Detailed Table of Contents
- Editorial
- Anne Lequy: Iconicity as a Doorway to a New Space: Lesser Known East German Women Writers in the Seventies and Eighties
- Abstract: Christa Wolf, Anna Seghers, Irmtraud Morgner, Brigitte Reimann and Maxie Wander are not the only women who wrote in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Although these five are the most well-known of that country's female authors, their fame should not cause us to ignore the very varied corpus of unrecognised literature produced by East German women. I uncovered more than 350 names of women who lived, wrote and were (or at least tried to be) published in Eastern Germany between 1971 and 1989, i.e. the second half of GDR history or the "Honecker era" (Lequy 487). Among this multitude, I choose to concentrate here on the eight I find most interesting from the point of view of literary iconicity. Applying Peirce's semiotics, I distinguish successively between imagic, diagrammatic and metaphoric iconicity. All eight authors I selected for this paper explore and exploit the materiality of words. Thanks to the corporeality of language, they open a door to new literary and political dimensions. This paper aims at both showing which innovative aspects literary iconicity brings to the works of lesser known GDR female writers, and analysing which innovative aspects their works bring to the theme of iconicity.
- Author's Bio: Anne Lequy was born in France in 1971. She received an M.A. in German as a Foreign Language in 1994, and an M.A. in English Studies in 1996. In 1999 she completed her PhD in German Literature (European Doctorate, doctorat en cotutelle). From 1998 until 2006 she was a lecturer in French at the University of Jena and at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Since 2006 Dr. Lequy has been employed as a professor of technical communication (German-French translation) and as head of the French language department at the Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal (FH). Her current research work focuses on gender and didactics, especially on computer-assisted language and translation learning / teaching. She also works as a sworn translator and interpreter for several German institutions.
- Hong-Chi Shiau: Performativity, Intertextuality, and Social Change: An Ethnographic Analysis of Taiwanese Gay Personal Ads
- Abstract: Based on in-depth conversations with those who have actively been involved in the process of producing and responding to gay personal ads, this paper attempts to challenge the earlier content-centered and socio-psychological analyses concerning gay personals. In addition to analyzing elicited historical testimonials (the personal ads published in print), I conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-two Taiwanese gay men who actively posted and/or responded to gay personal ads. In my interviews it soon became evident that the notion of intertexuality and multiple levels of linguistic functions worked together to facilitate the linguistic performance in gay communication, but that the respective importance of these was changed by the transition from print to digital media
- Author's Bio: Hong-Chi Shiau (Ph.D. 2002, Temple University) is an assistant professor in the department of communications management at Shih-Hsin University in Taiwan. His research interest includes media globalization, popular culture and audience reception studies. Previous publication focuses at how western texts were imported and re/produced in the local and how the local re/negotiate their identity.
- Ludger Viefhues-Bailey: Bearing the Beyond: Women and the Limits of Language in Stanley Cavell
- Abstract: The American philosopher Stanley Cavell is one of the very few thinkers in the Anglo-Saxon dispensation of philosophy who addresses the role of gender and desire in our possessing language. While Cavell's oeuvre is receiving more and more attention in Europe, the issues of gender discussed in and raised by his writing are not systematically explored. Against this silence in Cavell scholarship, this paper aims to show exegetically how philosophizing about language and about sexuality are connected in Cavell's work. Systematically, I will argue secondly that for Cavell not metaphysics but concrete gender and sexual arrangements motivate the yearning for the impossible, which characterizes so much of modern western philosophy. To this end I will trace a connection between Cavell's technical discussions of Wittgensteinian understanding of language and his own reflections on gender and marriage in opera and film.
- Author's Bio: Ludger Viefhues-Bailey is assistant professor for Methods and Theory in the Study of Religion and for Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. His work focuses on the systematic development of the notion of "religion" in the modern world. His book Beyond the Philosopher's Fears: A Cavellian Reading of Gender, Religion, and Origins in Modern Skepticism appeared in October of 2007 through Ashgate Press, England. In his teaching and research he is interested in the intersection of globalization; theory of religion, gender, and epistemology. He has lectured on these issues in Europe and in the United States. His new book is entitled Patriotic Dreams, Illicit Sex, Divine Grace: Understanding and Evaluating What Conservative Christian Organizations Say about Same-Sex Love.
- Linda Watts: Are Remarks History? Gertrude Stein as Conceptual Artist
- Abstract: Although critics typically characterize Gertrude Stein as a modernist, it is at least as useful to approach her as an antecedent for language-based conceptual art emerging during the late twentieth century. Conceptual artists pose questions rather than make assertions. With her penchant for estranging familiar words from their association with common ideas, Stein challenges readers to think in more abstract terms, to challenge conventions of statement, to contest the constraints of artistic and literary formulas, and to question traditional assumptions about what is good, usual, natural, beautiful, true, or memorable. Stein's work, with its distinctive properties—brazen self-referentiality, preoccupation with mass culture and ready-mades, deformation of narrative strategy and voice, and bold explorations of the edges and interstices of both the body's senses and the mind's symbolic systems (such as images and words), anticipates many of the themes that would later fascinate conceptual artists, including claims to monumental or immutable truths.
- Author's Bio: Linda S. Watts, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Washington, Bothell, is author of Rapture Untold: Gender, Mysticism, and the 'Moment of Recognition' in Writings by Gertrude Stein (1996), Gertrude Stein: A Study of the Short Fiction (1999), and Encyclopedia of American Folklore (2006).
- Interview: "I never dared to write a comedy before. If nobody laughs you're stuffed, aren't you?": Lisa Evans in Conversation
- Abstract: Lisa Evans has written extensively for the theatre, radio and television. Her stage work includes both new plays and adaptations, and has been performed apart from the UK in Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Israel and the USA. She regularly collaborates with director Gwenda Hughes and has been writer in residence at the Theatre Centre, London and Temba Theatre. She has won, among others, British Theatre Association awards and her work is published by Oberon. In this interview, she speaks about her work in general, and her play Once We Were Mothers in particular.
- Author's Bio: Jozefína Komporaly is Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University Leicester, UK. Her research interests include contemporary British and European theatre, women's writing for performance, and translation and adaptation for the stage. She has published extensively on British drama, and is the author of the monograph Staging Motherhood: British Women Playwrights, 1956 to the Present (Palgrave, 2006).
- Review (Review): Christina Wald. “Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama.” Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
- Abstract: Hysteria, Traum and Melancholia is a welcome contribution to the Theatre and Performance list at Palgrave, and a noteworthy work as far as the meticulous integration of psychoanalytic and gender theory and performance analysis is concerned. The study is an invaluable survey of how "disorders" such as hysteria, melancholia and trauma have been represented in Anglophone theatre from the mid-nineties onwards.
- Review (Review): Patricia Hill Collins. “From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism.” Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.
- Abstract: Hill Collins uses black nationalism as a background to the discussion of politics in the post-Civil Rights era and attempts to answer how black unity is to be conceived in the new millennium. Insightfully speaking, she is careful not to paint all ideological struggles concerning black solidarity as taking place within the black/white binary. Instead she begins and ends her analysis from within the black community, in turn illustrating that black solidarity can and does have variable meanings and that black solidarity has always been contextually and historically specific, located within diverse and sometimes overlapping discourses.