Recherche multi-critères

Connected to the question of nationalistic and identitarian assertions versus the other-regarding 'worlding' of literary-critical praxis is the question of the Global South – questions more specifically connected to colonialism, postcolonial discourse, and new-imperialism. To what extent can postcolonialism offer a suitable methodological toolkit for studying literature today? Conversely, what are some of the current discontents with postcolonialism, arising particularly from emerging insights into colonialism and literary production from the Global South? To answer these questions, this lecture probes into the different strands of recent critiques of postcolonialism as an adequate method of literary criticism. It also focuses on one of the primary research outputs of the current lecturer, which has been in the area of 'polycoloniality', or the multiple and productive strands of networked and mutually competitive colonial processes, which have always been multinational rather than mononational – with there being colonial efforts in South Asia, for instance, not just by the English (as is often presumed) but by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, Danish, 'Germans', etc, too. This lecture examines this further, particularly in relation to France's involvement in colonial projects in South Asia.

Egypt's Arab Spring was experienced as a mediated event in two notable ways. First, in the immediate successes of Tahrir Square, Facebook was heralded as a fundamental agent of the uprising and responsible for the fall of Mubarak. Second, the failure of the 'Spring' with the election of an Islamist and a counter-revolution that saw the rise of a military dictatorship, news reports sought to make sense of the country's rapidly flailing political fortunes. Missing from both these forms of mediation are the voices of the rioters, their coordinated spontaneity and their very acts of resistance. While numerous images of the protests were captured, individual stories and lives were drowned out by the raucous cacophony of the masses. Assuming an extended view of the media terrain that recorded the uprising, this seminar seeks to recover the lost voices of Egypt's Arab Spring. It focuses on two novels by Robert Omar Hamilton and Yasmin El Rashid to drill down into how intimate stories and individual voices provide an alternative method to inform our knowledge of crowd violence. It will illustrate how narrative discourses can contribute in critical and strategic ways to reclaiming what has been lost or unheard in the seeming media decadence that characterised the uprising.

This article aims at critically addressing the SNP's very favourable discourse on immigration and immigrants’ rights in Scotland from a historical and contemporary perspective.

This paper will argue that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s political discourse was profoundly influenced by his liberal Protestant worldview. The paper begins with some background on Roosevelt’s Christian upbringing. It moves on to show how FDR consistently used Protestant precepts and Biblical allusions as a rhetorical tool to gain electoral support. However, the author argues that Roosevelt’s simple yet profound Christian faith went far beyond this purely rhetorical usage and that liberal Protestant teachings in fact structured his political philosophy.

"To comfortably acquire, so to speak, as many fingers as needed," said one of Bach’s sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel, in his Essay on the True Art of Playing the Keyboard (1753). And these words are remarkable, as long as we are prepared to take them literally, and not hastily consider them as one of the metaphors that adorn discourse about music and on the bodies that it evokes.

Authors sometimes pepper their writings with features of orality. Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy or George Bernard Shaw have become household names renowned for this propensity to rely on the vocal medium. Orality, however, is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of possible meanings. In this paper, I shall mainly be concerned with direct speech and the way it represents spoken discourse proper.

Mick Short was invited by Manuel Jobert as part of the tenth edition of the Discourse Analysis Conferences, organised by the Société de Stylistique Anglaise and Lyon 3. After giving some precious advice to students in stylistics and explaining the "foregrounding theory", he analysed a number of texts including the front page of a British tabloid, a poem by Robert Frost and a passage from Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin.

George Gascoigne (1542-1577) est probablement l’un des premiers auteurs élisabéthains à s’être engagé dans la voie de l’expérimentation radicale avec la publication, en 1573, de son recueil intitulé A Hundred Sundrie Flowers, florilège mêlant poésie, récit en prose et théâtre. Cependant, après la décision de la Haute Commission de rejeter le recueil, Gascoigne se vit contraint de réviser son projet littéraire et plus spécifiquement son récit en prose, A Discourse of The Adventures of Master F. J., dont l’intrigue semblait s’inspirer de certaines histoires scandaleuses à la cour. Un nouvel horizon semble toutefois se profiler lorsque l’auteur choisit de métamorphoser sa narration en pseudo-traduction dans une seconde version (The Pleasant Fable of Ferdinando Jeronimi and Leonora Valasco, translated out of the Italian Riding Tales of Bartello). De fait, la translation générique s’accompagne d’un travail de repentir...

The prevention discourse, which has existed for so long has gone a step further with the belief of scientific capability to predict human behaviour by sophisticated software. It is not enough to assess possible futures, to do simulation and alternative scenarios and to guess what virtual future has the most chance to become actualised, now the professionals of security technologies want to reduce all these possible futures to only one future; often the future of the worst case scenario. And it is this selected future that they read as a future perfect, as a future already fixed, a future they already know...

De nombreux pamphlets traduits du français et publiés en Angleterre témoignent de l'intérêt croissant des Anglais pour l'actualité française à la fin des années 1580, au moment où l'accession d'Henri de Navarre sur le trône de France paraît de plus en plus probable. À la fois narration des faits et mise en garde face à une possible contagion du mal français à sa voisine d'outre-Manche, ces textes entretiennent des relations ambigües avec le pouvoir anglais. Progressivement, leur forme de pamphlet évolue pour donner naissance à un nouveau genre, le « discourse », qui cherche à dépasser la confrontation de thèses antagonistes pour réconcilier la nation.

Languages provide speakers with a number of structural options for manipulating the expression of events in narrative discourse. Underlying narrative competence is the capacity to view events as dynamic actions composed of a bundle of elements such as, agent, patient, affectedness, etc. (Hopper and Thompson, 1980). This study examines the grammatical constructions used by children (5-6-, 7-8- and 10-11-year-olds) and adult speakers of Amharic, English, French and Hungarian to manipulate the expression of agent and patient participants in the expression of events. The narrative task used to elicit the data is composed of a series of pictures which recount the adventures of two principal characters (a boy and a dog) in search of their runaway frog (Frog, Where are you? Mayer 1969). Over the course of the story the boy and the dog encounter a host of secondary characters (a mole, an owl, a swarm of bees and a deer) and change participant status, going from controlling agent to affected patient of a secondary character's action. Our interest lies in the range of structures available in the languages studied and their use by children and adults in narrative discourse. We detail how children and adults native speakers of the four languages use topicalising constructions to promote the patient participant in an event to the starting point (Langacker, 1998) of the recounting of that event.

In this article, Sylvie Maurel analyses the Gothic destabilizing machinery at work in Jean Rhys’s "Wide Sargasso Sea". The first Gothic element the author looks at is the demonic agency that haunts the novel. Colonial history lingers in Rhys’s world and accounts for some of the strange and unexpected phenomena that occur on the island. Actually, the narrative is under the double influence of a past set in an actual history of slavery and a future already written in the story of "Jane Eyre". Rhys’s characters have an uncanny prescience of what lies ahead and a sense that they cannot evade repetition. The motif of witchcraft is another element that links "WSS" to the Gothic. The motif goes beyond a picturesque reference to the West Indian context and functions as a metaphor of the relationship between language and power. Christophine’s witchcraft and Rochester’s Eurocentric discourse are two similar attempts at transforming the world through language. The power of language is also reflected in the way the novel constantly brings together multiple voices and conflicting views which seem to hide a secret rather than reveal a final truth. Rochester can only feel the presence of such a secret and risks delirium as he tries to get a grip on something that constantly eludes him.