English Text Construction - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2011

Building on recent findings in the field of fan fiction studies, I claim that Pamela Aidan’s Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman is indirectly influenced by three cultural phenomena which centre around Jane Austen and her work. Aidan’s fan fiction text stays close to the spirit of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice because she “reimagines” the novel according to the interpretive conventions of the Republic of Pemberley, a fan community. These conventions demand respect for Austen and her novels because they are shaped by the broader, cultural conventions of Janeitism and Austen criticism. Similarly, Aidan’s text is more individualistic and “Harlequinesque” than Austen’s novel, because the Republic allows writers to reproduce the cultural reading which underlies BBC / A&E’s adaptation of Austen’s novel.

Even though Audrey Thomas’s Mrs. Blood (1970) has received a considerable amount of critical attention, what has not been analysed in detail is the complex interaction between the novel’s existential themes and its highly poetic language. By relying on Julia Kristeva’s insights on the link between border crossing experiences and a discourse that is marked by the discharge of affects, this paper intends to come to a better appreciation of the novel’s strong association of narrative and style. By closely analysing several passages, it argues that even though Mrs. Thing — the rationalizing side of the narrator’s persona — feels alienated from normative, communicative discourse as it cannot accommodate her border crossing experiences, her fear of losing all grasp on self and meaning makes her desperate to hold on to the symbolic. Significantly, both her narrative as well as that of her alter ego are characterized by syntactic, lexical and phonetic disruptions (i.e. the semiotic) that give expression to affects and emotions that resist being silenced or bound into strict patterns. The novel’s discourse, in other words, undermines the narrator’s desire for stability and illustrates that both Mrs. Thing’s overreliance on normative communication (i.e. the symbolic) and Mrs. Blood’s complete submission to the discharge of affects (i.e. the semiotic) are disastrous for the speaking subject.

In this article we investigate keywords and key semantic domains in Fleming’s Casino Royale. We identify groups of keywords that describe elements of the fictional world such as characters and settings as well as thematic signals. The keyword groups fall into two broad categories that are characterized as text-centred and reader-centred, with the latter providing particular clues for interpretation. We also compare the manually identified keyword groups with key semantic domains that are based on automatic semantic analysis. The comparison shows, for instance, how words that do not seem to fit a semantic domain can be seen as reader-centred keywords fulfilling specific textual functions. By linking our analysis to arguments in literary criticism, we show how quantitative and qualitative approaches can usefully complement one another.

As an early form of news discourse, witchcraft pamphlets were one of the primary sites in which and through which ideologies about witchcraft and witches were articulated and disseminated in Early Modern England. Recognizing the pivotal position of language in constructing and perpetuating ideologies, this paper adopts a discourse analytic perspective (Van Dijk 2001, 2008; Halmari and Virtanen 2005) and uses insights from the study of stance and evaluation (Hunston and Thompson 2000; Hyland 2005, 2008) to examine the ways in which the prefatory materials of those pamphlets construct and (re)produce ideologies about witchcraft through linguistic and rhetorical choices, and the ways in which such a process may affect the audience’s perceptions, notions, and beliefs about witchcraft and witches. The findings reveal that the pamphleteers seek to manipulate linguistic choices and, in doing so, naturalize the ideologies about witchcraft which promote an image of Otherness that is inimical to the community. Persuasive strategies used include the negative depiction of the accused individuals as threats to society to prioritize the urgency of persecuting witches in the community; the pamphleteers’ construction of a positive self-image to establish itself as a source that can be trusted; and reader involvement to invite the reader to engage in the argumentation. Such strategies work in concert to reinforce the beliefs about witchcraft of those believers, and/or to persuade those who might still be in doubt.

This article reports on a study that examines the attitudes of 69 Flemish university students towards the emerging conceptualization of English as a lingua franca (ELF) on the basis of a questionnaire survey. Built on the notion of ELF as a functional term theorized on sociolinguistic grounds, this study seeks to understand the relation between ELF as a theoretical construct and ELF as a reality in the life of these language students through their experiences of engagement with English, both within and outside the academic community. The results show that the students have embraced some ideas of the ELF phenomenon on a macro level, but retain a strong belief in the native standard norm on a micro level.

In the context of academic publication, there is a need to recognise the validity and acceptability of texts written by non-native authors that, whilst eschewing formal error, may nevertheless still fail to correspond to the pragmatic expectations imposed by criteria of nativeness. In this article I describe what I take to be a form of linguistic imperialism at work in the processes of academic publication, most specifically as these refer to the manner in which the English of research reported in written format by nonnative speakers of English is treated by reviewers and editors. The article challenges the assumption that native standards of English should be the basic criteria of linguistic quality in international academic publication.Since a fundamental aim of such publication is effective diffusion of content, this paper proposes that journals be more open to variants of English that may not fully comply with the expectations of the ‘standard’ language, and it calls for language consciousness-raising on the part of all those involved in the writing/revising/publishing process with a view to insuring a fairer and less linguistically exclusive publishing scenario.