Journal of English Studies

Biopolitics in "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil", by George Saunders

Ioannis Antzus Ramos — 2024-08-28

In this article, I analyze George Saunders’s novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005) from the perspective of biopolitics, following the theoretical frameworks established by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Frédéric Lordon. I focus on two aspects of biopolitics: one linked to the extermination of the enemy, and the other to the manipulation of the passions of the governed. Regarding the first aspect, I discuss the strategies that Phil, the sovereign dictator in the story, uses to kill or displace the Other. In the second aspect, I study the use of desire and affect as biopolitical technologies that contribute to maintaining and reinforcing power. Finally, I examine the critical position of various characters in relation to Phil’s biopolitical regime and the political dimension of the novella itself.

“Time Travel Is Real”

Marta Bagüés Bautista — 2024-07-29

Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), the first instalment of her Seasonal Quartet, has been analysed as a Brexit novel or “Brexlit” (Pittel 58), when it actually represents a much wider reality. Although some academics highlight the unclassifiable nature of the novel, I believe that, despite its undeniable political undertones and thematic concerns when depicting our transmodern society, both its form and its content are aligned with the features of metamodernism that authors like Nick Bentley and Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker define in their research (2017, 2010). While most critical studies have been concerned with the thematic aspects of the novel as the first post-Brexit novel, my aim is to offer an analysis of all the different aspects that make Autumn an accurate example of the metamodernist novel fluctuating between modern features like the use of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness and postmodern features like multiple narratives and fragmentation. In its oscillation between the modern and the postmodern, Autumn finds a balance through its main characters, Daniel Gluck and Elisabeth Demand, who embody these two structures of feeling. Different as they might be, the reader, alongside these two characters themselves, will find that they are more alike than they expected, and thus their shared ideas and concerns turn into the main themes of the novel: the cyclical nature of time and history, the unheimlich and the nature of art.

Errors and Corrective Feedback in Chinese EFL Classroom Writing

Zhuoqun Bi — 2024-09-27

English as a foreign language (EFL) learners are often confronted with grammatical errors in writing. This study aimed thence to identify types of errors made by Chinese EFL learners in their writing and to explore the reasons behind these committed errors as well as the corrective feedback given by EFL instructors in responding to students’ errors. A mixed-methods case study research design was employed. Data were collected from the essays produced by 62 third-year senior high school students (equivalent to 12^th grade) at Jining No.1 Middle School in Shandong, China and semi-structured interviews with five EFL instructors from China. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis and descriptive statistics. This study found that omission was the most common error made by Chinese EFL learners. Inappropriate learning strategies, negative transfer, overgeneralization, lack of motivation and positive attitude were the reasons of this phenomenon. It was found that both implicit and explicit corrective feedback were used by the EFL instructors in responding to their students’ errors. The findings provide valuable pedagogical evidence for EFL instructors to scaffold EFL learners’ writing skills.

Disposable (Textual) Bodies

Miriam Borham-Puyal — 2024-09-02

The present article compares two coeval authors, Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) and Jane Barker (1652–1732), who stand on opposite sides of the political and religious spectrum, to analyse the ways in which they engage with popular prostitute stories in Moll Flanders (1722) and the Patch-Work narratives (1723, 1726), respectively. This contribution, then, offers novel insights into these writers’ work, exploring the ways in which Defoe rewrites this form of popular fiction to conform to his middle-class fantasy of personal development, and how Barker responds both to Defoe’s tales of prostitute ascent and the general taste for this fiction from her own ideological perspective. It will also expose their similarities, as they construct composite literary bodies of many different prostitute narratives, and emphasize the need to understand the novel as an assemblage of voices, genres and sociomaterial aspects.

Morrison’s Blue-Eyed Golem

Manuel Botero Camacho — 2024-07-29

This article deals with Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, as a possible interweaving of Aristotle’s Third Man Argument into both societal and psychological aspects of the contemporary world. Rooted in this philosophical background, it follows the decline of Pecola Breedlove’s mental stability throughout three segments that mimic the argument’s structure. The degradation of archetypes and the character’s conception of beauty articulate our thesis as it attempts to present the novel as a reenactment of the philosophical theory resorting to Borges’ poem “El golem” to strengthen the connection between Morrison’s take on Afro-American realities and Aristotle’s position regarding the degradation of the ideal.

Paying Homage to the Holocaust Female Victims in "The Zone of Interest"

Aída Díaz Bild — 2024-07-29

Martin Amis returns to the subject of the Holocaust after Time’s Arrow (1991) with The Zone of Interest, a realistic novel set in Auschwitz in the months from August 1942 to April 1943. Amis decides to deal again with the atrocities committed by the Nazis, because he believes that the impact of the Holocaust will change with the physical disappearance of the survivors. In this article we are going to focus on two of the female victims created by Amis: a Jewish prisoner who confronts her oppressors and a Jewish doctor morally destroyed by her collaboration with the Nazis, both of whom are presented through the perpetrator’s gaze. In order to demonstrate how Amis succeeds in giving the reader a truthful picture of the humiliations the Nazis inflicted on their victims, we will use the witnesses’ testimonies and the studies on the Holocaust relevant to our analysis, with special attention to those who offer a gender perspective.

The Semantics and Syntax of Old English Motion Verbs

Sara Domínguez Barragán — 2024-11-08

This is a study in the syntax and semantics of Old English verbs of motion, including verbs of neutral motion, verbs of manner of motion and verbs of path of motion. Its aim is to identify the morphosyntactic alternations in which these verbs participate. The theoretical basis of the research draws on Goddard’s semantics of motion, Levin’s model of verb classes and alternations and Talmy’s typological distinction between satellite-framed languages and verb-framed languages. The grammatical patterns of the verbs under analysis are discussed, as described in The Dictionary of Old English (Healey), with special emphasis on the study of transitivity, case, prepositional government, and reflexivity. As far as meaning components are concerned, this work concentrates on the study of polysemy. The conclusions of this study refer to the consistency of the syntactic behaviour of the verbs under analysis and the main alternations found within the verbal classes.

A Taxonomy of Anthologies According to the Criteria of Delimitation

Carles Granell Sales — 2024-09-02

Anthologies have usually been approached in relation to the canon and have usually been criticised for their inclusions and omissions. Yet anthology criticism ought to firstly acknowledge that the selection process stems from a concrete understanding of literature, tradition and its categories–period, genre, theme. These categories applied to the field of anthology-making are referred to as the criteria of delimitation, which condition which texts are apt to be anthologised. For this reason, Menand’s definition of tradition and its categories is set forth alongside Hopkins’s classification of anthologies in order to preserve the latter’s precise divisions–comprehensive, period, and trade anthologies–, to revise its terminology–genre anthology instead of generic anthology–, to demarcate the categories of the criteria of delimitation–critical anthologies are left out because they belong to the realm of the selection process–, and to propose a new class–the denomination of group anthologies for those collections which focus on the representativity of social groups. Thus, the criteria of delimitation, derived from the categories of tradition, offer a possible taxonomy of anthologies: comprehensive, period, genre, trade and group anthologies.

Mimesis of Contrast in Shakespeare's Ephemeral Subplot and its Use in Victorian and Modernist Literature

Antonio Jiménez Hernando — 2024-08-30

The aim of this paper is to present an overview of Shakespeare’s employment of a narrative technique that could be referred to as the “mimesis of contrast.” By analysing the characteristics of certain sequences in Macbeth, Henry IV 1 and The Tempest, it will be spelt out that Shakespeare’s sudden subplots, generally considered mere comic reliefs, are in fact revealing instances that not only mirror the play’s primary narrative but also succeed in generating a drastic poetic effect. Moreover, the use of this method will be considered in the works of Victorian and Modernist authors, notably Charles Dickens, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Lastly, the ideas of traditional Shakespearian critics like S. T. Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey shall work as central arguments in this article, aiding to conclude that Renaissance drama, and in particular Shakespeare’s motif of contrast, made an impact in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Examining Adaptation Practices in English Language Textbooks

Ana R. Luís — 2024-11-08

Authentic texts in English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks are highly valued for their ability to provide learners with exposure to real-world language. In Portuguese ELT textbooks, very often authentic texts are marked as "adapted", but few discussions have been raised about how they are adapted in ELT textbooks and what elements are considered during text adaptation. Given the central role textbooks play in language teaching and learning, examining textbook writers' adaptation practices can help teachers make informed choices about how to best use such materials. The goal of this paper is to examine the nature of text adaptations in Portuguese ELT textbooks and the extent to which authentic texts are modified. To accomplish this, two corpora have been manually compiled: one consisting of 37 adapted texts extracted from two Portuguese ELT textbooks, and the other comprising their unmodified, authentic counterparts. Each adapted text was compared to its corresponding original source using a predefined set of criteria. Findings reveal that adapted texts differ from the authentic source with respect to size, while changes at the level of language, such as modifications to vocabulary and syntax, are very rare.

The Flâneuserie of "In Treatment"’s Laila Green

Dorottya Mozes — 2024-10-01

The Parisian flâneur is a figure whose indulgent urban loitering is shaped by straight white male privilege. In contrast, this essay introduces the concept of the Blackqueer flâneuse, highlighting the radical imagination’s role in maneuvering through heavily surveilled and controlled spaces. By weaving together intersecting theories of waywardness (Hartman) and willfulness (Ahmed), it examines Black flâneuserie —both as an imaginative and tangible mode of mobility— that ingeniously subverts or sidesteps the violence of capture. Focusing on Laila Green, from the series In Treatment (2021), the essay unveils her outlaw imagination, her yearning for liberation, and her everyday practices of wandering as alternative expressions of flâneuserie. Employing the concept of queer failure (Halberstam), the analysis frames Laila’s persistent attempts at escape alongside her history of facing setbacks as a practice of flâneuserie. With the help of critical geography (de Certeau, Tuan, Cosgrove, Cosgrove and Dora) and Jungian theory, it conceptualizes Laila’s passion for high places and mountains and ultimately the realization of her passion as evidence of her individuation. Akin to the paradoxes of white male flânerie, Black flâneuserie in Laila’s case unfolds as a paradoxical journey of self-discovery, complicated by her privilege and the entanglements of her wanderings within the logic of racial capitalism.

Becoming Visible

Eugenio M. Olivares Merino — 2024-07-10

While in England the memory of Thomas More had been erased from public life after his execution (6 June 1535), English Catholics exiled in the Spanish Netherlands preserved his figure and legacy. Furthermore, the inclusion of More’s engraving in 16th-century portrait books of distinguished personalities–the so-called viri illustres genre–, contributed to the promotion of the famous English humanist in continental Europe. Soon, More’s integrity and wisdom were extolled not only in works printed in Catholic countries but also in other territories that no longer accepted Rome’s authority. This paper analyses the depiction (both image and text) of the English humanist in all these works. The visual and textual rhetoric of these engravings shows their mutual dependence.

Immigrant Heritage Learners' Acquisition of L3 EFL

Carmen Arsema Pérez Hernández — 2024-09-27

Heritage speakers (HS) with an immigrant background are bilinguals whose L1 is a minority language that lacks social status in the host country. A bilingual advantage has been extensively reported in research in third language acquisition (TLA) mainly in the context of bilingual education. However, mixed results are obtained when TLA takes place in immigration contexts. In an attempt to understand this variability, this systematic review examines the individual and contextual variables reported in the literature that could be mediating the relationship between immigrant HS’ bilingualism and their EFL L3 learning in educational settings across Europe. Following the PRISMA guidelines, we have examined 20 peer-reviewed studies (2013-2023). The findings highlight socioeconomic status, cognitive abilities, and manner of acquisition of the L1 as affecting L3 learning. This systematic review emphasizes the need to tailor instruction to the specific characteristics and needs of these learners, promoting a more individualized approach to L3 teaching.

Encountering the Machine

María Torres-Romero — 2024-07-29

This work explores the intricate connection between contemporary philosophical debates in the ethics of technology and speculative fiction through the analysis of the novel Machines Like Me (2019) by British author Ian McEwan. In line with McEwan’s continued literary interest in the intersection of science, morality, and ethics, this novel scrutinises the moral complexities that emerge from the encounter of humans with a technological other. Following the postphenomenological and relational ethical approaches of Peter-Paul Verbeek and Mark Coeckelbergh that overtly align with posthumanist thought, the article reassesses the moral dilemmas that emerge when a conscious nonhuman other challenges traditional ethical codes and the core of humanist moral ascription.