English Text Construction - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2016

The present article analyses Walter Pater’s novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), focusing particularly on the nexus between the story’s setting in Ancient Rome and its treatment of religion. Even though the abrupt ending of Marius’s Bildung suggests that Pater had not yet succeeded in reconciling his aesthetic philosophy with a religious life in community, the novel encourages its readers to adopt an eclectic religious consciousness. By examining Pater’s references to Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, the article investigates how Pater used the Roman poet to reinforce this message, and to react against the materialism of post-Darwinian Britain. Moreover, it shows how Marius the Epicurean incorporates and subverts some of the motifs that can be found in popular Victorian novels set in Rome.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate a way in which the concept of cognitive modelling can be applied to studies of intertextuality. The paper suggests a fresh way of looking at intertextuality – from the perspective of the cognitive processes involved in decoding intertextual references, namely, analogical mapping across different domains. Our knowledge of cognitive processes is largely based on the study of cognitive processing of texts, but texts with intertextual references have until now been a less studied area of cognitive research. I define three different ways in which texts relate to each other: hard modelling, soft modelling and loose association. From a cognitive perspective, I suggest that mental processing of these texts involves different knowledge structures which I describe using Schank’s (1982, 1986, 1999) theory of dynamic memory.

The author-audience interaction is an important issue in academic writing, but when academic texts are translated, new issues regarding the author-audience relationship arise because of the translator’s involvement in the text. This paper examines translators’ interventions in academic writing by focusing on one dimension of the author-audience interaction, i.e., reader-oriented strategies or engagement markers. Corpus analysis is employed to explore the use of engagement markers in academic texts translated into English, their corresponding source texts originally written in Slovene, and in comparable original English texts. The analysis reveals that while the frequency of engagement markers is relatively similar in the two sets of originals, it is considerably lower in the translated texts. This means that translators’ interventions resulted in a reduction in the use of engagement markers. The findings identify several potential reasons for translators’ intervention, including a tendency to avoid risky strategies such as the use of directives, adaptation of the target text to the conventions of the target language/culture, and adaptation of the target text to a new audience.

Due to students’ growing networking needs, educational institutions are increasingly looking for tools to bolster peer communication and information exchange. These tools, furthermore, need to facilitate students’ adaptation to the new academic culture and support their academic acculturation. This study proposes to integrate the social networking site Facebook into the learning programme, providing students with a low-threshold online environment where they can share ideas , experiences and information while creating social bonds. Data from two case studies show that students experience various challenges associated with academic acculturation and try to overcome them by consulting their peers via Facebook. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that through social networking, careful assignment design and tutor support, students are encouraged to acculturate and become active, responsible learners.