Below are a few abstracts for you to get an idea of what you are going to listen to at our conference
Plurilingual Practices that Empower: Effective Strategies for Language Teachers and Students
Jessica Swan, Luigj Gurakuqi University
English language learners bring a wealth of linguistic resources into the classroom that are best incorporated via a flexible approach that “softens the boundaries between languages” (Cenoz & Gorter, 2013, p. 591). Rather than viewing the classroom as an English-only zone, teachers and students should work collaboratively to create experiential learning that empowers students by drawing upon their linguistic resources in the learning of English. According to Garcia and Sylvan (2011), “[t]he result, then, is the facilitation of communication to improve the lives of speakers of language, instead of promoting a specific language or languages” (p. 386). In fact, learners who recognize the value of their linguistic repertoire have greater self-esteem (Bernaus, Moore, & Azevedo, 2007), stronger metacognitive skills (Bono & Stratilaki, 2009), more cultural empathy (Dewaele & Oudenhoven, 2009), and more resources to facilitate the learning of other languages (Cummins, 1979; Payant, 2015). Given these benefits, this presentation will highlight effective strategies to promote plurilingualism based upon the Council of Europe’s (2007) four guidelines: establish attainable goals, incorporate plurilingual competence, integrate syllabi, and create resources. Some of the recommended strategies include: 1.) encouraging translanguaging and code-switching in composition and oral communication, 2.) viewing the language student as a language teacher (Freire, 1968), 3.) incorporating multimodal assignments that are also plurilingual, and 4.) establishing classroom cultures that celebrate rather than stymie the linguistic resources of the students. Ultimately, greater diversity requires more flexibility from English language teachers and students, and these plurilingual practices will not only embrace this diversity but also help students see the power of their underlying linguistic competence.
Keywords: Plurilingualism, Classroom Practices, English Language Teaching
Meaningless work with words: The literary figure of the copyist
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Dr. Sixta Quassdorf, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
The power of language more often than not shows in successful manipulation of the other. Paradoxically, such successful pragmatic manipulation seems to subvert the power of language on the semantic level when it decouples the sign from its conventional referent and thus imperils meaningful communication.
In my paper I want to show that the literary figure of the copyist is an apt allegory for such manipulative linguistic mechanisms which have been analyzed as typical for our modern times of “simulacra and simulations” (see Baudrillard): A ‘good’ copyist, who obeys to the rules of efficiency, must not be concerned with the signified, but merely with the transposition of the signifiers from one medium to the other. The sign thus becomes its own referent and acquires the quality of a simulacrum. As such, a copyist’s work embodies the dehumanization implicit in the modern condition. They work “mechanically” (Melville, 1853), become mere “conduits” (Rowland, 2014), are supposed to turn into a machine themselves (and consequently are replaceable by them). The efficiency maxim forces them to shun meaning and thus give up a distinctive human marker.
The most famous copyist in American literary history is Herman Melville’s scrivener Bartleby, who stands at the beginning of that socio-political development that prioritizes economic efficiency over everything else. Amy Rowland’s The Transcriptionist of 2014 discusses the copyist’s plight from a contemporary perspective. While Bartleby, according to Deleuze, radicalizes referentless language and exemplifies its perverted power, Rowland’s transcriptionist sets out to retrieve lost referents. As such, the scrivener and the transcriptionist approach the dialectics of sign and referent from different ends of history, shedding light on 150 years of corporate double-speak and the pervasive thread of meaninglessness, even with meaningful words.
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Keywords: American literature, sign, reference, Baudrillard, Deleuze, scrivener
The drama of language and the language of drama in Wajdi Mouawad’s play Incendies
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Mai Hussein, Concordia University of Edmonton, Canada
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In a Century full of violence, inequalities and wars, the urge to testify about cruelties becomes more and more present. Thus, the urge to “tell” the story becomes a privileged theme for most of the literary representations dealing with violence and post-war trauma. The concept of testament and testimony is intrinsically related to the idea of healing the post-traumatic event and gives more and more power to the language and the spoken word. Wajdi Mouawad’s play “Incendies” is situated at this crossroad of silenced women trying to break that silence to become the witnesses of their trauma. The play exposes the concepts of testament and testimony, trying to explore the tension between them. In Testimonies: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Shoshana Felmann makes the point that a witness is required "when historical accuracy is in doubt and when both the truth and its supporting elements of evidence are called into question" (6). Thus, Felman argues that a witness is called upon wherever there is crisis of truth and evidence. If we migrate with this assumption from the written text to the stage, we encounter what Karen Malpede calls "Theatre of Witness" or what Erdmann calls "Theatre of Testimony", which describes Wajdi Mouawad’s “Incendies” that engages with contemporary theatre’s obsession with women’s remembrance and the way the stage dramatizes the act of "bearing witness". This performative play reconstructs feminine memory as a dual process of retrospective spatio-temporal narrative accounts, combined with physically enacted mnemonic flashbacks. This play exposes the “memorialist turn” in theatre as a process that problematizes the witnessing of trauma and the trauma of witnessing, focusing on how the female voices try to remember or reconstruct what happened in the realm of the “real”, while escaping into the fantastical when the demands of bearing witness become severe. It also addresses the modalities of perception of the audience bearing witness to witnessing, arguing that theatre does not construct the real or re-construct it for the audience, on the contrary if estranges it, not unlike Brechtian alienation, revealing an exchange that is both realist and anti-realist, artistic representation and reproduction of actuality, spectacle and mimesis, marking the relationship between the collective form of memory and the performative possibility of an aesthetic openness toward otherness.
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Keywords: trauma, parole, performance, identity
Cultural Marxism, Neo-McCarthyism, and the Contemporary American Political Scene
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Charles Wukasch, Ph.D.
Austin Community College, retired
Language is used to formulate and propagate ideologies, to construct and dismantle institutions, and to edify and ruin individuals. The above words from the call for papers have probably always been true but are undoubtedly even truer today in our age of mass communication, an age when a tweet or an entry on a Facebook page will reach millions in an instant.
As a lifelong professor of English, I am interested in such phenomena as euphemism, connotation, literal vs. figurative definition, pejorative usage, etc. My experience with these terms mainly concerns their use in modern American English. Although I speak several other languages, albeit with varying fluency, I am a native speaker of English and thus naturally have a feel for the subtlety of language. Call it native speaker intuition if you well.
Some of you may be familiar with the term “political correctness,” a term which one hears with increasing frequency in the U.S. today. Political correctness (often abbreviated to “PC”) refers to the avoidance of certain terms which another group (racial and ethnic minorities, women, etc.) find offensive. Using the wrong term for a “protected group” is often dangerous for someone’s career, whether he or she is a politician, an academic, or whatever. The term sometimes used in the U.S. for an overconcern with terms used is “cultural Marxism.” Someone running for political office or a teacher in the classroom who uses a negative term quickly learns to his or her discomfiture or even peril the power of language.
Words Are the Clay in Your Reality Sculpture. Self-Narrative Transformation Through Wordplay
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Pamela Calero, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
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The following essay aims to provoke questions around the relationship between one’s own identity and the power words have upon definitions of self. ​Who am I? ​The notion of self is a quality that essentially suggests each of us is different​. ​ ​Who am I?​ You are the story you play in your head. Storytelling is what shapes human thinking. ​Our imagination is weaved with narrative and this forces us to think a certain way. What vertebrates our thinking are words which are symbols for concepts used to organize and shape self-stories​. Throughout time, words have acquired so many different meanings that people interpret them differently. People adopt and appropriate words without knowing what they fully mean, without knowing where they come from and without being completely aware of their weight upon shoulders. Words are handed over (as sounds, concepts, visual forms), thus shaping our narratives and our silences. Why is the narration of self split into what we say and what we keep silent? These silences kept inside sit in the throat, weighing too much to be swallowed. ​Un​desirable shares a negation prefix with ​in​visible. I​nvisible not as in lack of form, color, or matter, but as that which we don’t speak of, what doesn’t stand out, what is silenced. How can one reshape or construct different definitions of oneself? By performing ​archaeological digs on words and ideas to discover what lies beneath and ​un​learn ​un​pleasant parts of the script of our life story. ​One’s own story becomes different after being narrated, questioned and rewritten in order to unpack language and reveal new ways of seeing.
Keywords:​ wordplay, self-narrative, self, linguistics, semantics, etymology, philosophy of language, autobiographical art, art therapy, psychoanalysis
Lawrence's Polyphonic Web of Words
Nick Ceramella, Latest affiliation (2014): University of Trento (Italy); currently Vice-President of the D. H. Lawrence Society
In this paper, we will look into the main linguistic features of D. H. Lawrence’s fiction: language, lexis, syntax, translatability, and use of foreign words. On reading Lawrence, we realise that he was constantly experimenting with words. David Lodge says that "in his own, less exuberantly experimental fashion, Lawrence was like Joyce a 'polyphonic' novelist, to use a term coined by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin." More specifically, Bakhtin talked about "heteroglossia" by which he meant the use more idiolects than standard languages. This description corresponds to Lawrence’s emotional dimension where his idiolect grows with a plethora of idiosyncrasies: frequent repetitions, unusual combinations and collocations of words, metaphoric associations, which draw the line between individual character’s speech and standard use, an area often considered “untranslatable.” To quote George Steiner: "When literature seeks to break its public linguistic mould and become idiolect, when it seeks untranslatability, we have entered a new world of feeling." For this reason, although translation is a tortuous path to follow in order to analyse Lawrence’s style, I will venture upon it as I believe that the magnifying glass of translation is an effective way to penetrate a literary work and reveal its stylistic and linguistic features. In this respect, Women in Love in particular lends itself to this kind of analysis because the syntax there is quite transgressive, complex, and unconventional. Closely related to the translation issue is Lawrence's wide use of dialect as shown by Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers and Mellors in Lady
Chatterley's Lover, two complex characters whose restlessness is reflected in their speech. Another though not often discussed aspect of Lawrence's style is his proclivity for inserting into his texts foreign words and phrases, mostly in French, Italian, and German. I will argue that the multilingualim pulse is not a simple oddity, yet is something that lies deep in Lawrence's world: otherness, nation, and class.
Keywords: experimental language, syntax, translatability, lexis, foreign words.