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.
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.
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.
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.).
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.
This article uses the debate raging around Samuel Richardson's novel-in-letters Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) as a case study in eighteenth-century reading practices. At a time when reading took place both in shared public spaces and the privacy of the home and was performed aloud as well as in solitary silence, the form of the epistolary novel rendered Richardson's Pamela suitable to a variety of reading practices-yet with widely differing assessments as to the rewards of 'virtue' promised in the novel's subtitle. By focusing on what is introduced as the 'epistolary complex', the article aims to show how one and the same novel could encourage diametrically opposed protocols of reading. Viewed through the prism of the epistolary genre, one answer to Pamela's success as a novel for public consumption (mirrored in the commodity culture surrounding the text) is its sententiousness and easy extricability.
The article examines how, through what is here referred to as ‘routines’, reading is integrated into the social context of everyday life and how such reading routines as “technologies of the self” (Foucault) are part of a more general trend towards optimising the self. Studying reading routines on BookTube can help to understand how vloggers in digital reading culture navigate the sometimes conflicting demands of what Andreas Reckwitz calls the creativity dispositif, aiming for both personal growth and social recognition. In order to examine reading routines as ‘self-making-machines’, the article focuses on two reading vlogs on BookTube: one which addresses general strategies for self-improvement through reading and one which specifically focuses on the social habitus associated with reading ‘classics’. It will be argued that reading routines firstly document the process of working on the self by means of reading habits and book choices and secondly stage reading scenes, thus performatively shaping the reader as subject and the subject as reader.
This article’s aim is to bring discussion of a recent emergence of ‘bookishness’ in the digital age into conversation with debates about the changed and changing status of reading for and in contemporary multimodal metafiction. It inquires into social reading as a cultural practice and the reader as a cultural figure as they are represented in contemporary multimodal metafiction, arguing that, in many cases, these works revolve around the act of reading as an ambivalent social activity. To demonstrate this point, I focus on two popular examples of twenty-first-century multimodal metafiction: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013). Both novels share a thematic and structural concern with storytelling and reading as fundamental for the making of identity; both imply the actual reader in their performative creation of a ‘bookish’ reading community; and both contrast different kinds of reading as either more or less beneficial for the creation and maintenance of social bonds. I contend that Cloud Atlas and S., while not digital texts as such, gesture towards the functions of literature in the context of digital technologies: through their multimodal setups, they make extensive use of narrative metalepses to enrich the immersive reading experience and make a point about the social and connective nature of reading. They also exemplify a tendency in contemporary fiction to make performative arguments for the value of reading as a social activity by consciously suspending it between embodiment and virtuality, the material and the digital, and by involving the reader, via multimodal elements and challenges, as a participant in the act of reading across ontological boundaries and the making of meaning and community.
This article addresses a pertinent case example of Popular Enlightenment: Westerkirk Parish Library. Dealing with the social aspect of reading, the argument is a twofold one. First, the library’s minute book reveals practices of what has been called the popularization of the Enlightenment – practices of disseminating Scottish Enlightenment texts and ideas into the larger rural community through the material sharing of books. Second, the article makes a methodological point. It argues that such a study of Westerkirk miners’ library and the founding committee’s minutes requires a media materialist perspective. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and recent reflections on the materiality of the archive, I foreground sources that at first sight do not seem to offer promising footholds for conventional literary scholarship – such as membership lists, accounts of items purchased or damaged, and lists of infractions. The emphasis is thereby placed on notational practices rather than on discourse. As such, I review two autobiographical attempts to frame Westerkirk and the adjacent sister library in Langholm in terms of what I call the ‘Enlightenment master plot’ and propose instead that we regard Westerkirk library as a dynamic archive of books held together by the meticulous actions of reader bureaucrats. Two steps for engaging with this archive are suggested as the interpretative keys for navigating ‘un-discursive’ material such as the Westerkirk minute book: specialization and inscription. Thinking of the minute book’s contents in terms of specialization and inscription forms the clue to understanding how ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment could be put in practice to start a library in an isolated community of antimony miners.
This article is concerned with two dimensions of reading: the dimension of fictional enactments of reading specifically in the lives of writer personae; and the dimension of an imagined reader’s stance, who is invited to navigate between different forms of reading. Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021) presents reading, in particular of emails, as a metafictional, metanarrative and meta-authorial reparative practice, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s sense, who conceptualizes reparative reading as being invested in pleasure and seeking heterogeneity. In this article I argue that it is in their emails – and in reading those emails – that the friends Alice Kelleher and Eileen Lydon (the former a famous novelist, the latter an editor) create a non-place in which they do not have to perform being knowledgeable but rather come to cherish the value of friendship, thus engaging in practices of (self-)care. In exchanging those emails, Alice and Eileen, initially paranoid readers of their lives, rehearse a reparative, meta-authorial position. The reparative process of knowing as unraveled in writing and reading strips the performance of being ‘knowledgeable’ and witty, as practices the characters engage in outside of their written communication, of its artificiality and instead turns reading into a texture of hope, in a novel in which the characters are doing their best to connect.
Reading challenging literary texts often results in feelings of confusion, frustration, and alienation in students. The dynamics between students, instructors, and difficult literary texts are both challenging to understand and of great importance because of how such engagements can enhance cognitive and emotional growth. By analyzing a student-created podcast which aims to demystify complex works such as those by Shakespeare, this paper examines the strategies employed by the students-creators to overcome challenges presented by text. It uses a combination of video recordings, transcripts, and interviews to investigate what the students found meaningful as they reinterpreted their reading experiences for the creation of the podcast episode. By focusing on not just the product of the student podcast, but also the process in the form of the experiences, strategies, and appeals they relied on and deployed, this paper attempts to contribute to an understanding of these complex dynamics.
Balkanism as a paradigm was first introduced by Maria Todorova and refers to historical representations of this region and its people by the West in a negative and stereotypical manner, typically as a place marked by backwardness, violence, savagery and ethnic conflicts. The term is associated with Edward Said's idea of Orientalism that relies on stereotypes, generalizations, and simplifications of Oriental cultures and peoples, depicting them as exotic, irrational, mysterious, or inferior. In her work Imagining the Balkans, Todorova draws some parallels, but she also points out the differences between the two paradigms. However, she agrees that both paradigms have been linked to reinforcing stereotypes and biases about the regions and their people, depicting them as an inferior Other that is binary to the superior West. In several of his literary works, the Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon addresses this negative construction of a narrative and image of the Balkans that misrepresents the region and its people. He does this by introducing characters who are Westerners practising Balkanism in their relationships with characters, who are often involuntary migrants as a result of the Balkan war in the 1990s. By so doing, the author attempts to demythologize the Balkans and its people. The paper analyses the manner in which the author attempts to deconstruct this negative narrative that does not accurately reflect the complexity and diversity of the region in two of his works, The Question of Bruno (2000) and Nowhere Man (2002). In addition, the paper also attempts to identify how these stereotypical, negative views of the Balkans affect the identity of the Balkan exiles that populate these two works.
This paper explores how socio-political discourses are constructed and developed transmedially in Bernardine Evaristo's authorship, using the discourse of Black hair politics (Craig 2006; Davis 1994; Hooks 1989, 1995, 2015; Robinson 2011) as an example. Special attention will be paid on the ways in which the body can function as a medium in the development of these discourses. Firstly, it will be explored how the discourse is constructed through the body in the novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) and, secondly, how the same discourse is continued and developed transmedially in other forms of media-in this case, in the Sunday Times UK special issue "BEAM" (2020) edited by Evaristo. To that end, both, Girl, Woman, Other and "BEAM", will be examined through the lens of Evaristo's method of 'showing and informing'- a combination of illustration/portrayal and historical, socio-political contextualization-to build a discourse throughout the explored media units. In the course of exploring the processes in the construction of Evaristo's transmedial discourses, the different functions that the body assumes in constructing and transmedially developing Evaristo's Black hair discourse, will be identified through the lens of phenomenology/feminist embodiment (Ahmed 2007; Fanon 1952; Lehtinen 2014) as well as Situated Knowledges (Haraway 1988) and Black feminist standpoint theory (Hill Collins 2000, 2002, 2010). Three identified versions of 'the body' will eventually be explored in the context of transmediality and Evaristo's authorship: the physical body, the body of the community, and the authorial body. Through these three versions of body in their interplay across various forms of media as well as in the course of Evaristo's 'showing and informing', the embodied, situated, frequently contradictory, perspectives on Black hair politics are revealed, thus presenting the discourse in its complexity and Evaristo's authorial figure as central aspect in the development of these discourses.
The present study builds on a dictionary of neologisms compiled by the Institut für deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim that covers the period from 1991 to 2020 per decade. It contains about 2,500 new words, phraseologisms, and new meanings. Three decades seem to be a suitable time span for exploring a shortterm diachronic perspective on lexical innovations. The aim of the present study is to interrogate whether English has provided a significantly larger number of borrowings to present-day German than in earlier times (see Busse 2011a) due to its presently unchallenged position as a global language, and whether word-formation processes (Lehnwortbildungen) on a native or mixed basis are a productive source for the formation of new lexical items. To this end, the results from the Neologismenwörterbuch online will be compared to those obtained in previous pertinent studies on dictionaries of anglicisms such as the Anglizismen-Wörterbuch (1993–1995), A Dictionary of European Anglicisms (2001) and the Deutsches Fremdwörterbuch (1913–1988).
This contribution aims to provide an overview of current concepts of film literacies in the (English) language classroom in Germany. Against the background of a working definition of film literacies, three central models are being discussed with regards to their general composition, highlighted aspects, and potential blind spots. These models are Blell and L & uuml;tge 's (2008) notion of Filmbildung ; Blell, Gr & uuml;newald, Kepser and Surkamp 's (2016b) comprehensive study of film in language education; and Viebrock 's (2016) concept of film literacy in English language teaching. In addition, this contribution also takes into account further contributions to the discourse on film -based language education, with a particular focus on multiliteracies-informed approaches and approaches to cultural learning with films. To conclude this overview, the article highlights central insights gained from the discussion and points to open desiderata in the field.
At secondary level, great importance is put in teaching and assessment on the ability to write texts that meet the conventions of text types. For the Austrian school system, descriptions of text types for German, English, French, Italian and Spanish are available. However, the text types differ across languages. This study focuses on English. It uses a set of 23 descriptive statements, derived from text linguistic theory, to empirically investigate their suitability to characterise the constructs held by practicing teachers for eight text types for L2 English. This approach has already been applied to German as the language of instruction (Sigott et al. 2020) and can be applied to all other languages. The results for English show that the suitability of the 23 statements varies considerably across text types. A subset of statements turns out to be suitable as dimensions for comparing all the English text types. In addition, statements are identified which are suitable to characterise individual text types and statements which should not be considered in describing text types and, therefore, not used in formulating assessment criteria. This is valuable information for teaching and relevant for assessment practice. These results are presented in a polarity profile for each text type.
English as it is taught in German schools (Schulenglisch) is often perceived to be radically different from natural English, as used outside the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. Previous corpus studies have confirmed that individual lexico-grammatical features are indeed often misrepresented in EFL textbooks used in Germany. This study presents an empirical multi-feature and multi-dimensional (MDA) analysis of the language of three series of EFL textbooks (15 textbook volumes) used at lower secondary school level in Germany, as compared to three target language reference corpora. Principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to identify the defining linguistic characteristics of Schulenglisch along three dimensions of linguistic variation: 1) ‘Written informational vs. Spoken interactional’, 2) ‘Fictional narrative’ and 3) ‘Didactised vs. Real-life English’. The distributions of texts on the first and second dimensions show that Schulenglisch is characterised by an underdifferentiation of register-based variation as compared to ‘real-life’, extra-curricular English. Mixed-effects models show that this finding is consistent across all three textbook series. Intra-textbook variation is mediated – to varying degrees on each of the three dimensions of the model – by text register, the proficiency level targeted by the textbooks, and interactions between these variables. In line with lay beliefs about Schulenglisch, the largest gap between Schulenglisch and extra-curricular English is observed in the conversation register. This gap persists even as textbook proficiency level increases. Compared to transcripts of natural, everyday conversations, Schulenglisch conversation significantly underrepresents key features of spontaneous, interactional spoken English, such as discourse makers, fillers, negation, contracted verbs, demonstratives, and it-pronouns. At the same time, it overrepresents features more typical of written, informative writing such as nouns, prepositions, and high lexical density and diversity. Across all registers, linguistic features that are typical of Schulenglisch, especially at the lower levels of proficiency, include imperatives, can as a modal, politeness markers and question forms.
