Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction offers fresh readings of what has been called "transatlantic literature". In selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts it discovers a shift from oceanic, place-based knowledge to an atmospheric, placeless circulation of information. Consonant with the displacements of the Information Age, this book reads contemporary narrative as it imagines and navigates today's virtual spaces. An important conclusion of the book is that intellectual resources are finite and should be used sustainably. Thus, arguing against a conventional comparative approach, this book proposes reading practices that resist the tendency toward an oversupply of reworked literary contexts that seems bent on matching the reach of the World Wide Web. Instead, the book reimagines place as a practice in the way it is communicated and narrated. Ultimately, this book empowers the reader to reimagine a future for narrative in the Information Age.

Teaching Literature in Times of Crisis looks at the range of different crises currently affecting students – from climate change and systemic racism, to the global pandemic.

Addressing the impact on students’ ability and motivation to learn as well as their emotional wellbeing, this volume guides teachers toward strategies for introducing both canonical and contemporary literature in ways that demonstrate the future relevance of sophisticated and targeted literacy skills. These reading practices are invaluable for framing and critically examining the challenges associated with crisis in order to help cope with grief and as a means to impart the skills needed to deal with crisis, such as adaptability, flexibility, resilience, and resistance. Providing necessary background theory, alongside practical case studies, the book addresses:

• Reading practices for demonstrating how literature explores ethical issues in specific and concrete rather than abstract terms
• Making connections between disparate phenomena, and how literature mobilises affect in individual and collective human lives
• Supporting teachers in considering new, imaginative ways students can learn from literary content and form in online or remote learning environments as well as face to face
• Combining close and distant reading with creative and hands-on strategies, presenting the principles of a transitional pedagogy for a world in flux.

This book introduces teachers to methods for reading and studying literature with the aim of strengthening and promoting resilience and resourcefulness in and out of the literature classroom and empower students as global citizens with local roles to play.

In my reading of Ballard's short story 'Dream Cargoes', I find a post-growth imaginary that focuses on a profound species-wide change of pace in the context of future nano- and biotech waste. I compare this to Tom Wolfe's heady account of the Merry Pranksters set during the Great Acceleration of the 1960s and 1970s. While Wolfe captured multiple fragmented points of view located in scattered time frames in his account of the Pranksters, Ballard is suggesting that time and its specific contemporary associations with extinction, renewability and futurity has become a central concern for humanity at large. I argue that literary representations of toxicity yield insight by awakening the reader to the ultimate limits of consumer culture. Thus, this essay offers an approach to fictions such as Ballard's and Wolfe's seeing them as essential resources for assessing toxicity in our lives as a source of insight as well as motivation to look for alternatives to petroculture.

This article reports on the project to design and implement a web-based mechanism for formative self-assessment, to be used as part of Mick Short's online stylistics course, Language and Style (see the preface to this issue for details). Using the self-assessment mechanism, students can compare their own performance on extended academic tasks (the stylistic analysis of three literary texts – a poem, a piece of prose fiction and a drama extract) with benchmarked sample answers. In this article we describe the process of developing benchmarks for the self-assessment mechanism and explain how this mechanism works in practice. Finally, we discuss students’ reactions to the self-assessment instruments, as part of our own assessment of their validity and pedagogical value.

In 2019, China reported coronavirus disease which has spread around the world since then (WHO, 2020). It has been named as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (WHO, 2020). While it has spread around the world because of being a highly infectious disease, each country has tackled the measure to contain the disease and protect its citizens in different ways. Sweden is a unique case in the European context which has not gone into any lockdown, but institutes of higher education have been closed since the middle of March and have turned to distance teaching. Similarly, high schools had been closed for Spring 2020, but in the Autumn, 2020 they had been reopened. The Public Health Agency (HSLF-FS 2020) as from 1 July 2020 issued the regulations and general guidelines with the aim of reducing the transmission of COVID-19 in restaurants, bars and cafés (2020:526). As a background, Swedish is the official language of Sweden, whereas it has five officially recognised minority languages, besides several migrant languages spoken in different language communities within its polity. English is taught at the compulsory school level in Sweden and is also an extramural language as well as lingua franca among various highly educated groups as well as Anglophone migrants. This study aims to study the discourses and language of the instructions displayed on the Public Health Agency’s website with a particular focus on English and globalization. According to Blommaert (2020), COVID-19 is a textbook example of contemporary globalization processes, which started as a health crisis but became an economic crisis as well as of mobility. Furthermore, according to Blommaert’s (2018) definition of globalization, it is a process of increasing interconnectedness between different parts of the world, creating global modes of organization and conduct. In a complete paradox, while mobility and local cultural phenomenon arise because of globalization and spread of COVID-19, English language was one of the main sources of information in many contexts as well as Sweden beside Swedish language being the main source. In this regard, this study will focus particularly on English. According to Canagarajah (1999), the use of English is dynamically negotiated, and its status in contextually modified in socially strategic ways, and in the process modifies the communicative and linguistic rules of English according to local cultural and ideological imperatives” (ibid, 1999:76), while Pennycook (2007) argues that the choices around moves into particular languages may be on pragmatic, aesthetic, or commercial grounds, but they are also political decisions to do with language, identity, and authenticity. With this theoretical background, the study argues a particular kind of English created post-COVID19 in each context.

This study investigates political discourse about ethnicities and migration in the political discourse by focusing on Trump and Clinton’s public talks comprising of debates, interviews and speeches. The data will be collected by downloading available debates and interviews from youtube from the year 2015. In the initial process, the data will be categorised according to the genres as the data set is huge. In the next stage, the data will be transcribed and analysed using membership categorisation analysis and multi-modal analyses. The main purpose of the study is to shed light on some of the distinguishing features of how ethnicities are talked about in the political discourse, what kind of conversational devices are used to create a particular ethnicity, how is migration talked about and contextualised.

How does current scholarship on literary translingualism and the “monolingual paradigm” (Yasemin Yildiz) reflect on the richly multilingual setting of the Caribbean? Drawing on Edgar Schneider’s dynamic model of postcolonial Englishes and Rebecca Walkowitz’s work on born-translated novels, this paper considers notions of monolingualism in conjunction with Earl Lovelace’s fourth novel, The Wine of Astonishment (1982). I argue this novel offers fertile ground for discussion on how the postcolonial Caribbean “writes back” to the imperial center in a decidedly local language that shatters notions of monolingual, Standard English literature. Lovelace utilizes a range of voices from the creole continuum to reveal issues of power related to religion, race and education. This paper evaluates how Lovelace’s use of Trinidadian Creole for not only the dialogue, but the narration of the novel, validates it as a literary language and challenges norms of standardizing local tongues for literary use. An engagement with concepts of linguistic imperialism and the scholarly work historically specific to the novel elucidate these points.

This dissertation focuses on three authors who came of age in the 1980s, Earl Lovelace, Milton Murayama, and Ntozake Shange, reading their novels set respectively on Trinidad, Hawai‘i, and the Sea Islands, as postplantation expressions. My definition of the postplantation builds upon the work of Édouard Glissant, especially “Closed Place, Open Word” where he delineates three phases in literary production from the Plantation: the first is chiefly oral and appears as an “act of survival,” the second is an attempt to justify the Plantation system and is marked by “delusion,” and the third phase is written by descendants of the Plantation in a “passion of memory.” It is this third phase that I call the postplantation. Here, several generations after the system’s collapse, writers return to the plantation as a way to process its legacy. An integral part of this process for the authors studied here is the use of Creole languages developed on the plantation and still spoken today. This dissertation’s specific contribution is to show how the history of the plantation is central to contemporary island discourse. My comparative study of novels about Trinidad, Hawai‘i, and the Sea Islands untangles the effect of the plantation in each of these locations: the legacies of racial and sexual trauma, poverty, and the power structures that continue to replicate the plantation, but also the culture and language that emerged in triumph from this dehumanizing system. My readings of the postplantation illustrate how despite writing about three seemingly very different locales, Lovelace, Murayama, and Shange are engaged in similar efforts to reclaim a local culture, language, and history denied in the plantation’s violent trajectory. The emerging field of island studies, archipelagic approaches to literature, and studies of vernacular in world literature speak to the significance of this doctoral study. 

Article: Review: Aiyejina, Funso. Earl Lovelace. University of West Indies Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-976-640-627-1. Pp. 114. Cloth $25.00

This project investigates Swedish and Russian young learners’ uses of modern technology in international communication in English. Modern technology plays an increasing role in children’s documentation and international communication at schools. The role of the English language in new ways of communicating and interacting is therefore relevant to investigate. The development of new digital tools implies that young learners are not only consumers but also producers of information in English, and that new forms of representations can be used when communicating in English. The present study is a project of cooperation between the universities in Uppsala, Sweden and Kaliningrad, Russia and describes communication between three schools in Sweden and three schools in Russia. The communication at the websites provides useful material of 12-year-olds who used English as their lingua franca and as means of communicating at three common websites with the help of blogs, podcasts and films from September 2012 to May 2013. All the young learners’ productions at the three websites were studied in terms of modes of communication, length of contributions, structural complexity in the English language and topics selected in the messages. The results show that young Russian and Swedish learners are able to use the English language in authentic communication by using different digital tools within the topic fields of the levels A1 and A2 of the CEFR. The learners’ production showed evidence of the occurrence of complex structures and current non-standard features of the English language with very few instances of misunderstandings or communication breakdowns.

This chapter describes a project aiming at investigating Swedish and Russian 12-year-old learners’ use ofICT. They communicate in English on three shared blogs. Their exchanges and contributions are analyzed with a focus on mediating tools, modes of communication and motives for collaboration. Ongoing activities are studied through classroom observations, interviews and a research circle. Results show that ICT plays a vital role as a mediating tool and a motive for collaboration. Results indicate that Russian and Swedish learners manage to interact in authentic communication in English with the help of digital tools. Opportunities to explore a variety of digital tools resulted in new forms of representation. International collaboration through ICT indicates that conflicting issues and developmental opportunities may challenge the current education system.

This study examines the genre of YouTube reaction videos as a distinct form of cultural production and social influence in online communication. Despite its prevalence and popularity, the genre has received limited scholarly attention, particularly with regard to reactions to ideological activism. This paper aims to fill this gap by conducting a social semiotic discourse analysis of videos reviewing the activism of transgender community on TikTok. The analysis demonstrates how intersecting non-verbal and technologically enabled modes, such as gaze, gestures, facial expressions, and various audio-visual effects, contribute to the expression of impoliteness arising from a sense of superiority over the target, shared with non-targeted viewers. Overall, the paper provides insights into the dynamics of online culture wars and the multimodal manifestations of impoliteness in contemporary social media discourse.

Conventionalized impoliteness in English and Polish: The case of ‘you idiot!

Daniel Van Olmen & Marta Andersson

(Lancaster University, Uppsala University)

Keywords: address, conventionalization, evaluative meaning, impoliteness, questionnaire

Earlier research has argued that the YOU+NP! patterns in (1) and (2) are constructions (in a Construction Grammar sense; Goldberg 2006): they constitute distinct forms dedicated to the function of addressee evaluation (see also Davies 1986 among others). This assessment may be positive (e.g. you angel!) but the construction has been shown, with corpus data, to exhibit a strong bias toward insults in usage in English and a very strong one in Polish.

(1)       “Thanks a lot, you stupid bitch!” screamed Vultureman. Chilla was enraged by the unprovoked profanity. (enTenTen18)

(2)       Już mam ochotę wrzeszczeć: ty mendo, … ja ci pokażę, ja cię kwasem obleję!

‘I feel like screaming: you douche, … I'll show you, I'll pour acid on you!’ (plTenTen19)

Following Terkourafi (2005) on politeness formulae and against the dominant view in the field that (im)politeness is primarily socio-pragmatic in nature rather than inherent in linguistic form (e.g. Van der Bom and Mills 2015), these results have been taken to suggest that YOU+NP! is conventionalized considerably for negative addressee evaluation, even more so in Polish than in English. This association with impoliteness has, moreover, been attributed to the pragmatic explicitness and thus directness (Culpeper and Haugh 2014) of referring to the target with ‘you’.

This paper seeks to put the claims about English versus Polish and about the impact of ‘you’ to the test, by conducting an online questionnaire asking native speakers to assess, on seven-point Likert scales, the well-formedness (1=very unnatural, 7=very natural) and evaluative meaning (1=very negative, 4=neither positive nor negative, 7=very positive) of stimuli in short, general scenarios. The stimuli, which are as similar as possible for both languages, differ in the presence/absence of ‘you’ and in the nouns, ranging from negatively and positively evaluative ones (e.g. NE ‘idiot’, PE ‘angel’) over neutral ones denoting humans and things (e.g. NH ‘waiter’, NT ‘pan’) to pseudo-nouns (e.g. P ‘wabe’; cf. Jain 2022). The hypotheses that we intend to test are:

(i)        without ‘you’, NEs, PEs and NHs are judged the more well-formed addresses but, with ‘you’, just the evaluative nouns stand out and especially NEs while NHs score lower and NTs and Ps higher for well-formedness with than without ‘you’;

(ii)       NEs’ evaluative meaning is deemed (even) more negative with than without ‘you’ and NHs, NTs and Ps too are seen as (more) negative with ‘you’ (than without it);

(iii)      these two tendencies are stronger in Polish than in English.

The collection of the data, which will undergo statistical analysis (ANOVAs, Bonferroni-corrected post hoc t-tests), is ongoing. Our preliminary results, however, appear to be in line with the hypotheses. Evidence for (i) shows that YOU+NP! is an evaluative construction, even able to turn unlikely NPs into (evaluative) addresses. Support for (ii) confirms that ‘you’ increases the effect of already negatively evaluative NPs and that YOU+NP! is conventionalized considerably for impoliteness, coercing non-evaluative NPs into a negative (rather than positive) interpretation. Evidence for (iii) indicates that this conventionalization is more established in Polish than in English. 

References

Culpeper, Jonathan and Michael Haugh (2014), Pragmatics and the English Language, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Davies, Eirlys E. (1986), English vocatives: A look at their function and form, Studia Anglica Posnaniniensis 19(1), 92-106.

Goldberg, Adele (2006), Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jain, Kate H. (2022), You Hoboken! Semantics of an expressive label marker, Linguistics and Philosophy 45(2), 365-391.

Terkourafi, Marina (2005), Pragmatic correlates of frequency of use: The case for a notion of “minimal context”, in S. Marmaridou, K. Nikiforidou and E. Antonopoulou (eds), (2005), Reviewing Linguistic Thought: Converging Trends for the 21st Century, Berlin: De Gruyter, 209-233.

Van der Bom, Isabelle and Sara Mills (2015), A discursive approach to the analysis of politeness data, Journal of Politeness Research 11(2), 179-206.

This dissertation focuses on the use of address phrases in three forms of computer mediated communication (CMC) in English. The aim of the study is to examine how people address each other in email, online chat and weblogs. The three forms of CMC included in the study represent different types of communicative situations online as regards synchronicity, speed of production, number of participants and permanency. The study also investigates how the use of address phrases varies between the three forms and in relation to usage in spoken and other forms of written English.

For the purposes of the project, three corpora were collected, one for each form of CMC. The email corpus comprises business email from the United States, the chat corpus includes data from a range of different types of multi-person chat rooms, and the weblog corpus consists of text from a number of personal weblogs. I then investigated the lexical and syntactic characteristics and the pragmatic functions of the address phrases found in the corpora. In the email and weblogs material, I also examined gender-related differences in the use of address phrases.

The results of the investigation show that CMC users employ different types of address phrases in different forms of CMC; first names and online nicknames dominated in the email and chat material, while the weblogs included a large number of common nouns as headwords in the address phrase. Address phrases are also used for different pragmatic purposes in different types of CMC.

The English and Swedish Drama Dialogue (ESDD) corpus is a sociopragmatically tagged corpus of English and Swedish drama texts from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using this corpus, I investigated the use of the address terms Fool, Dear, Sir and Brother. The study focused on the contexts where these terms were found and traced diachronic usage patterns. The main questions asked in the investigation concerned, first, the speaker's attitude towards the addressees when using the address phrases and whether attitudes connected with particular phrases changed over time; second, whether the phrases could be said to signal intimacy or distance between the interlocutors.

Although it is generally accepted that English is becoming the lingua franca of international business, the details of this process are not well understood. This article uses the Google Books corpus to provide both a quantitative and a qualitative investigation of the ways in which specific English business terms are penetrating major European languages. Some English business terms now appear to be firmly established in other languages, and can be classified as lexical borrowings, while the use of other terms is better described as code-switching.

An account of the way food culture has been put into language and language has been put into food, from 1470 to 1740.

A look at how MasterChef has spread through the world, based on an anglophone model, but expressing national culinary and cultural differences.