Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2021 vol. 56
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Item A review of: The Multilingual Origins of Standard English. By Laura Wright (ed.). De Gruyter Mouton, 2020. Pp. xi + 534 + 114 b/w illustrations, 84 b/w tables.(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Rogos-Hebda, JustynaItem A review of: Shekspir v russkoi teorii pervoi poloviny XX veka [Shakespeare in Russian Theory in the First Half of the Twentieth Century]. By Ludmiła Mnich. Wydawnictwo Naukowe Instytutu Kultury Regionalnej i Badań Interdyscyplinarnych im. Franciszka Karpińskiego. 2019. Pp. 264.(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Shadurski, MaximItem A review of: Mostly medieval: In memory of Jacek Fisiak. By Hans Sauer & Piotr P. Chruszczewski (eds.). Academic Publishing, 2020. Pp. xii + 555.(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Ogura, MichikoItem A review of: "Beowulf: A new translation". By Maria Dahvana Headley. FSG Originals, 2020. Pp. 176.(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Olesiejko, JacekItem Characterisation and theatricality in "King Lear of the Steppes": The rewriting of the Shakespearean classic(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Bellmunt-Serrano, ManelThis paper provides an in-depth analysis of the rewriting of King Lear, the Shakespearean classic, as it appears in Ivan Turgenev’s novella King Lear of the Steppes, published in 1870. In order to study this case of appropriation in Russian literature, which was received with skepticism by many of his contemporaries and forgotten for a long time, the focus is placed on two fundamental aspects: characterisation and theatricality. These two features connect Turgenev’s work with the source text and exemplify how adaptation and appropriation function within target cultural systems. Far from being a mere literary experiment, the appropriation of some of Shakespeare’s characters in Turgenev’s works and their use as literary archetypes was based on ideological reasons that would influence the evolution of nineteenth-century Russian thought. The present research highlights the importance of processes of rewriting, such as adaptation and appropriation, for the development of target cultural systems and, in order to do so, the perspective of adaptation studies is adopted.Item A review of: The Languages of Early Medieval Charters. Latin, Germanic Vernaculars, and the Written Word. By Robert Gallagher, Edward Roberts & Francesca Tinti (eds.). Brill, 2021. Pp. 548, xvi.(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Zagórska, PaulinaItem Item Gender relations and female agency in Claire Keegan’s "Antarctica"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Morales-Ladrón, MarisolClaire Keegan is one of the most prominent voices within the contemporary Irish short story panorama. Internationally acclaimed, her prose has been praised for its frank and bitter portrayal of a rural world, whose outdated values, no matter how anchored in the past they might be, still prevail in a modern milieu. Keegan’s unsympathetic views on society, mainly on the Catholic Church and the family, are the main targets of her harsh criticism. Issues like gender and sexuality, two social constructs with which to validate an uneven distribution of power, constitute the pillars of most of her plots. Bearing these aspects in mind, my proposal focuses on the analysis of Keegan’s first collection of short stories, Antarctica (1999), in light of gender relations and female agency, in an attempt to find patterns of – often thwarted – female emancipation in the context of the rapid changes of a society that is still adjusting to a globalised world. This article will also engage in the discussion of her second collection, Walk the Blue Fields (2007), and her long short story Foster (2010).Item A review of: Politeness in the History of English: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day. By Andreas H. Jucker. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 210.(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Rogos-Hebda, AnnaItem Post-apocalyptic stress disorder in "The Leftovers"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Front, SoniaIn Tom Perrotta’s novel, The Leftovers (2011), and the TV series (2014–2017) based on the novel, 2% (140 million) of the world’s population vanish into thin air. The event constitutes a temporal rift that divides history into Before and After and inaugurates a new mode of temporality, marked by a break with a clock-time-based economy and a yearning for the ultimate end. This new mode of temporality is accompanied by the shattering of the individual sense of being-in-time. The essay focuses on the altered experience of time both on individual and collective levels, a condition that constitutes a kind of post-apocalyptic stress disorder. The characters’ reactions to the traumatic experience demonstrate that the inexplicability of the apocalyptic event and duration without closure are psychologically intolerable. As closure is impossible, they cannot work through the trauma, remaining trapped in the past event and the present anticipation of the ultimate annihilation while the future horizon becomes obliterated.Item “Houses. Cats. Cars. Trees. Me”: Outward and inward journeys in Joe Brainard’s collage travelogues(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Drąg, WojciechThis article examines two brief travelogues by the American writer and visual artist Joe Brainard (1942–1994) as formally unique fusions of the travel journal and literary collage, in which the experience of travel becomes a catalyst for introspection. “Wednesday, July 7th, 1971 (A Greyhound Bus Trip)” is a record of a bus journey that Brainard made in the summer of 1971, from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City to Montpelier, Vermont, while “Washington D.C. Journal 1972” is a diary of a three-day car trip to the capital, taken with Brainard’s oldest friend (and future biographer), the New York School poet Ron Padgett and his wife and son. In both texts, a description of the particulars of the trip is combined with meditation about the author’s life and career. After introducing the structure of the travelogues, the article demonstrates their formal indebtedness to literary collage, which relies on fragmentation, heterogeneity, parataxis, and the use of appropriated content. What follows is an analysis of the texts’ oscillation between an account of external stimuli and a record of Brainard’s train of thought. It is argued that, gradually, the inward journey becomes more important than the outward, leading the author towards pushing the boundaries of his candour (in “Wednesday”) and towards an artistic self-assessment (in “Washington”). The article interprets those works as a manifestation of twentieth-century travel writing’s turn towards self-reflectiveness and concludes by considering the relationship between fragmentary, collage-like form and introspective content in the texts at hand, as well as in Brainard’s entire artistic output.Item John Lydgate’s "Guy of Warwick" and fifteenth-century emotions(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Czarnowus, AnnaThe article argues that John Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick is an innovative version of the Guy of Warwick legend as it emphasizes the feelings of its characters. Furthermore, it also openly intends to evoke emotions in its audience. The poem requires to be read in light of the newly emerged field of the history of medieval emotions since the social context of Lydgate’s Guy is more visible from this perspective. The poem offers an admixture of religious and secular feelings. As a result, the final scenes of bidding farewell to Guy by Felice and by the community have to be seen as related both to Guy as a hero and as a saint.Item ‘A dismal howling’: Formulaic density and the Gothic tableau(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Aguirre, ManuelScant attention has been paid by critics to the formulaic diction that pervades the Gothic genre. This article continues an extended experiment aiming to analyse formulaicity in one of the less-known Gothic novels. Peter Teuthold’s 1794 The Necromancer exhibits massive co-occurrence: textual units (lexemes, sounds, and both phrase and clause formations) regularly gravitate around other textual units, effectively clustering into fields. A field is defined as an open paradigm of items related by functional equivalence; the novel handles its components not as independent units but only in accordance with a ‘fielding’ principle, that is, only as paradigmatic elements which can be exchanged for or combined with other elements. Previous work has established a distinction between the formula properly so called and the formulaic pattern, defined as a construct that attracts lexical, phonological, syntactic, and connotative fields into its orbit. The article argues that ‘fielding’ operates on at least one ‘higher’ level, the level where formulaic patterns combine to shape a charged moment in the narrative – a tableau. After selecting a fragment of text and illustrating the structure of a single formulaic pattern, the article isolates each phrase or clause segment in the fragment, outlines the pattern it belongs in, and shows that over seventy-five per cent of its textual matter is demonstrably formulaic. Analysis of several other excerpts suggests that formulaic density is not homogeneous but decreases or rises at different points in the novel. A rationale for high-density segments is then sought in the ritualising nature of the tableau itself.Item Developing intercultural identity on a sojourn abroad: A case study(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Sobkowiak, PawełThis article reports on a longitudinal case study and gives first-hand accounts of the lived experiences of five Erasmus+ students from Turkey during their sojourn at a university in Poland and its impact on the students’ individual identities. The research aimed to investigate students’ learning experience at the host institution and intercultural adaptation, focusing on the transformative outcomes that the sojourn brought about in them. The framework used as a theoretical basis for the study was Kim’s integrative theory of communication and cross-cultural adaptation. The theory claims that cultural adjustment is a function of an individual’s development of social and personal communication competence in their respective environments. As a result of frequent meaningful interactions with cultural others, through meeting and overcoming multiple intercultural challenges, people are likely to develop intercultural personhood, going through three consecutive stages, i.e., stress-adaptation-growth (Kim 2008). The study outcomes show sojourning abroad as a rather positively valenced experience, contributing to participants’ gaining knowledge about diverse cultures, the skills to cope with diversity and an increased willingness to interact with people from different ethnic backgrounds. The data revealed that the participants underwent, to a moderate degree, a cultural identity shift toward becoming more mindful, open-minded, self-other oriented, and inclusive toward diversity.Item Lexical borrowing in the light of digital resources: 'Nyet' as a case study(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Podhajecka, MirosławaThe mere appearance of a foreign word does not necessarily mark the birth of a loanword, which requires documented usage by the speech community. Relatively little research has been dedicated so far to the “prenatal” stage that would investigate the tentative infiltration of foreign-derived words. Nyet, a borrowing from Russian, is taken as a case in point. Although its first recorded instance in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED3) is dated to 1928, it had been increasingly recognized in English for several decades. This article focuses on textual attestations for nyet discovered in a range of digital resources, including British and American newspaper archives, and discusses their usefulness as potential antedatings for OED3’s entry.Item Object-Verb in Early Modern English: Modelling markedness(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Pérez-Guerra, JavierAlthough Verb-Object (VO) is the basic unmarked constituent order of predicates in Present-Day English, in earlier stages of the language Object-Verb (OV) is the preferred pattern in some syntactic contexts. OV predicates are significantly frequent in Old and Middle English, and are still attested up to 1550, when they “appear to dwindle away” (Moerenhout & van der Wurff 2005: 83). This study looks at OV in Early Modern English (EModE), using a corpus-based perspective and statistical modelling to explore a number of textual, syntactic, and semantic/processing variables which may account for what by that time had already become a marked, though not yet archaic, word-order pattern. The data for the study were retrieved from the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (1500–1710) and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (c.1410–1695), the largest electronic parsed collections of EModE texts. The findings reveal a preference for OV in speech-related text types, which are less constrained by the rules of grammar, in marked syntactic contexts, and in configurations not subject to the general linearisation principles of end-weight and given-new. Where these principles are complied with, the probability of VO increases.Item Discourse markers in peer reviews of academic essays by future teachers of English as a foreign language(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Kapranov, OleksandrThis article presents and discusses a quantitative investigation of discourse markers (further – DMs) in the corpus of peer reviews of academic essays in didactics written by a group of future teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). In total, 12 future EFL teachers at an intermediate level of EFL proficiency (henceforth – participants) took part in the study. The participants were instructed to form dyads and write peer reviews of each other’s academic essays on a range of topics in EFL didactics. Two corpora were used in the study, the corpus of the participants’ academic essays in EFL didactics and the corpus of peer reviews thereof. The corpora were analysed using WordSmith (Scott 2008) in order to establish the frequencies of the use of DMs per 1000 words. The results of the quantitative analysis of the corpora indicated that the participants employed a repertoire of stylistically neutral DMs in their peer reviews that was quantitatively similar to that of the academic essays. These findings will be further discussed in the article.Item Ælfric’s expressions for shame and guilt: A study in intra-writer conceptual variation(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Díaz-Vera, Javier E.This research focuses on the analysis of onomasiological variation in Old English texts written by Ælfric; more specifically, I am interested in the study of the different motifs that shape the linguistic expressions of shame and guilt used by this Anglo-Saxon monk across different textual genres. Through the fine-grained analysis of the whole set of shame and guilt expressions recorded in the entire corpus of Ælfrician texts, a network of literal and figurative conceptualizations for each emotion is proposed here. Based on this network, I have reconstructed and analysed patterns of conceptual variation in Ælfric’s English in order to show the existing tension between literal, metonymic and metaphoric expressions for these two emotions. As shall be seen here, the introduction in Anglo-Saxon England of Augustinian psychology by Ælfric and other highly educated authors favoured (i) the progressive neglect of the Germanic concept of shame and guilt as instruments of social control, (ii) the dissemination of new shame-related values, and (iii) the growing use of a new set of embodied conceptualizations for the two emotions under scrutiny here, most of which have become common figurative expressions of shame and guilt in later varieties of English. The new expressions (e.g., SHAME IS SOMETHING COVERING A PERSON, GUILT IS A BURDEN) illustrate the shift towards a progressive embodiment of the new emotional standards brought by Christianization. According to these standards, rather than an external judgment or reproach, shame and guilt involve a negative evaluation of oneself.Item Translation of children's speech in Frank Schaeffer's "Portofino"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2021) Czarnecka, MiraThe theme of the article is a research into the issue of translation of children’s speech. The analysis will be conducted based on three excerpts from a novel – Portofino – written by a contemporary American writer Frank Schaeffer and translated into Polish by the author of the article, early in her career as a translator. First, the results of text typology investigation by Anna Trosborg (1997b), Paul Kussmaul (1995, 1997) and Christiane Nord (2018) regarding cognitive structuring, text structures, and general style conventions will be highlighted. Then the outcomes of the translation process research (TPR) on cohesive aspects and structuring by Michael Carl, Srinivas Bangalore & Moritz Schaeffer (2016) will be summarised. This will be followed by the discussion of findings of Paul Thompson & Alison Sealey (2007), Gillian Lathey (2011), and Anna Čermáková (2018) regarding the issue of repetition and the aspects of point of view. Subsequently, the notion of style in a work of fiction will be introduced and followed by the description of stylistic and linguistic means used to achieve it. This will include the discussion of speech and thought presentation (STP) scales proposed first by Geoffrey Leech & Mick Short (2007) and then developed by Mick Short in cooperation with Elena Semino (2004). Next, the stylistic features of children’s speech and its linguistic exponents will be outlined. The translation analysis will focus on stylistic and linguistic devices used by the author to imitate children’s speech in the source text and their rendering by the translator in the target text. The achieved effect and translation equivalence will be evaluated, possible reasons behind any loss in meaning will become identified and some final recommendations for translators will get defined.