Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2012 vol. 47.2-3
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Item Iconicizing kingship in Elizabethan England: Strategic acting by Queen Elizabeth I(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Kizelbach, UrszulaRenaissance England is often discussed in the context of theatre and theatrical acting. The fact is that Renaissance monarchs, too, viewed kingship in terms of theatrical display and public performance. Such is the nature of royalty presented by King James I in Basilicon Doron. Queen Elizabeth I was playing all her life. Faced with the problem of her femininity in the world of men, as well as her ambivalent hereditary rights as a member of the Tudor dynasty, she focused on legitimizing her reign through playing different roles – she played the fearful king, the loving queen, she even played Virgin Mary. But Elizabeth emerges as the most stunning actress when she plays herself. On her summer visit to Wanstead in 1578 she took an active part in the pageant “The lady of May”, playing herself, “Good Queen Bess”, which Sir Philip Sidney depicted in his pastoral romance The lady of May. In this way, Elizabeth became her own icon. This paper provides instances of the Queen’s political role play in a historical and socio-cultural context of the time.Item Margaret Fuller’s conversations: Speaking as revision and feminist resistance(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Quawas, RulaConversation as a means to social, intellectual, and spiritual self-culture was advocated during the American Romantic period by members of the Transcendental movement. Margaret Fuller was a transcendental conversationalist who challenged the theoretical setting and practice of selfculture, remedied the gap in it about concepts of womanhood that were imposed by the culture of the time and that attempted to determine women’s place in the symbolic order, and placed an emphasis on self-knowledge, whatever the subject matter. She came to represent a rhetoric whose aim was to foster community, moral truths, ethical actions, and feminist resistance. Fuller fully subscribed to the idea of the revelatory power in conversation and provided women with an opportunity to develop the intellectual rigor necessary to establish their own identities in the world: public or private. Through her weekly conversations for Boston women, held from 1839 through 1844, she used conversation or speaking as revision to explore philosophical, aesthetic, and sociocultural questions and supplied access to education from which women were excluded.Item The holy and the unholy in Chaucer’s "Squire’s Tale"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Czarnowus, AnnaAs Richard Kieckhefer once noticed, “the holy” and “the unholy” were interlocking phenomena in the medieval culture. Such a perspective on religion and magic may, indeed, be seen in possible sources of Chaucer’s Squire’s tale, John Carpini’s Historia Mongalorum and in Historia Tartarorum, attributed either to Benedict the Pole, a member of the 1245 papal mission to Mongols, or to the scribe, “C. de Bridia”. Perhaps Carpini and Benedict projected their Christian perception of magic as connected with religion onto the Tartar world they experienced. The Mongol beliefs they related may have been the very convictions mentioned by Chaucer in the discussion of Cambuskyan’s “secte”. The tale then proceeds to a discussion of magic, but the magic there is no longer “unholy”, as opposed to “the holy”, but technological, manmade, and unnatural. The texts portray two stages in a medieval approach to magic, which were followed by the Renaissance condemnation of magic as heretical. In Squire’s tale magic leads to the experience of wonder, which unites the community.Item Between habits of the heart and copulation of clichés: Some popular American stories, mores and shibboleths(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Semrau, JanuszFrom the very beginning, all manner of ideas, concepts and conceits have been advanced to explain America and Americans – as much to themselves as to others. The paper presents a historical- literary compilation of popular notions of ‘Americanness’ in the guise of random de Tocquevillian observations in general circulation. This is to provoke the question about the degree to which this kind of pervasive discourse may reflect the so-called habits of the heart, as against how at a certain point it may lapse into a Nabokovian copulation of clichés.Item The development of learner autonomy through internet resources and its impact on English language attainment(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Pawlak, Mirosław; Kruk, MariuszSince the arrival of the Internet and its tools, computer technology has become of considerable significance to both teachers and students, and it is an obvious resource for foreign language teaching and learning. The paper presents the results of a study which aimed to determine the effect of the application of Internet resources on the development of learner autonomy as well as the impact of greater learner independence on attainment in English as a foreign language. The participants were 46 Polish senior high school students divided into the experimental group (N = 28) and the control (N = 18) group. The students in the experimental group were subjected to innovative instruction with the use of the Internet and the learners in the control group were taught in a traditional way with the help of the coursebook. The data were obtained by means questionnaires, interviews, learners’ logs, an Internet forum, observations as well as language tests, and they were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results show that the experimental students manifested greater independence after the intervention and they also outperformed the controls on language tests.Item Where boys, girls and children come from(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Hlebec, BorisThe etymology of three very frequent English words child, girl and boy has been notoriously obscure because researchers have failed to pay attention to possible Slavic influence. This article is aimed at rectifying this major oversight by providing abundant evidence of both formal and semantic similarities between the English items and the corresponding Slavic ones and at establishing Scandinavian as an intermediary for girl and boy, no such connector being necessary for child.Item Pseudo-archaic English: The modern perception and interpretation of the linguistic past(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Traxel, Oliver M.This paper introduces a new project currently in its planning stages. It is dedicated to pseudoarchaic English, an area in linguistic studies which has so far hardly received any academic attention. After providing some historical examples a brief selection of some present-day occurrences as well as inspirational sources for these is given. Sample cases of pseudo-archaic English from various linguistic categories are presented in order to illustrate the wide range of its usage. Some remarks on modern perceptions of the linguistic past and their role in creating pseudo-archaic forms are provided and followed by suggestions on what still needs to be done in this field.Item The Middle English suffix -ish: Reasons for decline in productivity(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Ciszek, EwaThe aim of the present paper is to investigate the reasons for the significant decline in both the frequency and productivity of the suffix -ish in Middle English. The major factors responsible seem to be the growing popularity of the of + Noun phrases as well as the competition among -ish and other suffixes. The analysis will be preceded with the introduction of some essential facts concerning the semantic development and productivity of the OE suffix -isc in Middle English.Item Long lexical bundles and standardisation in historical legal texts(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Kopaczyk, JoannaStandardisation on the level of text is visible in the employment of stable and fixed expressions for a specific textual purpose. When gauging the extent of standardisation in texts, one of the parameters which should be taken into consideration is the length of such stable patterns. Since it is more difficult, and therefore rarer, to reproduce long chunks of text in an unchanged form, such a practice points towards greater standardisation. To explore the textual behaviour of long fixed strings in legal texts, this paper concentrates on long lexical bundles built out of eight consecutive elements (8-grams) and their frequency and function in historical legal texts. The database for this pilot paper comprises two collections of legal and administrative texts written in Scots between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century. The research results point to a considerable degree of textual standardisation throughout the corpus and to the most prominent functions of long repetitive chunks in historical legal discourse.