Journal of English Studies

Echoes from "Fight Club"

2022-10-17T20:17:43+02:00

This work addresses Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Adjustment Day as a satirical critique of the political radicalization of the USA and as a warning about the dangerous ideological effects narratives may have on our posthumanist understanding of reality. To reach his purposes, the novelist combines three stylistic strategies. First, he creates a satirical story that exposes the condition of American politics, the dangers of radicalized political correctness, and the present risks of populist revolutions. Secondly, he uses explicit metafictional references to Fight Club and to other literary works and critical theories to warn about the dangerous effects that the power of narrative can have. Finally, Palahniuk departs from the minimalist style he used in his earlier and most well-known fiction in favor of a heterodiegetic and omniscience narrative voice that, combined with multiple internal focalizations, endorses a plural, non-categorical understanding of reality.

Reassessing Constructions in the ARTEMIS Parser

2022-10-10T11:07:05+02:00

The aim of this study is to reexamine the status of constructions in ARTEMIS (Automatically Representing TExt Meaning via an Interlingua-based System), a Natural Language Understanding prototype that seeks to provide the syntactic and semantic structure of a given fragment in a natural language. The architecture of ARTEMIS has been designed to conform to the tenets of the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM), a theory in which constructions are a central tool for the linguistic description of languages. However, since ARTEMIS is a computational device, there are many formalization requirements which involve the adaptation of the LCM, a process which necessarily leads to reconsidering several issues, as are: (i) what counts as a constructional structure; (ii) how constructions contribute to parsing operations in ARTEMIS; and (iii) the location and the format of constructional patterns.

The Semantic Map of "Aktionart" and Lexical Entailment of Old English Strong Verbs

2022-05-16T09:42:41+02:00

The aim of this article is to analyse the semantic relations that hold between Old English primitive and derived verbs in terms of troponymy and Aktionsart. The results of this analysis are presented in a semantic map, while emphasis is made on the points of contact between these phenomena. The main conclusion is that semantic maps represent a more flexible and applicable methodology than previous work suggests since they have been used to deal with one language, to explain historical languages and to refer to specific lexical items. Likewise, this analysis shows evidence of an inherent relationship between both phenomena: troponymy and Aktionsart.

Emotional Intelligence Survey in the English as a Foreign Language Classroom

2021-11-09T17:27:51+01:00

Current society demands people with different attitudes and competences who are able to thrive in the global world. Since its appearance in the 1990s, the relevance of the concept of Emotional Intelligence has only grown within the education system, as it is seen by recent research as an essential competence that needs to be developed to achieve the holistic training of students. This study was conducted in a high school of Spain with the participation of the English department and 49 English learners who answered some questionnaires to examine how teachers and students from a EFL classroom context perceive issues related with Emotional Intelligence such as the perception and expression of emotion, emotional facilitation of thinking, understanding of emotion and regulation of emotion. Besides, it spotlights their potential interest in working with some projects proposed following the Project Based Learning (PBL) approach. Results showed a growing awareness of own and other’s emotions among the participants and their interest in developing the projects to work on Emotional Intelligence in the EFL classroom.

Going Down in Herstory

2022-05-16T09:42:41+02:00

Throughout her writing career, Michèle Roberts has been one of the contemporary women writers who has re-constructed and retold the lives of previously forgotten, silenced or marginalised women. In an attempt to re-inscribe their voice, Roberts has re-written history from the female perspective by going back to the lives of female saints, Biblical figures and other female writers. In her last collection of short stories, Mud: Stories of Sex and Love, all the protagonists are women taken from historical or literary texts, to whom she has given voice, providing the reader with new visions of reality. This paper focuses on “On the Beach at Trouville”, and analyses the strategies Roberts has used both to present the lives of Thérèse of Lisieux and Camille Monet from their own perspectives and to subvert the patriarchal construction of history.

Exploring Anxiety and Self-Efficacy in Writing

2022-09-27T10:19:32+02:00

This paper investigates the level and type of writing anxiety among Turkish EFL students along with the causes of the anxiety perceived by them and their instructors. The EFL writing self-efficacy level of the students was examined, and with the findings obtained, the relationship between writing anxiety and writing self-efficacy in EFL classes was investigated. To meet these objectives, 176 (A2, intermediate level) Turkish EFL students and 6 instructors enrolled in a language preparatory program offered by a state university in Istanbul, Turkey participated in the study. The data were gathered both quantitative and qualitatively through the Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI), Self-efficacy in Writing Scale (SWS), Causes of Writing Anxiety Inventory (CWAI), and semi-structured interviews. The results revealed that the students had either a high or moderate level of writing anxiety in English, and they mostly suffered from cognitive anxiety. Their level of writing self-efficacy was also moderate, and there was a negative correlation between self-efficacy and writing anxiety among the participants. The results of this study suggest implications about coping with anxiety and self-efficacy in writing classes at language preparatory programs.

Mark McClelland’s "Upload" (2012)

2022-10-19T20:32:12+02:00

In recent years and, in light of the latest developments in the field of neurotechnology, some critics have claimed that mind uploading could become technically feasible in a not-too-distant future. While transhumanist critics embrace this procedure and dream of a postbiological future in which human beings possess greater cognitive, emotional, and sensorial abilities, the critical posthumanists warn of the risks inherent to the idea of leaving biology behind to lead a virtual life in cyberspace. Significantly, these warnings reverberate in some twenty-first century cultural productions such as Mark McClelland’s Upload (2012), a novel that is also representative of an emerging trend of SF novels written by tech professionals. Although the novel may seem to be at first a defense of simulated life, this work aims to prove that McClelland’s narrative choices ultimately uncover a critical posthumanist view of embodiment as an essential part of human identity.

Discussing the Feminist Agenda in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Novels

2022-10-04T10:50:07+02:00

In this article, an analysis is made of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and MaddAddam (2013) from a gendered and generic perspective. The Handmaid’s Tale was one of the novels that marked the dystopian turn in the 1980s writing of fiction, while MaddAddam is, for some critics, a feminist critical dystopia in which the ending retains hope for a better future. Consequently, both novels belong a priori to a specific branch of the dystopian genre: the feminist dystopian novel. However, some ambiguity or even contradictory readings can be inferred in both texts. This article explores The Handmaid’s Tale and MaddAddam’s portrayal of women and their acts of resistance in order to assess these texts’ liberatory or still inherently conservative messages of their endings, especially regarding women.

Space, Emotion, and Gender

2022-11-03T20:01:00+01:00

This article examines Kym Ragusa’s The Skin between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging as a gendered transcultural narrative from the standpoint of spatial theory. In order to do so, it contextualizes the text within the framework of memoir writing and subsequently analyzes the representation of varied emotional spaces in the process of recovering one’s identity as displayed by the narrative voice. This research contends that the use of memoir, a genre particularly used by ‘marginal’ voices, is an adequate means to critically reflect on the (de)construction of identity as well as convey alternative patterns of gender relations and cultural negotiations. In addition, it stresses the central role of space and emotions in reflecting the transculturality and intersectionality of the diasporic and gendered subject.

Old English-Origin Words in a Set Of Medieval Latin Accounts

2022-10-04T11:27:30+02:00

For a long time, texts in Medieval Latin were poorly regarded for their linguistic hybridity: alongside Classical/post-Classical Latin lexemes, there were many words coming from the vernaculars (in the case of late medieval England, Anglo-French and Middle English) embedded in them. This traditional and restrictive view was superseded by a more nuanced conception of multilingualism, which appreciates the value of this kind of written evidence for our understanding of the multilingual dynamics of medieval texts. The present investigation uses a case study, the Account Rolls of the Abbey of Durham [1278-1538] (Fowler 1898-1901; henceforth, Durham Account Rolls), one of the largest edited and published collections of accounts in Medieval Latin, to discuss broader issues such as how to classify the vernacular lexical items present in medieval multilingual texts (are they borrowings, code-switches, or something else?) and to what extent this vocabulary can be deemed to be integrated/unintegrated into Medieval Latin. Since there are multiple underlying languages in the vernacular vocabulary of the Durham Account Rolls, this article will concentrate on the Old English-origin lexis in these accounts and its relation to Latin and French. An overview of 263 simplex (one-element) Old English-origin forms in the Durham Account Rolls proved to be a source of both basic-level terms and more specialised terminology. Finally, some examples from the most representative semantic domains (equipment, farming, animals, and materials) will be given.

Automatic Lemmatization of Old English Class III Strong Verbs (L-Y) with ALOEV3

2022-05-16T09:42:41+02:00

This article presents ALOEV3, a lemmatizer based on Morphological Generation that allows for the type-based automatic lemmatization of Old English Class III strong verbs beginning with the letters L–Y. The lemmatizer operates on the basis of the inflectional, derivational and morpho-phonological alternation rules characteristic of this class. The generated form-types are checked against the two most reputed Old English corpora, namely the Dictionary of Old English Corpus and The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose to validate their attestations and assign the corresponding lemma. Results show that 97 percent of the validated forms are successfully assigned a single lemma. The remaining inflectional forms (38 out of 1,256) show competition between two lemmas, which implies that despite the high level of accuracy of the lemmatizer, contextual, token-based analysis is still needed for disambiguation. However, the research shows that competition only occurs in a limited set of lemma pairs and their derivatives. Although the research focuses on but one strong verb class, it confirms that exploring the avenues of automatic lemmatization will contribute to the field of Old English lexicography by either lemmatizing attested inflectional form types or by highlighting areas for manual revision.