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EditorialMax Louwerse, President of IGELDear members,On the one hand 2008 seems to be so far away, at the same time July 2008 will have arrived before you realize it. As I mentioned in a separate email to you earlier this year, the XIth IGEL Conference will take place in Memphis TN July 8-11 2008. The conference will be preceded by the IGEL Summer Institute (July 5-8). We are in organizing mode, but I can already reveal that IGEL XI promises to become yet another exciting conference! The IGEL Conference will be immediately followed by the Annual Conference of the Society for Text and Discourse (ST&D Workshop July 11-12, ST&D Conference July 12-15). So while you are in Memphis, you may want to enjoy this conference too. The IGEL Conference (as well as the ST&D conference) will be held at the University of Memphis' FedEx Institute of Technology (FIT), a state-of-the-art facility that houses a large amphitheater boasting the second largest implementation of digital conference units outside the United Nations, a high definition presentation theater, and many meeting rooms. With Memphis being one of Northwest Airlines' major hubs, with the Mississippi River flowing next to the city and with major highways crossing the city, accessibility will not be a problem. As Memphis is the birthplace of Rock 'n Roll and Home of the Blues (BB King, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Al Green, Isaac Hayes, Aretha Franklin, Johnny Cash) you will not be deprived of music. And with the world-famous Memphis barbecue, food will not be an issue. Memphis is also the home of literary heritage (William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams). So there will also be enough food for thought. In sum, I cannot wait to welcome you in Memphis! Detailed information regarding the conference will follow in the Fall of 2007. The Holiday Inn at the University of Memphis, right across and walking distance from the FedEx Institute of Technology, has already allocated a large number of rooms for conference participants. In the meantime, I have been working with the Executive Committee (Jan Auracher, Marisa Bortolussi, Catherine Emmott, Melanie Green, Michael Kimmel, David Miall and Willie van Peer) on a variety of IGEL issues. One of them is a new IGEL email address and IGEL's own domain (www.IGELweb.org). The advantage of this website is that new websites can still be hosted under this name. In other words, this web address stays the same even if the house behind it changes. In addition, we are making progress with on-line payment options and member benefits. We will keep you posted! Sincerely, Max Louwerse P.S. Had I mentioned some exciting books that landed on my desk recently? Those interested in computational approaches to literature may want to take a look at Landauer, McNamara, Kintsch and Dennis' (eds.) Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis that recently came out; those interested in corpus linguistic approaches to Spanish texts may want to take a look at Parodi's (ed.) Working with Spanish corpora that will be coming out soon; and those interested in interdisciplinary and intercultural studies of literature at Zyngier, Chesnokova, Viana (eds.) Acting and connecting: Empirical approaches to language and literature can expect this volume being available soon.
Call for contributionsAs usual, your Newsletter editors would like to remind you of the value of the contributions you make, without which, of course, there would be no Newsletter! These are among the categories of material we welcome:
If you have contributions for one or more of these sections in the next Newsletter, make sure to send your contribution to us ON OR BEFORE October 1st 2007. In addition, ideas for innovations are always welcome. Please send your contributions and suggestions to one of us, as follows:
Copyright of graphics in the Newsletter remains with the copyright holders. Any copyright holders who require individual acknowledgment are invited to contact us. John Sinclair (1933 - 2007), ObituaryDr. Ute Römer Yesterday was a very sad day for the world of linguistics. John Sinclair (b. 14 June 1933) died at his home in Florence, aged 73. He will be deeply missed by his family, his colleagues and his many friends. His death is a terrible loss to everyone who knew him. John was an outstanding scholar, a first-generation modern corpus linguist and clearly one of the most open-minded and original thinkers in the field. He was Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Birmingham for most of his career and founder of the ground-breaking COBUILD project in lexical computing which revolutionised lexicography in the 1980s and resulted in a new generation of corpus-driven dictionaries and reference materials for English language learners. After his retirement from Birmingham John moved to Italy where he became President of the Tuscan Word Centre, an association devoted to promoting the scientific study of language. On the short intensive courses that the Tuscan Word Centre offered, John very generously shared his original ideas about language and linguistics with generations of younger scholars, introduced numerous students to the fascinating world of corpora and inspired many new ideas for future research in linguistics. He was an Honorary Life Member of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain and a member of the Academia Europaea. John held an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Gothenburg, and Honorary Professorships in the Universities of Jiao Tong in Shanghai and Glasgow. He is gone now and it will be very hard to get used to it. John's last email to me just a couple of days ago ended "Very brief note tonight; more to follow." I will miss him.
Some Epistemological Remarks regarding Psychonarratology -- An Invitation to a Critical Discussion
Edmund Nierlich
The definition of an object for scientific observation has become a blur with various kinds of empirical studies, but not in all of them this is due to facts. The unavoidably incomplete determination in microphysics is an 'ontological problem', as Peter Mittelstaedt already pointed out with regard to so-called 'virtual objects' such as quarks, strings, superstrings, which, all the same, aren't denied actual effects. (Mittelstaedt 2003, pp. 207-30, esp. p. 229. The words between inverted commas are my translations. E. N.) But this problem must not be equated with an 'epistemological' one in other empirical sciences, among them a psychology of cognition or an "empirical science of literature," as the expression is getting accepted usage also with Anglo-American scholars (Bortolussi & Dixon 2003, p. 21). It's not that an object cannot be identified here by means of empirical evidence, but that the knowledge of it may not be proved to have actual effects outside the individual minds. I think this equation of different problems isn't evaded by Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon in their book on Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response, when they state that
But studies in cognitive psychology and an empirical science of literature are, in principle, different from those in nuclear physics. Clearly there is a pragmatic determination of objects for empirical studies which, though it is transient and often not universally accepted and doesn't always refer to directly observable things or processes, all the same serves for joint orientation and can even support concrete decision-making in a specific practice. Every empirical study begins with such a kind of ad hoc definitions, though it strives for something more permanent, more universally accepted through repeated empirical proofs and in the end for nomological explanations of practical relevance beyond merely joint and temporary orientation and agreement. The "mental processing of literature" in the mind of the reader is but an initial, pragmatically determined object of empirical study, which, however, in contrast to virtual objects in microphysics can be indirectly observed.
And also fictional narrators in literary studies aren't to be considered principally "unobservable phenomena" such as objects in quantum mechanics, but they aren't phenomena at all: they are representations, which can be indirectly observed as phenomena in the minds of the readers. Here, I think, a general clarification is needed not so much for reasons of only a possibility of indirect observation, let's say, of readers' receptions of literary texts, but for reasons of avoiding categorical confusion between principally unobservable, indirectly observable and directly observable objects of empirical studies. As there is also no clear distinction between the latter, I'll select a central notion in the book by Bortolussi and Dixon, which is, on one hand, meant to denote a directly observable phenomenon, but on the other hand a mental image in the minds of the readers only indirectly observable: communication. Although the authors "argue that the communication model in general is inadequate to explain the complexities of literary processing" (p. 20), the term turns up throughout the book in various meanings:
This widespread view of a real and directly observable literary communication, however, had earlier been rejected by the authors with a rather doubtful argument:
As I see it, this formulation doesn't make sense in itself, because an imagined speaker of words cannot communicate with a real reader, but a real writer can. Written words are in no way less communicative than spoken ones. And, by the way, words spoken as a soliloquy of a character in a theatre play are all the same communicated to the spectators by the actor, even if they are not directly addressed to them. So a communicative intention must not be linguistically expressed, if it is guaranteed by the social role of the communicator.
On the other hand there is the mental image of communication within the mind of a real reader between an imagined narrator and his imagined audience as indirectly observable, which cannot be a real communicative occurrence between humans. It may be at best a representation. But, all the same, the authors state that: "The words of the narrator form the basis of the communication between the narrator and the narratee" (p. 68). And: "There must also be an explicit or implied audience for the narrator; this is the narratee" (p. 67). But there is no real communication here, and there cannot be any between two mental representations, or the communication itself is meant to be only a representation within the reader's mind. So far there is clarity at least, but the danger lies ahead, namely, that the two notions of "communication" get mixed up.
And so it happens when the authors express their conception in the following way:
I don't know why the narrator comes in here as a "conversational participant," because many characteristics of conversation, and even those by the authors themselves, simply do not apply. One outstanding example may suffice here: "Speakers should be brief and should avoid ambiguity and obscurity" (p. 20). How about the "unreliable narrators" (pp. 82-84)? But an even simpler counterargument is the mutuality of conversation which doesn't exist between the fictive narrator and the readers. Luckily the narrator is only a "representation," which, all the same, is "treated" by real readers as that of a "conversational participant." However, one should be careful. The category mistake is not only a slip of wording here, but of argumentation:
I think the obvious categorical confusion can be resolved quite easily, if we put aside the ambiguous term of communication for a while and look at the history of the narrator as originally an oral teller or Singer of Tales (Lord 1960). No problem arises, if we think of the original narrator or singer as in front of a real audience. But then there was no distinction for the audience between an author and a singer/narrator: "…the song produced in performance is his [the singer's, E. N.]. The audience knows it as his because he is before them" (Lord 1960, p. 4). The narrator and his audience here exist and the communication between them is a real one. And they have already developed a joint foreknowledge regarding the singer/narrator.
What changes at the moment when such a communicative situation is only imagined and this imaginative invention is described and published as was done by Boccaccio in his Decameron? A real author remains as now distinct from an imagined narrator. And the isolated readers - other than the audience community -- have to build up a joint foreknowledge of the real author, so that they can exchange evaluations and views regarding his message, which they need not so much for individual delectation -- even in the refined form of aesthetic experience -- as for socialization as a reading public. Meanwhile the narrator not only becomes a fictive character, but over the history of modern literature adopts different views of various characters in the story world, gets unreliable and even dissolves as one coherent personality.
The main thing about the real author here is not that the readers know him historically, which they often do not, but that they have developed a joint foreknowledge, which they take for granted among themselves and which may change and can be empirically ascertained. This essentially presupposes communication among the readers regarding the author and his or her message, which still remains a real author's message and is intended for a real reading public, not for an individual reader. At least Bortolussi and Dixon claim not to neglect the communicative intention of the real author towards a reading public:
But what does the author's message exclusively communicate to his or her intended reading public that a fictive narrator cannot be supposed to convey to an individual reader? It is an offer of a common atmosphere or quality of a fictional reality (in Germ. 'fiktionale Wirklichkeit') which imbues the readers as well as the narrator without his knowing it, even if he may not belong to the narrated story world. Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon are quite right here, when they don't require that "the narrator be thought of as belonging to the story world" (p. 192). It is this essential communicative transaction between the real author and a real reading public, which cannot be conveyed by a fictive narrator. But the author's offer must be jointly actualized at least by parts of the readers.
As early as 1930 Roman Ingarden coined the term 'schematized aspects' (in Germ. "schematisierte Ansichten": Ingarden 1960, pp. 270-293), which are 'laid in store' (in Germ. "paratgehalten": p. 282) in a work of art. They are not considered by Ingarden either to be qualities of objects of the story world, or psychological states of the narrator.[1] Qualities such as the absurd, the curious, the grotesque, the Kafkaesque, the sublime are only outstanding examples among others. And there can be offered a polyphony of various qualities by the author in his message, harmonious or even disharmonious, the actualization of which, however, has to be performed by communicating real readers (Cf. Ingarden 1960, pp. 318 f.).
A last look will be taken at an "empirical evidence" offered in one reported "experiment" regarding reader constructions for "focalization" (Bortolusssi & Dixon 2003, p. 194):
Four questions had to be answered by 20 psychology undergraduates after reading two passages of similarly constructed stories which were, however, meant to be different regarding a "persistent perceptual access" (p. 194). The evidence of the results will not be considered here, though it is not clear why suddenly the "writer" turns up in the third and fourth questions instead of the narrator. (pp. 195 ff.) It is only the logical consistency of the causal connection which will be examined.
There is the reader's construction of the narrator as a conversational participant, who is also endowed by him with perceptual knowledge "corresponding to perceptually salient descriptions" in the text. But the reader also has "consistent perceptual access" to a character. And as a consequence of this an association between the two is established by him, which will not only make them mutually share their perceptual knowledge, but also makes them take on properties of the one by the other and vice versa. And to top the obscurity of the argumentation the properties of the character are "physical attributes" such as age and gender, whereas those of the narrator are mental ones, namely "rationality and cooperativeness." But if it really were so, what practical use for real readers would result from this "empirical" knowledge?
To turn back to my fundamental criticism and transform it into a positive proposal: Psychonarratology should, besides refining categorical precision, include the author's cooperative communicative actions and also the mutual communicative exchange between real readers of a reading public into its theoretical framework. These are cooperative communicative activities which are supposed to happen outside the individual readers' minds, and so the knowledge of them within the minds may have practical relevance for real participants in the literary life of a society and between societies.
References:
Bortolussi, Marisa, & Dixon, Peter. Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Cambridge, 2003. Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art, transl. by George G. Grabowicz. Evanston, Ill., 1986 (1973). Ingarden, Roman. Das Literarische Kunstwerk (1930). Tübingen, 1960. Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass., 1960. Mittelstaedt, Peter. Der Objektbegriff bei Kant und in der gegenwärtigen Physik. In Heidemann & Engelhard (Eds.), Warum Kant heute? (pp. 207-230). Berlin, 2003.
Notes 1. Cf. Ingarden 1960, p. 310: "Diese Qualitäten sind keine gegenständlichen 'Eigenschaften' im gewöhnlichen Sinne, aber im allgemeinen auch keine 'Merkmale' dieser oder jener psychischen Zustände, sondern sie offenbaren sich gewöhnlich in komplexen und oft untereinander sehr verschiedenen Situationen, Ereignissen, als eine spezifische Atmosphäre, die über den in diesen Situationen sich befindenden Menschen und Dingen schwebt und doch alles durchdringt und mit ihrem Lichte verklärt." The English translation by Grabowicz wasn't available in due time. [back] 2. A more explicit exposition of the authors' idea about focalization is the following: "In sum, we suggest that there may be three important aspects of reader constructions related to focalization. First, readers generally construct a representation of the narrator like that constructed of a conversational participant and endow that representation with the perceptual knowledge corresponding to perceptually salient descriptions. Second, in the presence of consistent perceptual access to a character, readers may construct an association between the narrator and that character, so that the character is presumed by default to share the perceptual knowledge of the narrator, and vice versa. And third, a perceptual association between the narrator and a character may lead the reader to assume that other attributes of the narrator and the character overlap as well: The character may share the narrator's rationality and cooperativeness, and the narrator may share the character's age, gender, and other physical attributes" (p. 194). [back]
A Review of Greg Watson and Sonia Zyngier, Eds., Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners: Theory and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007Dr. Rajat Ghosh The volume, edited by Greg Watson and Sonia Zyngier, appears to show how stylistics can serve as a platform for interdisciplinary academic interaction. The contributions, most of which are based on radical experiments at the levels of theory and practice, generally tend to expand the scope of stylistics in different directions. The authors have shown that they are interested in new areas of investigation and the editors seem to have facilitated them, having examined their ultimate objective of doing stylistics in a novel way. To me it appears that the twenty-three contributors with different orientations demonstrated their loyalty towards the sovereignty of stylistics with a goal of expanding its territory. The diversity of sub-fields has not been a constraint. This book gives the potential reader a comprehensive view of the range and depth of stylistics as it is being done at present. To describe the structure of the book, I shall use the words 'parts' and 'sections'. The volume has five parts. Each part is divided into different sections. It reminds me of a well-structured five-act play with a clear sense of beginning, middle and end. The first part, called 'Theoretical perspectives' has two sections. The first one, written by Geoff Hall offers a critical perspective on stylistics in second language contexts. The crucial issue discussed here is whether stylistic approaches promote language learning. Presenting arguments both for and against this proposition, there is a proposal for a research program for pedagogical stylistics. Peter Stockwell writes the second section in this part and it is on teaching of literature 'as literature'. One of its principal arguments is that only the scholars of stylistics can teach literature ontologically 'as literature' and not as any other disciplines such as sociology or archeology. A literary text is not an archeological or sociological document; it is a record of achieving certain aesthetic goals. Stylistics offers tools to understand and appreciate the means towards achieving those goals. The second part of the book, called 'New Approaches' has four sections. The first section is by Joanne Gavins and Jane Hodson. It is on practical aspects of advanced pedagogical stylistics. The second section is by John McRay. It deals with stylistic explorations of narrative point of view and its relation to memory, resonance and immediacy. The argument is based on contrastive reading experience of texts by Dickens, Saro-Wiwa, and Roy, authors with different historical and geographical backgrounds. The third section, written by Rocio Montoro, offers a methodological frame for analyzing literature through films. His frame includes aspects of literary adaptation, technicalities of filmmaking, semiotic and semantic analysis, and metafictional analysis. The fourth section in this part is by Urszula Clark who reports the results of her pedagogic experiments where she has applied discourse stylistics in analyzing two detective novels. The third part of the book has been devoted to Corpus Stylistics, presumably the youngest sub-discipline and one of the most active ones. Here the first section is by Donald E. Hardy, who attempts to establish corpus stylistics as a discovery procedure. He demonstrates how the computational tools of corpus linguistics, namely frequency counts, key word indexing, collocations and contextualized searches can lead the students to 'discover' linguistic information enhancing their understanding of narratives. The second section is by Bill Louw. He examines the notion of collocation in the corpus studies context and attempts to discover literary worlds as reflected by collocations. The third section is written by Mick Short, Beatrix Busse and Patricia Plummer. The authors have investigated how students react to a web-based stylistics course in different national and educational settings. Inclusion of computers in pedagogy is not new but the attempt to assess its effectiveness in clear and objective terms is what makes it relevant for the teachers and researchers of stylistics. The fourth part of the volume is called 'Stylistics, grammar and discourse' and it has three contributions. It starts with a section by David L. Gugin who writes on teaching Flannery O'Connor in the Persian Gulf. He discusses the aspects of discovering the syntactic structure in the linguistic and cultural schema in pedagogic contexts. The second section by Paul Simpson is on the nature of non-standard grammar in the teaching of language and style. The third section is by Judit Zerkowitz who shows that Grice's logical principles of conversation (maxims) can be applied meaningfully in pedagogical stylistics handled by language learners. The fifth and last part is called 'Awareness and cognition' and it has three sections. The first one is by David Ian Hanauer. It is an empirical investigation of Attention-directed Literary Education which evaluates the model of literary education with the help of data from an empirical test. The second section by Willie van Peer and Aikaterini Nousi is on what reading does to readers. This section is developed on the basis of a case study of how stereotyped notions are responded to through reading in multi-ethnic socio-demographic contexts. The third section in the fifth part of the volume is by Sonia Zyngier, Olivia Fialho, and Patricia Andrea do Prado Rios. It is devoted to the concept of literary awareness examined in relation to the notion of language awareness. Literary awareness, as presented by the authors, is a process that involves the student. It is developed through exposure or direct contact with a text, cross-linking of its parts, building-up references, and repertoire-based responses to the text. Levels of awareness here are treated as measurable data that can be statistically presented to see some definite objective results. Given this range of topics reported here, it will be relevant now to be reminded of Professor Mick Short's plenary presentation at the 26th International Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association held in Joensuu, Finland on 25-30th July 2006, where he insisted that the scholars of stylistics should not be influenced by 'all the agendas and rapidly-changing fashions of nearby areas', but 'should be more circumspect about the new lines'. He also suggested that scholars should treat the new areas of analysis with an equal degree of examination that has customarily been a part of stylistic analysis. This can serve as a reliable guideline to respond to the current volume. While reading this book, one can identify some novel areas that stylistics scholars are moving into, for example, corpus studies. Virtual corpora had existed in the manual handling of literary texts in classrooms. Fundamentally what is new here is the use of a mindless machine in the process of literary interpretation which we all knew to be a creative process and uniquely human. This is no small achievement. Almost the same degree of novelty lies in the studies that attempt to measure literary response and awareness in statistical terms. We need not feel insecure that interpretation is becoming mechanical. The truth is, it is becoming more sophisticated. The editors should be thanked to have selected these works. They have recognized the need to orient the new reader about the new avenues. Stylistics is associated with two other powerful fields, namely linguistics and literature, both of which have moved at an intimidatingly fast speed taking risky turns during the last fifty years. And the editors have included another field in their scheme, language learning, which has also been chasing the other two in terms of pace of investigation and in terms of fixing the empirical destination, sometimes following the same route, sometimes diverting from it. I am implicitly using a 'vehicle' metaphor here to suggest that the editors seem to be in the third vehicle of stylistics trying to follow the other two. If I was in their place with the same task in hand, I would probably be confused. But having read this volume, I realize that they aren't. Hence understanding of the critical perspective of stylistics in the second language context is mandatory. The same holds for the relation between literary awareness and linguistic awareness. What impresses me the most is the emphasis on the role of metalanguage in language learning which is evident everywhere, in the volume's title and throughout all the sections. Commemorating forty years of the notion of communicative competence this year, it is time to recognize that there are other important factors that contribute to the development of communicative competence than just the exposure to authentic language. And one such significant factor is the formal exercise in metalanguage, in this context the apprenticeship of the language learner in stylistic analysis. Thus, a curriculum planner of a literature-based language program may now include it as one of his objectives: 'to develop stylistic competence in the learner'. When learner's reactions are studied in relation to curriculum evaluation, it seems that their socio-academic right to respond freely to institutionally positioned texts and methods have been given recognition and accommodated in practice. This, to me is an attempt to enhance the relationship between the student and the teacher, both of whom needed to be freed from their stereotypical roles when it comes to stylistic analysis in the classroom. I read the book as a restless student whose mind wants to be elsewhere. Had the book been inconsistent and non-cohesive, I would not have been able to finish reading it. It could sustain my interest. I noticed later that a careful handling of resources on the part of the editors has minimized the academic stylistic variations of the contributions. This is what makes it a good textbook. As all adults know, there are two types of textbooks: bad and good. A bad textbook demotivates the learner whereas a good textbook enlightens him. A good textbook often enlightens the teacher handling it. This book has the power that it can enlighten a teacher just as it enriches a student of stylistics. (Whether the teacher would keep his indebtedness private is not our concern at present.) The editors succeed in giving it the unitary effect of a textbook by handling the wide range of resources at their disposal. Their materials are more abstract than just the methodological tools and analytical objects (say, texts). Hence the task was difficult. In an age when interdisciplinary investigation is the passion and paced communication is the fashion for the majority of academics it is not difficult to get many authors committed to write for one volume. Planning of this volume must have been a tremendous task as the sequential pattern had to be designed purely thematically. I need to mention this because we all have seen at least one volume in our life where authors are given slots following extra-academic norms violating the thematic commitments of the volume. That is definitely not the case here. Let us congratulate the editors for this. Finally, some stray thoughts -- and that's what reading did to me. The book, especially the last part, opens the gateway to cognitive inquiries to a reader (like me) who has not been following the current interfaces in this fast-growing field. I can now imagine a multi-disciplinary research context where a scholar would be investigating the role of stylistic analysis as a pedagogic input in cognitive development of the second language learner and would derive some statistically sensitive data to be interpreted against socio-demographic variables. Honestly, I am not aware if some scholars are not already doing this somewhere.
REDES-BRA: Past, Present And FutureVander Viana Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro / Junior researcher -- REDES-BRA
1) History The foundation of REDES draws back to 2002, in Brazil, when Frank Hakemulder (University of Utrecht, The Netherlands), Sonia Zyngier (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Willie van Peer (Ludwig-Maximillian Universiteit, Germany) joined efforts to create the research group. Later Anna Chesnokova (Linguistic University of Kiev, Ukraine) and David Miall (University of Alberta, Canada) became members of the group and have been helping disseminate its ideals. REDES stands for "Research and Development in Empirical Studies." The main interest of this group is to develop research in the field of literature and culture from an intercultural perspective. The international interaction takes place in a digital forum (http://www.redes.lmu.de/portal/index.php), which can be accessed freely through the Internet. It is by means of such platform that researchers exchange ideas on their projects and find collaborative partners. In 2006, it was decided that REDES needed a constitution to regulate its affairs by clearly establishing its orientations and each participant's rights and duties. The objectives of the group have been listed in this document as follows:
It can be noticed that being a REDES member entails more than just doing research. In fact, it involves the creation of a real network in which both junior and senior researchers work jointly. At present, this international research group currently consists of four national centers located in Brazil (REDES-BRA), Canada (REDES-CA), Germany (REDES-MU) and Ukraine (REDES-UA). Other national groups have shown interest of joining. Therefore, it is likely that the group will expand its academic activities in the near future. Having briefly introduced the group as a whole, it is important to point out that this article focuses on the Brazilian group.
2) REDES in Brazil The Brazilian branch of REDES (http://www.letras.ufrj.br/redes/index.htm) evolved from the DICEL ("Discurso e Ciência Empírica da Literatura" or "Discourse and Empirical Science of Literature" in English) research group. On September 10th, 2002, with the foundation of REDES, the former merged into the latter, as described above. REDES is characterized by a continuous renewal of its members. There are only three members who still belong to the first formation of the previous DICEL group. At present, the REDES-BRA group consists of 20 members (cf. Appendix 1) from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (totaling 16 members), the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (totaling 3 members) and the University of Alberta (totaling 1 member). Concerning members' titles, there is one PhD, two PhD students, three graduates, ten graduate students, and four undergraduate students. It is important to point out that there are no differences between members based on their titles. All members are required to work hard and dedicate themselves both to the group and to their research. Most of the time outside observers are not able to spot who holds which title in the group. This is actually positive since the idea within REDES-BRA is to develop high-quality research despite the level of instruction or academic accomplishment. Being a member of REDES-BRA means much more than attending study sessions. In fact, members are required to have supervision with the coordinator and to attend monthly meetings in which both administrative and academic matters are discussed. It should be stressed here that being a REDES-BRA participant means holding a different philosophy towards researching and studying. As it is not enough to attend sessions, members are required to have active participation in the group and to foster its development. Work is done on a voluntary basis most of the time and no academic credits are given to members because of their joining the group. In other words, members do not join it because they have to take a certain number of credits at the university where they study. It must be clear that in the Brazilian setting taking part in this research group means having extra work, which is not connected to university credits or grades. Students join the group because they see in REDES-BRA an opportunity to develop as researchers and to become better professionals in the future. At the same time as it is necessary to keep old members' involvement and interest, the group needs renovation of members who will in the end be responsible for the future of the group. This is why the research group is always open and welcomes interested and committed students and/or scholars.
3) ECELs: the REDES-BRA conferences The conferences organized by the Brazilian branch of REDES are called either by its full name (Encontro de Ciência Empírica da Literatura, which means "Meeting of Empirical Science of Literature" in English) or by its four-letter acronym (ECEL). These conferences take place at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro once a year. The first edition of ECEL was organized in 2000 even before the beginning of REDES. This conference was innovative since it was the first in Brazil to deal with the field of Empirical Science of Literature (henceforth ESL). The ECEL conferences, which have been jointly organized by REDES-BRA members, provide participants the opportunity to present their papers and to have them criticized before they are submitted for publication. It is impossible to think of an ECEL conference without constructive criticism. Altogether 105 papers have been presented at the previous six editions of ECEL (cf. Appendix 2), which gives an average of 17 papers per conference. The greatest number of papers was 20, presented at the sixth edition of ECEL in 2005; however, the greatest number of presenters was 25 at the fourth conference. It is also a tradition at the ECEL conferences to have national and/or international guest speakers. The REDES-BRA research group has already invited more than 15 guest speakers over the years. The list of guests include Achim Barsch (University of Siegen), Alamir Aquino Corrêa (State University of Londrina), Heidrun Krieger Olinto (Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro), Frank Hakemulder (University of Utrecht), Michael Wiseman (Bavarian Academy of Science), Solange Vereza (Fluminense Federal University), Tania Shepherd (State University of Rio de Janeiro), Tony Berber Sardinha (Catholic University of São Paulo), and Willie van Peer (University of Munich). In relation to the topics discussed, the ECEL conferences have covered much ground. Most papers have dealt with the field of ESL from both a theoretical point of view and a practical perspective. As a result, there are certain keywords which have appeared in a large number of presentation titles such as 'literary' (23 instances), 'literature' (23 instances), 'empirical' (16 instances) and 'reading' (16 instances). Additionally, many presentations have covered the area of Literary Awareness (Zyngier, 1994). There have also been presentations on computational linguistics, English as a foreign language, hypertext, metaphors, multimodality, new technologies, soap operas and subtitling versus dubbing to cite a few. The final outcome of each ECEL meeting is the editing of a book containing a selection of papers. These books are discussed in more detail in the following section.
4) Bibliographical production The REDES-BRA research group has edited at least one book per year following an edition of ECEL. Since 2000, five books have been carefully put together by REDES-BRA members, the covers of which can be seen in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Book covers English version of titles Papers from both REDES-BRA participants and guests have been collected in five volumes (http://www.letras.ufrj.br/redes/books.htm): Conhecimento & Imaginação: Coletânea dos Trabalhos do I ECEL (Zyngier, Pinheiro & Figueiredo, 2001), Fatos & Ficções: Estudos Empíricos de Literatura (Zyngier & Valente, 2002), Pontes & Transgressões: Estudos Empíricos de Literatura (Zyngier, Mendes & Pinheiro, 2003), Venturas & Desventuras: Coletânea dos trabalhos do V ECEL (Zyngier, Viana & Fausto, 2005), and Linguagens e Tecnologias: Estudos Empíricos (Zyngier, Viana & Spallanzani, 2006). These five books total 74 different articles mainly in Portuguese, but some also in English. The first three books edited in 2001, 2002 and 2003 show a tendency to follow the principles of ESL. There are theoretical research articles on ESL (cf. Olinto, 2001; Barsch, 2002; van Peer, 2002; Wiseman, 2002; and others) and applied research in the same area of expertise (cf. Menezes, 2001, Valente, 2001; Barbosa, 2002; Barboza, 2002; Fialho & Zyngier, 2003; and others). The fourth volume (Zyngier, Viana & Fausto, 2005) also deals with studies in ESL (cf. Barreto & Fialho, 2005; Corrêa, 2005; Oliveira, 2005; among others). However, it contains other investigations on, for instance, contrastive studies in Portuguese as L1 and English as L2 (cf. Viana, 2005). The latest book (Zyngier, Viana & Spallanzani, 2006) shifts more clearly towards Applied Linguistics. There are investigations on academic writing in English as a foreign language (cf. Viana, 2006), computational linguistics (cf. Berber Sardinha, 2006), jokes (Jandre, 2006), metaphors (cf. Vereza, 2006), multimodality (cf. Fausto, 2006), and new technologies (cf. Mendes & Almeida, 2006). It does not mean that there are not any articles on ESL (cf. Olinto, 2006; Silva, 2006, for instance). The importance of such a book can be summarized in Chesnokova's (2006) words: "this edition is extremely valuable for both students and mature scholars who work in the sphere of empirical research and beyond." Whether they follow the principles of ESL or whether they follow an Applied Linguistics approach, the seventy-four articles in the five volumes share a common ground, that is, they are grounded on an empirical basis. The studies reported in these five books have given voices to research subjects, investigated language in use and/or examined how readers react to literary works of art.
5) Final remarks This report has aimed at describing the production of the Brazilian branch of REDES. The other branches are also active and reports on them should follow soon. It should be stressed here that among the objectives of REDES is to "stimulate students to actively carry out research independently from an early stage in their studies onwards, with the possible prospect of becoming researchers within and beyond academia." This is probably the main goal of REDES, that is, empowering students, making them develop their critical skills and helping them become scientific researchers with this spirit of knowledge sharing. The production of REDES-BRA is standing evidence. There could not be a better way to end this report than to quote van Peer's (2006) words: "Why don't all university teachers provide young students with such opportunities? It would change the face of university education."
6) References BARBOSA, C. V. F. (2002). The Use of ESL Questionnaires on Lusophony:
Differences Between Brazilian and Portuguese Undergraduate Students.
In: ZYNGIER, S. & VALENTE, A. C. (Eds.). Fatos & Ficções: Estudos
Empíricos de Literatura. Rio de Janeiro: Setor de Publicações da
Faculdade de Letras da UFRJ, 156-162. Appendix 1. Current REDES-BRA Members
Appendix 2. List of papers delivered at the six editions of ECEL (see
attached table).
REDES in UkraineMariya Sergeyeva and Anna Rumbesht
The seeds of REDES were sown onto the fertile scientific soil of Ukraine in the course of cooperation between Willie van Peer and Anna Chesnokova. The three weeks visit of Professor van Peer to Ukraine with a course of lectures on empirical research methods for cultural studies in spring 2003 gave a powerful incentive to foundation of REDES-UA. The actual cooperation between the Ukrainian REDES members and the colleagues from other countries started shortly after the visit with Mr. van Peer's letter of invitation to the seminar on Intercultural Reading (Munich, Germany). The preparation for the international seminar was a truly unique experience for the Ukrainian students due to the fact that empirical approach was quite "alien" to the Ukrainian school where cognitive research methods dominate. An integral part of papers' preparation were the incessant discussions on the Internet between the students and professors from 5 countries. The Ukrainian group had been constantly receiving positive feedback and apt comment that gave us confidence in this initially unfamiliar area. Within the 4 years' existence of REDES-UA, the young Ukrainian researchers have participated in a great number of international conferences and seminars (REDES seminar, Munich, Germany (2003); PALA conference, New York, USA (2004); World Youth Congress, Barcelona, Spain (2004); REDES conference, Kyiv, Ukraine (2004); REDES seminar, Hintersee, Germany (2005); REDES conference, Kyiv, Ukraine (2005); PALA conference, Huddersfield, Great Britain (2005), REDES conference, Kyiv, Ukraine (2006); PALA conference, Joensuu, Finland (2006); IGEL summer school, Munich, Germany (2006); IGEL congress, Fraueninsel, Germany (2006) etc.), and presented a vast range of research, including Anna Chesnokova and Milena Mendes's "Reading Dickinson: Identification and Cultural Stereotypes"; Anna Chesnokova and Anna Rumbesht's "Seclusion Imagery in J.Fowles's and A.Nothomb's Fiction"; Marina Chernenko and Anna Rumbesht's "CONTAINER in J. Fowles's The Ebony Tower, The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant's Woman"; Mariya Sergeyeva and Kseniya Shabanova's "Language and Politics: Do You Trust Your Language as Much as You Trust Yourself?"; Eugenia Fedorova's "Why Reading Drama?"; Elina Vereschaga's "Victims of Human Trafficking: Empirical Analysis of Media Discourse", etc. It should be highlighted that the key position among our projects is taken by the cross-cultural research within REDES, such as:
The key annual event for the Ukrainian group is the already traditional international conference "Cultural Research: Challenges for the 3rd Millennium" (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007), the agenda of which includes lectures and workshops by senior researchers of all member countries (e.g., Prof. van Peer's SPSS seminar and "Why do I need empirical studies when I study to be a translator?" lecture; Prof. Zynger's "Literary Awareness: Looking back into the Future" lecture, Prof. Miall's "Episode Division" and "Ambiguity" workshops, etc.), research presentations by junior researchers, cultural workshops, tours around the city, and even classes in Russian and Ukrainian. Despite the periodical renewal of the group due to the vivid interest in the REDES activities the core of the group remains stable and is formed mainly by the graduate students who joined the group in the very beginning (Marina Chernenko, Lyudmila Ivanyuk, Mariya Sergeyeva, Anna Rumbesht, Natalia Yemets, Viktoria Korolchuk, Zhanna Kovalchuk, Eugenia Fedorova, Ksenia Shabanova, Vanya Skripka, Elina Paliychuk). They attend the regular weekend meetings chaired by Anna Chesnokova in one of the Kiev literary cafes. The well-structured agenda of every meeting permits to carry out the ongoing projects effectively by assigning individual tasks to each member, the results of which are presented at the next meetings. The Ukrainian group now is involved in a number of new projects as well. The Literary Awareness research has given birth to a series of smaller sub-projects (looking at the reader's reaction to neologisms or lexical repetition in the text, etc.), which have been taken as course papers by students. Another study has been inspired by the newly published A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by M. Lewycka, which provoked quite contrary interpretations by Ukrainian and Western readers. A round table on the novel is planned during the 2007 Kyiv conference. At present, apart from regular activities, our group concentrates on the official registration of a Youth Centre of Empirical Studies Development in the Ukrainian legal system in order to give an opportunity to Ukrainian students to learn the methodology of empirical research and present their investigations at the international level. Pictures (click image to enlarge)
With Prufrock in Alberta
Aprilia Zank
"Let us go then you and I"* I said to myself, echoing Eliot's Prufrock (who had been my concern lately), and decided to disturb my domestic universe -- in spite of loud protests from my family -- in order to undertake the journey to Canada. Why such a long journey and why to Canada? A proverb I had read of late saying that "It is never too late to do the things one thought one might have done" was the final argument in this personal dilemma -- I experience great affinity with Prufrock! -- of still being able (or not!) to motivate myself to ask questions, to try and find out things about the spirit of knowledge at almost the other end of the world, and . . . about myself. Canada was not a random target. My Ph.D. supervisor, Prof. van Peer, was having a research term there, and in addition, during the Summer Institute in Munich in 2006 I had had the luck and the pleasure of making the acquaintance of some fascinating personalities from the Faculty of Arts and Department of Psychology of the University of Alberta in Edmonton. And so, after a thousand indecisions and revisions, I found myself on the plane flying to Amsterdam to change to a plane flying to Minneapolis to further change to a plane flying to Edmonton. (The Chorus: "Oh dear, all alone!") I did not have much time to indulge in dejection about my solitude during the journey, as I had some very important tasks to carry out, stuff which I had failed to finish before the trip. So I had no alternative than to turn the 20-hour-flight to Edmonton into research work on the topic of time, work which consisted in addressing people on the plane and at the various airports to please have a look at the questionnaires I was handing them and request them to draw the direction of the time flow after having read quotes by Augustinus and Jorge Luis Borges. A somehow unusual demand, indeed, but also an excellent opportunity to observe people's reactions ranging from utter distrust to exuberant enthusiasm. Nevertheless, I managed to obtain quite a number of answers and became more and more confident that my hypothesis may prove well-founded. During the last stop-over I was in great danger of missing my connection to Edmonton, due to the utterly trivial fact of simply falling asleep on a lounge seat, hand-luggage and questionnaires in my hand. Yet somehow instinctively I woke up the very moment the embarking was drawing to an end and I managed to join the other passengers. One o'clock at night, arrival at Edmonton Airport after a rather turbulent flight, and a deep sigh of relief at seeing Willie van Peer and Paul Sopcak being there to pick me up. Hello Canada, hello Edmonton, here I am to explore new dimensions of time and of myself.
(Switch to present tense - for more dynamism!) After a short night's rest -- my room mate at the hostel turns out to be a somehow alarming company -- I set off for university, a little sceptical about the good of it, since it is Sunday. To my knowledge universities in Germany are closed on Sundays. A huge surprise awaits me: not only is the university open, but the whole atmosphere is very enjoyable: plenty of students everywhere reading, talking, working on computers. And the HUB Mall with all the cute cafes and inviting two-table- restaurants, the generous light and the tropical plants which make you forget the -10°C and the snow outside. I am delighted! I revel in being among these young people from all over the world eager to enlarge their horizon, to surpass the borders of their countries and mentalities.
I myself decide to see and learn as much as possible and am very happy that due to Prof. van Peer's commitment I am allowed to attend a few lectures and seminars. First I have the opportunity to listen to Prof. Miall's exquisite British English, excellently lecturing on Swift, and I am glad to discover that in spite of all technical devices (notebooks, power point and so on) Swift has remained the same at his very core. David Miall's second lecture skilfully brings together the old and the new by motivating the students with parallels between Jane Austen's Gothic novel and our present days' understanding of the term of Gothic. The next step into knowledge takes me to Prof. Kuiken's seminar about a most exciting topic, the poetic quality of dream metaphors. During the Summer Institute in Munich I had already had a glimpse into Don Kuiken's research work on this realm, so I can hardly wait to learn more about it. But the way to it is wearier than I thought. I had been informed that I had to look for the seminar room in the Department of Psychology, in a quite distant building, so I set off early in order to be there at six o'clock p.m. I walk from department to department -- outside it is dark, of course -- from edifice to edifice, the University of Alberta consisting of a rather heterogeneous bulk of constructions, and manage at last to find the building, but to my astonishment I only see long corridors, very much like tedious arguments with insidious intent and not a human being to ask about the room. On the walls huge portraits of famous psychologists and psychiatrists smile at me, but the more I walk, the more I have the feeling that they actually grin at my being so utterly disoriented. Still no human being to be seen. I start losing any hope of ever finding the seminar room and even begin to think that through some miraculous process of day dreaming the building has turned into a metaphoric labyrinth from which I have no escape. Tired and distressed I enter a room at random and … salvation, I see a human being, a female student reading a book in a sort of library. I can't help asking her whether she is not afraid of being there alone. No, she isn't, not really, she answers after some hesitation, although she did hear a story about a student having been stabbed to death in one of the libraries. No comment from my part. Anyhow, she knows where Don Kuiken's seminar takes place and following her instructions I can get there in time. The room is full of students and I am very grateful to be among humans again and to be given a warm welcome by Prof. Kuiken. I can relax and enjoy the pleasant, hearty manner in which he lectures on most interesting things about the relationship between dreams and metaphors. I am very happy, the more so as Don Kuiken manages to find a nice young lady willing to give me a ride home. One more token of people's readiness to help, which I have encountered ever since in Edmonton. It is nine o'clock in the evening and I don't exactly feel like starting to search for my way again.
The next days I am busy making last adjustments on my presentation on time and having still more questionnaires answered by students. Most of them are willing to do it, a few are reserved. I myself ponder about the time when I will have to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet at Don Kuiken's lab, where I'm going to deliver my paper. I don't quite feel at my ease, but I am lucky to have my supervisor at my side, encouraging and advising me. The day of the event arrives, I find the room easily and without much roaming about, and the faces I meet there don't look as if they were going to pin me on a wall. I present my hypothesis, the results of my research work and of my questionnaires, a lively discussion follows and I feel confident that my paper was satisfactory. (Later that evening, thinking over some questions -- the ones I had feared, since I knew they would point to some items that still needed refinement -- I was all of a sudden seized with the deepest scepticism about the presentation and hurried to ask my supervisor's opinion.) His answer is utterly reassuring, so going back to my hostel room I decide to reward myself with a small bottle of wine which I try to buy in a supermarket, completely ignorant of the fact that in Canada you can only buy alcoholic drinks in special shops. I content myself with a can of non-alcoholic beer, which for a person coming from the country of the Oktoberfest is almost a sort of betrayal, but it is OK with me, I quench my thirst and enjoy a well-deserved night's sleep. My stay in Edmonton is drawing to an end, but there is still one most exciting point on the schedule. My supervisor and Mimi, his wife, had been so nice to invite me to a trip at the national park, about 60 km away from Edmonton, where we are supposed to see plenty of wild animals living freely, such as wolves, bison , moose, elk and others. It is a cold, windy and gloomy day, but our enthusiasm is glowing even though our clothes are not exactly of the polar type. From the very beginning our zeal is rewarded by the presence of a wolf, a coyote and a couple of stately bison, but we are keen on seeing the elk, so we get out of the car and start a weary walk through the wind and snow, following some path which can hardly be seen. We are the only mortals in this wilderness, except for a few unseen birds, which we can hear calling weirdly . The whole atmosphere has a strange, unique beauty of which I am almost painfully aware, the more so as my feet are so frozen, that I can hardly feel them any longer. After a couple of hours' walk in silence, with daylight getting thinner and thinner and the darkness taking unchallenged possession of the surroundings, I make a timid attempt to approach the subject of turning back to the car -- the rising moon is scarcely any good in helping us to find the narrow path in the snow, but my supervisor retorts assuringly "We have a pocket torch with us.:" To that I have no reply and even now still think that had it not been for an invitation which was due that evening, we would still be wandering around in search of the elk. In the evening back to civilisation again, in an exquisite frame, too: I have the honour and the pleasure of being invited, together with Willie and Mimi to Uri and Tamar Margolin's place. The highly intellectual atmosphere and the setting in very good taste make one feel confident in the benign influence of aesthetics on life. At a certain point in the discussion I am slightly taken aback by Prof. Margolin's astonishment at my being familiar with Ramayana and Mahabharata. I answer his question as to where I learned about it in a proud voice: "In Romania, during my secondary school education."
The day of the departure. I am glad and sad at the same time: the stay here has been too short, but there is always the hope that one may come back some time. It was a far-reaching experience, an opportunity to meet wonderful people among whom I would especially like to thank Willie and his wife Mimi, and of course Paul and his wife Nico for their unbelievable willingness to help me time and again, Olivia and her friends for the invitation to their place, and everybody else I met in Edmonton. My journey was very satisfactory. I know I'll have to join Prufrock again, but I am aware I have taken one more step towards the ability of facing any overwhelming question about him or about anything else.
Munich, February, 2007 * The lines in italics are more or less free quotes from the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot.
Journal
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d'Hirondelle
by Amélie Nothomb
The
novel is divided into two parts. In the first one, we are allowed into
the workings of the mind of a cold, almost surgeon-like serial killer,
in the best tradition of the character in Clockwork Orange, a
person who has stopped up all his senses after having had a frustrating
love affair. In a biting, sharp and detailed description, he revels
in labelling himself "un assassin du troisième millénnaire" ["a murderer
of the 3rd millennium"] (p. 50) and discloses how he carries out his
everyday routine "job": being hired to kill in cold blood, no matter
who his "client" may be. We learn how he plans each murder meticulously,
matter-of-factishly and fast as he goes about doing his work as one
of the best shooters around. He is quite ironic in the way he sees himself:
"Je me rassurai en m´apercevant que je n´avais aucune des caractéristiques
du serial killer. Je ne préparais pas longuement mes meurtes
avec mille détails maniaques, je tuais n´importe qui pour obéir à une
exigence hygiènique: jávais besoin de mon assassinat quotidien comme
d´autres de leur tablette de chocolat noir" (p. 46) ["I would find comfort
in realizing I did not have any of the characteristics of a serial killer"].
After each killing, he helps himself to some meat in a kind of anthropophagical
banquet. Suddenly, a turn of the screw.