Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2012 vol. 47.4
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Item When William met Mary: The rewriting of Mary Lamb’s and William-Henry Ireland’s stories in Peter Ackroyd’s "The Lambs of London"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Chalupský, PetrPeter Ackroyd’s London novels represent a distinctive component in his project of composing a literary-historical biography of the city. Understanding London as a multilayered palimpsest of texts, Ackroyd adds to this ongoing process by rewriting the city’s history from new, imaginative perspectives. For this he employs approaches and strategies such as parody, pastiche, genre mixture, metafiction, intertextuality and an incessant mixing of the factual with the fictititious. The aim of this article is to explore the various ways in which he toys with historical reality and blurs the borderline between fiction and biography in The Lambs of London (2004), offering thus an alternative rendering of two unrelated offences connected with late eighteenth and early nineteenth century London literary circles: Mary Lamb’s matricide and William-Henry Ireland’s forgeries of the Shakespeare Papers.Item Memory and forgetting in Lisa Appignanesi’s "The Memory Man"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Drewniak, DagmaraThe aim of this paper is to look at Lisa Appignanesi’s novel The memory man ([2004] 2005), which won the 2005 Holocaust Literature Award, and examine the patterns of remembering and forgetting as indispensable aspects conducive to the formation of Jewish identity. The main character of the book, Bruno Lind, a Holocaust survivor and a scientist dealing professionally with the complicated neurological issues of remembering and losing memory, tries to recollect his war memories during a journey to the places of his youth which are at the same time the sites of his and his family’s trauma. The Holocaust, change of identities, the war memories and finally the stay at the DP camps and escape to Canada return to Bruno Lind’s mind in order to be passed onto the next generation and remembered. This article shows Appignanesi’s novel as an important contribution to the discussion on the role of memory in Jewish identity.Item “The Undiscovered Country”, “A Kind Behind the Door”, “Neverland”, or “A Small Unfocused Blur”: Uncanny literary definitions of death(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Małecka, KatarzynaKnown yet unknown, undiscovered yet constantly discovered and re-discovered, death has always been a gold mine providing ideas, work and wages for scientists, sociologists, philosophers, artists, literary critics, and many others who find life’s provisionality in any way “uncanny”. This article looks at select literary definitions of death that present mortality as a concept both familiar and unfamiliar, comforting and discomforting, domestic and strange. Like the Freudian term “uncanny”, the nature of mortality is complex, mysterious and elusive. As Terry Eagleton (2003: 211) points out, “[d]eath is both alien and intimate to us, neither wholly strange nor purely one’s own”. While some of Freud’s ideas from his essay “The ‘Uncanny’” are used as the basis for discussion here, this analysis is not limited to a psychoanalytic perspective and includes psychological, sociological, medical and literary references which help explore different aspects of death in literature.Item The God of the Middle English "Cleanness" and his erotic exhortations of purity(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Spyra, PiotrThe Middle English Cleanness is a poem unique in the medieval context in that it couples its homophobic discourse with a powerful vindication of sexual pleasure and its role in relationships without referring to the procreative telos of marriage. In fact, Cleanness does not even stress that the only proper arena for erotic desire is the marriage bed, with the narrator emphasising the mutuality of pleasure instead. The article investigates the text’s rhetorical interplay between the vilification of homosexuals and the divine endorsement of heterosexual lovemaking. Going beyond the established critical consensus on the issue, it argues that the contrast between the two serves not only to allow the author to vent his homophobic prejudice but also connects with the epistemological concerns of Pearl, the text that precedes Cleanness in the Cotton Nero A.x manuscriptItem Lexical borrowings and calques from African American slang in Polish youth slang – A study based on a selected internet forum(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Dylewski, Radosław; Jagodziński, PiotrThe aim of the article is to present a very preliminary chunk of a wider study of Polish slang, whose aim is to pinpoint lexical influence of American English in broad terms and the usage and understanding among Polish youngsters of various types of borrowings. More specifically, the authors have concentrated on the borrowings of words, phrases and meanings from a sociolect known as African American English to the language of Polish youngsters. To this end, the largest Polish hardcore punk Internet forum has been scrutinized. The conducted analysis points to a discernible, albeit not significant lexical influence of the sociolect on the Polish youth slang, which calls for a more nuanced, survey-based analysis the authors wish to undertake as part of their research project.Item Authority in Lowth’s and Priestley’s prefaces to their English grammars(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Fernández Martínez, DoloresThe eighteenth century was a crucial period in the process of codification of the English language and in the history of English grammar writing (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008b). The need for grammars to provide linguistic guidance to the upper social classes, and to those who aspired to belong to them, led to an important increase in the output of English grammars. Since most of the grammar writers were clearly in competition with one another for a share of the market, they turned the prefaces to their grammars into highly persuasive instruments that tried to justify the need for that specific grammar. Priestley’s and Lowth’s grammars epitomized, respectively, the two main trends of grammatical tradition, namely descriptivism and prescriptivism. Taking a critical discourse analysis approach, this paper aims to examine how both writers claimed their authority through the presentation of the different individuals involved in the text, specifically, the author and any potential readers. We will examine how individuals are depicted both as a centre of structure and action through Martin’s (1992) identification systems and Halliday’s (2004 [1985]) transitivity structures. Such an approach fits in with Wicker’s (2006: 79) assessment of prefaces as textual networks of authority in which it is essential to interrogate how the readers who support and influence the texts are represented and addressed.Item A "Testimonie"'s stance: Editorial positioning in Ælfric’s "Sermo in Die Pascae"(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Mele-Marrero, MargaritaBeing one of the first texts to reproduce in printed form the Anglo-Saxon characters, A Testimonie of Antiquity, basically an edition of Ælfric’s “Sermo in Die Pascae”, has been the object of philological studies. Its subject matter related to the Anglican reform has also been analysed from a religious perspective. This article intends to focus on a different aspect, the reason for the text’s success evidenced in its several reproductions and content discussions, which have reached the 20th century. We claim the main credit for this success is to be given to its editors and, therefore, a pragmatic analysis concentrating on stance and engagement (Hyland 2005, 2009) is an adequate study frame. The conclusions will reveal how although there are quantifiable markers that facilitated the positive reception of the text, there were other elements (closer to modern writing implements) the authors utilized to achieve their final objective.Item Reduplication of consonant graphemes in "The Ormulum" in the light of Late Old English scribal evidence(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Mokrowiecki, TomaszAs opposed to previous studies, which usually attempt to refute the traditional interpretation put on the use of double consonants in The Ormulum, and attempt to advance an alternative explanation for the abnormally frequent use of digraphs, the current study primarily focuses on the standard view, which assumes that the scribe of MS Junius 1 applied double consonant graphemes to indicate vowel shortness. However, in this study the evidence comes not from The Ormulum but from two Late Old English MSS, as the use of double consonants to indicate vowel shortness is also occasionally attested in some earlier texts (Anderson – Britton 1997: 34, 51, 1999: 305, 317-323; Smith 2007: 107; and Laing 2008: 7-8). The major aim of this study is to show that the use of reduplicated consonant graphemes as indicators of vowel shortness is not confined exclusively to The Ormulum because this practice derives directly from Old English scribal tradition, where sequences were used not only to represent geminate (or long) consonants, but sporadically also for marking short vowels.Item Types of lexical complexity in English: Syntactic categories and the lexicon(Adam Mickiewicz University, 2012) Anderson, JohnThis study focuses on minimal (non-compound, non-phrasal) signs that are nevertheless internally complex in their syntactic categorization. Sometimes this is signalled by morphology – affixation or internal modification. But there are also conversions. In terms of categorial structure, we can distinguish between absorptions, where the source of the base is associated with a distinct category, and incorporation, where the base is categorially constant. Incorporation is thus typically reflected in inflectional morphology. Absorption may be associated with morphological change or conversion – with retention of the base in a different categorization. But categorial complexity may be nonderived, covert: the categorial complexity of an item is evident only in its syntax and semantics.