Abstract This article focuses on an interrelation of various scales of perception in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015). Basing itself on Timothy Clark’s delineation of scalar ambiguities, it argues that Satin Island’s main protagonist, U, embodies a process of growing awareness of the world’s infinite complexity, discovering personal authenticity by withdrawing from action. His perspective is contrasted with the all-pervading Koob-Sassen, which represents a level of complicatedness that contradicts an individual perspective and the possibility of causal thinking. Finally, U’s entire narrative is cast into doubt by an oil spil, signifying a global occurrence whose rift effects are impossible to gauge, let alone predict. As these various scales are explored, the article shows that the novel thematises different levels of what Clark terms the Anthropocene disorder, in which human action can counterintuitively bring about catastrophic consequences.
{"title":"Scalar ambiguities","authors":"Wit Píetrzak","doi":"10.1075/etc.00034.pie","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00034.pie","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article focuses on an interrelation of various scales of perception in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015). Basing itself on Timothy Clark’s delineation of scalar ambiguities, it argues that Satin Island’s main protagonist, U, embodies a process of growing awareness of the world’s infinite complexity, discovering personal authenticity by withdrawing from action. His perspective is contrasted with the all-pervading Koob-Sassen, which represents a level of complicatedness that contradicts an individual perspective and the possibility of causal thinking. Finally, U’s entire narrative is cast into doubt by an oil spil, signifying a global occurrence whose rift effects are impossible to gauge, let alone predict. As these various scales are explored, the article shows that the novel thematises different levels of what Clark terms the Anthropocene disorder, in which human action can counterintuitively bring about catastrophic consequences.","PeriodicalId":42970,"journal":{"name":"English Text Construction","volume":"13 1","pages":"46-61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42971176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Helen Oyeyemi’s 2011 novel Mr. Fox artfully remasters the “Bluebeard” fairytale and its many variants and rewritings, such as Jane Eyre and Rebecca. It is also the first novel in which Oyeyemi does not overtly address blackness or racial identity. However, the present article argues that Mr. Fox is concerned with the status of all women writers, including women writers of colour. With Mr. Fox, Oyeyemi echoes the assertiveness and inquisitiveness of Bluebeard’s last wife, whose disobedient questioning of Bluebeard’s canonical authority leads her to discover, denounce, and warn other women about his murderous nature. A tale of the deception and manipulation inherent in storytelling, Mr. Fox allows for its narrative foul play to be exposed on the condition that its literary victims turn into detective-readers and decipher the hidden clues left behind by the novel’s criminal-authors. This article puts the love triangle between author St. John Fox, muse Mary, and wife Daphne under investigation by associating reading and writing motifs with detective fiction. Oyeyemi’s menage a trois can thus be exposed as an anthropomorphic metaphor for the power struggle between the patriarchal literary canon, established feminist literature, and up-and-coming (black British) women writers, incarnated respectively by Mr. Fox, Mary Foxe, and Daphne Fox.
{"title":"“Bluebeard” versus black British women’s writing","authors":"A. Sanchez","doi":"10.1075/etc.00032.san","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00032.san","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Helen Oyeyemi’s 2011 novel Mr. Fox artfully remasters the “Bluebeard” fairytale and its many variants and rewritings, such as Jane Eyre and Rebecca. It is also the first novel in which Oyeyemi does not overtly address blackness or racial identity. However, the present article argues that Mr. Fox is concerned with the status of all women writers, including women writers of colour. With Mr. Fox, Oyeyemi echoes the assertiveness and inquisitiveness of Bluebeard’s last wife, whose disobedient questioning of Bluebeard’s canonical authority leads her to discover, denounce, and warn other women about his murderous nature. A tale of the deception and manipulation inherent in storytelling, Mr. Fox allows for its narrative foul play to be exposed on the condition that its literary victims turn into detective-readers and decipher the hidden clues left behind by the novel’s criminal-authors. This article puts the love triangle between author St. John Fox, muse Mary, and wife Daphne under investigation by associating reading and writing motifs with detective fiction. Oyeyemi’s menage a trois can thus be exposed as an anthropomorphic metaphor for the power struggle between the patriarchal literary canon, established feminist literature, and up-and-coming (black British) women writers, incarnated respectively by Mr. Fox, Mary Foxe, and Daphne Fox.","PeriodicalId":42970,"journal":{"name":"English Text Construction","volume":"13 1","pages":"1-21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41860889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Constructing a coherent text and achieving genre-specific communicative purposes are crucial aspects of academic writing. However, to date, it remains unclear how coherence and genre are related to each other conceptually. This paper seeks to extend previous research on the influence of genre on coherence relations by examining how writers of applied linguistics research articles (RAs) organise sentences in the discussion section to achieve communicative purposes of the RA discussion genre. The analyses suggest that the writers of the selected discussions might have related sentences to each other differently depending on the purposes they sought to achieve. Possible reasons for relational features are considered in light of the nature of the RA discussion genre and/or the applied linguistics discipline.
{"title":"Coherence relations in research article discussions","authors":"Tomoyuki Kawase","doi":"10.1075/etc.00028.kaw","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00028.kaw","url":null,"abstract":"Constructing a coherent text and achieving genre-specific communicative purposes are crucial aspects of academic writing. However, to date, it remains unclear how coherence and genre are related to each other conceptually. This paper seeks to extend previous research on the influence of genre on coherence relations by examining how writers of applied linguistics research articles (RAs) organise sentences in the discussion section to achieve communicative purposes of the RA discussion genre. The analyses suggest that the writers of the selected discussions might have related sentences to each other differently depending on the purposes they sought to achieve. Possible reasons for relational features are considered in light of the nature of the RA discussion genre and/or the applied linguistics discipline.","PeriodicalId":42970,"journal":{"name":"English Text Construction","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1075/etc.00028.kaw","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47622129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper investigates the different readings and meanings ofneverin the speech of London adults and teenagers, with particular attention to cases in which this negative is equivalent to a sentential negator in the past. The analysis of a sample of over 2,000 tokens extracted from three main corpora serves to provide not only a qualitative perspective on this issue but also a quantitative one that presents new empirical evidence. The universal negative quantificational use ofneveris seen to be the most frequent while punctualnevercomes second. The data analysed also indicate that in the last few years there has been an increase in such uses of this negative compared to the early 1990s. However, no notable differences are attested in this respect when contrasting adult and teen speech.
{"title":"Vernon never called for me yesterday","authors":"I. M. P. Martínez","doi":"10.1075/etc.00030.pal","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00030.pal","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the different readings and meanings ofneverin the speech of London adults and teenagers, with particular attention to cases in which this negative is equivalent to a sentential negator in the past. The analysis of a sample of over 2,000 tokens extracted from three main corpora serves to provide not only a qualitative perspective on this issue but also a quantitative one that presents new empirical evidence. The universal negative quantificational use ofneveris seen to be the most frequent while punctualnevercomes second. The data analysed also indicate that in the last few years there has been an increase in such uses of this negative compared to the early 1990s. However, no notable differences are attested in this respect when contrasting adult and teen speech.","PeriodicalId":42970,"journal":{"name":"English Text Construction","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44963933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores how the notion of decreation manifests itself in the signifying strategies of Anne Carson’s Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005). By revisiting Carson’s stereoscopic poetics and Wolfgang Iser’s branch of reader-response criticism, the article conceptualises these signification strategies, which include generic hybridity and multimodality, as guiding devices that usher the reader’s perspective towards a stereoscopic vision of sameness-in-otherness. These strategies can evoke a sense of ‘decreation’ by drawing the reader’s attention to the boundary between (apparent) incongruities whilst simultaneously encouraging the reader to forge previously unsuspected connections. The semiological argument proposed here concludes that the transcendence of this ‘edge’ by means of analogical thinking constitutes the metaphysical project of personal re-creation.
{"title":"Recalibrating categorisation","authors":"Helena Van Praet","doi":"10.1075/etc.00026.pra","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00026.pra","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores how the notion of decreation manifests itself in the signifying strategies of Anne\u0000 Carson’s Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005). By revisiting\u0000 Carson’s stereoscopic poetics and Wolfgang Iser’s branch of reader-response criticism, the article conceptualises these\u0000 signification strategies, which include generic hybridity and multimodality, as guiding devices that usher the reader’s\u0000 perspective towards a stereoscopic vision of sameness-in-otherness. These strategies can evoke a sense of ‘decreation’ by drawing\u0000 the reader’s attention to the boundary between (apparent) incongruities whilst simultaneously encouraging the reader to forge\u0000 previously unsuspected connections. The semiological argument proposed here concludes that the transcendence of this ‘edge’ by\u0000 means of analogical thinking constitutes the metaphysical project of personal re-creation.","PeriodicalId":42970,"journal":{"name":"English Text Construction","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45344263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Acknowledgements","authors":"","doi":"10.1075/etc.00031.ack","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00031.ack","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42970,"journal":{"name":"English Text Construction","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45753651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper investigates the use of aspect and modality in English predicative and specificational copulars. To examine attractions of aspectual and modal meanings to the VPs in the copular constructions, I carry out collostructional analyses (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003). These attractions are interpreted with respect to (i) the lexicogrammatically coded meaning of the copular clauses and (ii) the pragmatic mechanisms that they trigger (e.g. (non-)exhaustiveness implicature), and (iii) the discursive functions they serve in specific contexts of use. It is crucial that this study takes into account specificational copulars with indefinite vs definite variable NPs, which carry an implicature of non-exhaustiveness vs exhaustiveness respectively. I will argue that the felicity of specific aspectual construals is related to the meanings coded at level (i), while the attraction of modal verbs is related to all three levels.
{"title":"Aspect and modality in English predicative and specificational copular clauses","authors":"W. Praet","doi":"10.1075/etc.00027.pra","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00027.pra","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper investigates the use of aspect and modality in English predicative and specificational copulars. To\u0000 examine attractions of aspectual and modal meanings to the VPs in the copular constructions, I carry out collostructional analyses\u0000 (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003). These attractions are interpreted with respect to\u0000 (i) the lexicogrammatically coded meaning of the copular clauses and (ii) the pragmatic mechanisms that they trigger (e.g.\u0000 (non-)exhaustiveness implicature), and (iii) the discursive functions they serve in specific contexts of use. It is crucial that\u0000 this study takes into account specificational copulars with indefinite vs definite variable NPs, which carry an implicature of\u0000 non-exhaustiveness vs exhaustiveness respectively. I will argue that the felicity of specific aspectual construals is related to\u0000 the meanings coded at level (i), while the attraction of modal verbs is related to all three levels.","PeriodicalId":42970,"journal":{"name":"English Text Construction","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41362962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Minna Palander-Collin, Maura Ratia and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Diachronic Developments in English News\u0000 Discourse","authors":"Paul Arblaster","doi":"10.1075/ETC.00024.ARB","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1075/ETC.00024.ARB","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42970,"journal":{"name":"English Text Construction","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45760345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}