English Text Construction - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2017

The November 1997 issue of Index magazine featured a rather unusual piece by avantgardist John Jesurun, which apparently had surprised even the editors – and this despite having commissioned the contribution themselves. Building on the already troubled conversion from James M. Cain’s 1941 novel Mildred Pierce to the 1945 film produced by Jerry Wald via multiple screenwriters and many more rewrites, this essay approaches the theme of betrayal so conspicuous in both works less from the narrative angle than from a processual angle inspired by the principle of incommensurability. To this end, it juxtaposes the ‘classical’ adaptation from the Hollywood studio era with Jesurun’s experimental reimagining of the betrayal theme as a homology-based remodelling.

On 31 December 1993, French pay TV channel Canal+ broadcast a 70-minute film called La Classe américaine, directed by Michel Hazanavicius and Dominique Mézerette. They took excerpts from about fifty Warner Bros. productions, edited them to build a story and had the characters (played by A-list actors such as John Wayne and James Stewart) dubbed over by well-known French voice actors, resulting in what is known technically as a ‘détournement’, combining the techniques of film collage and dubbing. This paper sketches the origins and the production context of this very unusual audiovisual object, relying on insights from film theory, with particular reference to adaptation techniques like remixes and collages. The analysis also shows how meaning and humour are created through the montage of originally completely disconnected scenes and the addition of funny or crude dialogues that one would not expect from cinema legends like John Wayne. A final part highlights the film’s cult status and its influence on the creation of more détournements.

Presuming that both travel and crime fiction can be described as traditionally ‘white’ genres, this article investigates how contemporary Black British authors appropriate these genres. Focusing on Mike Phillips’s A Shadow of Myself and Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists, the article examines how the two novels redeem and suspend the traditional racial and national coding of travel writing and crime fiction by rehabilitating black mixed-race characters. In both novels, moreover, the rethinking of traditional popular genres coincides with, and is partly enabled by, a transnational shift in focus from Britain to Europe. A closer look at the novels’ respective endings, finally, reveals how each conceptualises the relationship between Britain and Europe differently, and how this difference can be explained by the impact of genre.

The paper analyses the influence of John Madden’s biopic Shakespeare in Love (GB/USA, 1998) on Molière (FR, 2007) and Young Goethe in Love (GER, 2010) by having a closer look at the intertextual relationship between the films. For this, it considers external and internal connections, referring to intertexts for the promotion and marketing as well as the use of content-based conventions for biopics on writers, literary sources and anachronisms. The analysis reveals that, although the French and German films take Shakespeare in Love as a source of inspiration, they rewrite the approach and transform it for an individual representation of their national subjects. This double effect points to a different, alternative strategy for adapting the literary life of the canonical author.

In this paper, we explore the potential of a corpus approach to study translated cohesion. We use key words as starting points for identifying cohesive networks in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and discuss how these networks contribute to the construction of literary meanings in the text. We focus on the role of repetition as a key element in establishing cohesive networks between lexical items. We specifically discuss the implications of our method for the analysis of cohesion in translated texts. A comparison of Lovecraft’s original novel and a translation into Italian provides us with a nuanced understanding of the complex nature of cohesive networks. Finally, we discuss the broader issue of applying models and methods from corpus linguistics to corpus stylistic analysis.

This paper analyzes the “when” meme, a popular internet meme, which prototypically juxtaposes a when clause with an ostensibly unrelated image. Despite the initial incongruity, I contend this image prompts selective mapping between verbal and visual elements to produce a multimodal simile. First, I attempt to define and more clearly distinguish simile from metaphor. Second, I show how this multimodal simile exhibits unique viewpoint mapping by prompting audiences to subsume viewpoints that are both unfamiliar and bizarre. Third, I connect the like construction in simile with the like reported speech marker to show how both concepts are intimately related. Ultimately, the paper seeks to contribute to studies of simile by bolstering its ties with multimodality, blending, metonymy, viewpoint, and embodiment.

This study investigates the usage patterns of four near-synonymous mental predicates (believe, guess, suppose and think) across three Asian ESL (English as a Second Language) varieties as well as British and American Englishes. Using two multivariate techniques, multiple correspondence analysis and classification and regression tree analysis, the study shows the benefits of exploring cross-varietal variation through the lens of lexicalization patterns. The study also demonstrates that to make sense of semantic patterns it is crucial to account for extra-linguistic factors such as genre, as different ESL writers structure the meaning of believe, guess, suppose and think differently depending on their type of writing. Ultimately, in the broader context of the emancipation of ESL varieties, the results raise important questions about the developmental process of Asian Englishes and the place that semantic structure holds in this endeavor.