English on the Move: Mobilities in Literature and Language

SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 27

Edited by Annette Kern-Stähler and David Britain 066112 SPELL 27 - Britain_Kern_Stähler_066112 SPELL 27 - Britain_Kern_Stähler Titelei 28.09.12 08:18 Seite 1

English on the Move: Mobilities in Literature and Language Edited by Annette Kern-Stähler and David Britain 066112 SPELL 27 - Britain_Kern_Stähler_066112 SPELL 27 - Britain_Kern_Stähler Titelei 28.09.12 08:18 Seite 2

SPELL Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature

Edited by The Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE)

General Editor: Lukas Erne

Volume 27 066112 SPELL 27 - Britain_Kern_Stähler_066112 SPELL 27 - Britain_Kern_Stähler Titelei 28.09.12 08:18 Seite 3

English on the Move: Mobilities in Literature and Language

Edited by Annette Kern-Stähler and David Britain 066112 SPELL 27 - Britain_Kern_Stähler_066112 SPELL 27 - Britain_Kern_Stähler Titelei 28.09.12 08:18 Seite 4

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Na tio- nal bibliogra fie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar.

Publiziert mit Unterstützung der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozial- wissen schaften.

© 2012 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwer- tung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Gedruckt auf säurefreiem und alterungsbeständigem Werkdruckpapier. Internet: http://www.narr.de E-Mail: [email protected] Einbandgestaltung: Martin Heusser, Zürich Fotografie: Annette Kern-Stähler Druck und Bindung: Laupp & Göbel, Nehren Printed in Germany ISSN 0940-0478 ISBN 978-3-8233-6739-0

Table of Contents

Introduction 11

Elleke Boehmer (Oxford) The Worlding of the Jingo Poem 17

Simon Swift (Leeds) New Mass Movements: Hannah Arendt, Literature and Politics 39

Barbara Buchenau (Bern) The Goods of Bad Mobility: Pierre-Esprit Radisson’s The Relation of my Voyage, being in Bondage in the Lands of the Irokoits, 1669/1885 53

Martin Heusser (Zurich) “Why I Write about Mexico”: Mexicanness in Katherine Anne Porter’s “Flowering Judas” and “María Concepción” 69

Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (Neuchâtel) Shakespeare and Immigration 81

Sarah Chevalier (Zurich) Mobile Parents, Multilingual Children: Children’s Production of Their Paternal Language in Trilingual Families 99

Simone E. Pfenninger (Zurich) Moving Towards an Earlier Age of Onset of L2 Learning: A Comparative Analysis of Motivation in Swiss Classrooms 117

Patricia Ronan (Lausanne) Mobilizing Linguistic Concepts: Support Verb Structures in Early English 145

Notes on Contributors 163

Index of Names 167

General Editor’s Preface

SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature) is a publication of SAUTE, the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English. Established in 1984, it first appeared every second year, was published annually from 1994 to 2008, and now appears three times every two years. Every second year, SPELL publishes a selection of papers given at the biennial symposia organized by SAUTE. Non- symposium volumes are usually collections of papers given at other conferences organized by members of SAUTE, in particular conferences of SANAS, the Swiss Association for North American Studies and, more recently, of SAMEMES, the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies. However, other proposals are also welcome. Decisions concerning topics and editors are made by the Annual General Meeting of SAUTE two years before the year of publication. Volumes of SPELL contain carefully selected and edited papers devoted to a topic of literary, linguistic and – broadly – cultural interest. All contributions are original and are subjected to external evaluation by means of a full peer review process. Contributions are usually by participants at the conferences mentioned, but volume editors are free to solicit further contributions. Papers published in SPELL are documented in the MLA International Bibliography. SPELL is published with the financial support of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. Information on all aspects of SPELL, including volumes planned for the future, is available from the General Editor, Prof. Lukas Erne, Département de langue et littérature anglaises, Faculté des Lettres, Université de Genève, CH-1211 Genève 4, Switzerland, e-mail: [email protected]. Information about past volumes of SPELL and about SAUTE, in particular about how to become a member of the association, can be obtained from the SAUTE website at http://www.saute.ch.

Lukas Erne

Acknowledgements

The papers in this volume were contributed following the University of Bern’s hosting of the SAUTE meeting in May 2011. We are grateful to all the speakers who made the conference such a memorable and stimu- lating event, and would like to especially thank our international invited speakers, Professor Elleke Boehmer and Professor Crispin Thurlow, who gave extremely thought-provoking and lively presentations. We would very much like to thank the following people for their very significant contribution both to the production of this volume, and to the organisation of the conference: Dr Kellie Gonçalves, Dr Nicole Nyffenegger, Kathrin Reist, Eva Grädel and Bettina Müller from Bern all helped in numerous ways in the editorial production of the volume, and we thank them sincerely for their work. In addition to Kellie, Nicole, Kathrin, Eva and Bettina, we were helped at the conference by Elisa Marenzi and Monika Iseli. We’d like to thank our international panel of reviewers who performed the task of reading and commenting on submitted papers with great professionalism, dedication and velocity! We are especially hon- oured to be able to publish Professor Boehmer’s paper here alongside those of the SAUTE members. We are also very grateful to Keith Hew- lett for his careful copy-editing work on the final volume. Without the amazing support of SAUTE, this volume simply would not have been possible. SAUTE helped to finance the conference that led to this volume, and we have received especially great assistance from Professor Dr Lukas Erne and Professor Dr David Spurr, who provided us with clear and precise guidelines for the conference and the volume. And finally we would like to acknowledge our families – Axel, Sue, Timon, Molly, Ella and Mael – who cheerfully and patiently tolerated our absences as we devoted ourselves to this volume.

Introduction

All the world seems to be on the move. Asylum seekers, international students, terrorists, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, business people, sports stars, refugees, backpackers, commuters, the early retired, young mobile professionals, prostitutes, armed forces – these and many others fill the world’s airports, buses, ships, and trains. The scale of this travelling is immense. Internationally there are over 700 million legal passenger arrivals each year (compared with 25 million in 1950) [. . .] there are 4 million air passengers each day; 31 million refugees are displaced from their homes; and there is one car for every 8.6 people. These diverse yet intersecting mobilities have many consequences for different peoples and places that are located in the fast and slow lanes across the globe. (Sheller and Urry 207)

So began Sheller and Urry’s (207) declaration of a “new mobilities paradigm,” a critique of what they called the sedentarism of contemporary social theory. In linguistic, literary and cultural studies, however, mobility and movement have been receiving critical attention for at least two decades. On the Move: Mobilities in English Language and Literature seeks to harness some of this critique to explore how mobilities, both mundane and dramatic, are represented, narrated, performed and negotiated in literature and discourse, as well as the repercussions and consequences of mobility on language and dialect. Across the volume, the individual chapters examine some of the diverse manifestations of mobility, such as colonialism (Boehmer), tour- ism and travel (Heusser) and globalisation (Chevalier, Pfenninger). The

On the Move: Mobilities in English Language and Literature. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 27. Ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and David Britain. Tübingen: Narr, 2012. 11-15. 12 Introduction volume also explores literary and cultural consequences of these different forms of mobility, for example language and cultural contact (Ronan, Tudeau-Clayton, Chevalier, Heusser), the diffusion of genres, words and ideas (Boehmer, Ronan) and displacement (Tudeau-Clayton, Buchenau, Heusser, Swift). Just as mobility transports literatures and language, so language and literature also function as carriers of mobility (Boehmer, Ronan, Swift). The papers in this volume usefully remind us that the “dialectic of cultural persistence and change” (Greenblatt 2) and the juxtaposition of sedentarism and nomadism (see Cresswell 26) are key dimensions in the study of mobilities. Elleke Boehmer, in her contribution “The Worlding of the Jingo Poem,” discusses the jingo poem as catalyst and conduit for imperialist attitudes in the British Empire. The jingo poem traverses colonial borderlines and oceans and migrates between different ways of presentation. Boehmer argues that, until the appearance of the 1950s pop song, jingoist verse was one of the most culturally migrated or “worlded” of literary genres, transporting imperial convictions and British nationalist feelings. She discusses the jingo poem both as carrier of meanings (bear- ing imperial messages) and a mode of carrying meaning (being an imperialist message itself) and she exemplifies this with a discussion of the operation and reception of two iconic jingo poems, namely Newbolt’s “Vitae Lampada” and Kipling’s “A Song of the English.” Simon Swift, in his study of political mass movements in Hannah Arendt’s work, argues that the political philosopher resorted to literature to describe mass movements for which she felt Marxist political theory lacked the adequate vocabulary. Working with literary metaphors of sta- bility and fluidity, Arendt claimed that mass movements depend on being perpetually on the move and setting everything (e.g. settled political doctrines) and everyone (e.g. Nazi victims transported across Europe) in motion. In this way the Nazi movement was able to distract from the fact that it was not a fixed political entity respecting the nation state but instead wanted to abolish it. In the second part of his contribution, Swift turns to Arendt’s discussions of later mass movements, including the student movement and Black Power, and focuses on the creative power of violent political emotions (i.e. “being moved politically”), such as rage, hatred and disgust. Barbara Buchenau addresses “The Goods of Bad Mobility” in her discussion of Pierre-Esprit Radisson’s The Relation of my Voyage: Being in Bondage in the Lands of the Irokoits. Against the background of mobility theories, most prominently those of Sheller/Urry and Greenblatt, she argues that the idea of “bad mobility” as defined as too much or too little movement comes alive only in discourse. In a narrative such as Radisson’s, she goes on to argue, the concept of bad movement be- Introduction 13 comes mobile itself; the protagonist’s repeated movements in and out of Mohawk captivity undergo several re-conceptualisations. Captivity is first positively re-interpreted in terms of family membership, then, through the eyes of another adoptee, re-interpreted as loss of economic and cultural value and finally transformed yet again into a moment of enlightenment and empowerment when the bad movement of captivity becomes a central asset in the author’s commercially motivated self- presentation to the English King Charles II. Martin Heusser discusses two Mexican short stories by Katherine Porter against the background of her conceptions of Mexico and of her biography. At a time when many American artists were drawn to Mex- ico as a locus of difference yet strange familiarity, he argues, Porter per- ceived and literarily constructed the country as a space to explore the missing links of her own life. The construction of an identity-forming past was at the centre of her project, Heusser claims, which is why she both manipulated her own biography and provided her characters with the powerful past of Aztec culture. The murderess María Concepción, as well as the idealised community which protects her, preserve archaic instincts which inform the essentialist version of selfhood that the author craved but ultimately failed to attain in Mexico. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton discusses Shakespeare’s contribution to The Book of Sir Thomas More as a propagation of “non-sectarian Christian humanist internationalism.” Against the backdrop of a parliamentary debate concerning “aliens” of 1593, Shakespeare’s More, echoing both Henry Finch’s parliamentary intervention and the historical More’s Uto- pia, makes a case on behalf of strangers and thus discontinues the line of argument in favour of citizens presented by Shakespeare’s “fellow au- thorial hands.” While this discontinuity with the rest of the play-text has repeatedly been attributed to material conditions of production, Tudeau-Clayton argues that Shakespeare’s contribution presents “an ethically and politically charged intervention.” Where George Abbot’s echo of Finch’s parliamentary intervention makes reference to a collec- tive memory of persecuted English protestants under Queen Mary, Shakespeare’s More focuses on “English victims of enclosure,” drawing on the historical More’s Utopia, and thus speaks up in defence of strangers “across religious divides and across the century.” Like Finch, he urges the citizens to “imagine themselves in the strangers’ case,” dem- onstrating its contingency and denouncing exclusionary violence “as a denial of a shared human condition.” Sarah Chevalier’s paper looks into language production of two children who have been exposed to three languages from birth, namely Swiss German, French and English. This study focuses on the production of the paternal language for both children, in this case Swiss Ger- 14 Introduction man and French, where both languages are considered to be “minority” languages within the respective language regions, where the families re- side. Chevalier’s study investigates language choice among these children and the underlying factors that contribute to such choices. She employs a social interactionist framework that stresses child-directed speech (Barnes) concerning language development. The data stems from longitudinal case studies of two children, in which recordings were done over a period of twelve months. Chevalier’s findings indicate that the most salient factors have to do with the fathers’ conversational styles, input from the paternal language from other family members and friends, particular exposure patterns to the languages in question and the extent of the community language presence. Simone Pfenninger’s study looks at the motivation level of Swiss ele- mentary school children with regards to learning English. She considers students’ age and onset of learning as well as the different amount of L2 input students received. Employing Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational Self- System, Pfenninger’s findings reveal that the major discrepancy found had to do with the motivational area known as the Ideal L2 Self. In other words, regardless of students’ age or amount of actual input received, students were motivated to learn English due to its status and popularity; however, Pfenninger is cautious and argues that such reasons could “wane” in the future and states that the type of motivation concerning SLA is indeed a salient factor for young learners. Patricia Ronan’s study compares the use of support verb constructions with loan derived predicate nouns in OE. She does this by looking at a sample corpus from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales from the 14th century and contrasting these constructions with an Old English corpus. Her findings indicate a higher use of foreign derived predicate nouns in support verb constructions rather than in non-support verb constructions within the Canterbury Tales corpus. Apart from poetic and stylistic reasons for these constructions, Ronan claims that a further factor con- tributing to the high frequency of support verb constructions with loan derived predicate nouns within Chaucer’s writing stems from the in- creased amount of language contact contexts in ME as opposed to OE.

Annette Kern-Stähler and David Britain

Introduction 15

References

Cresswell, Tim. On the move: Mobility in the modern western world. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. Greenblatt, Stephen, with Ines Županov et al. Cultural Mobility. A Mani- festo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Mimi Sheller and John Urry. “The new mobilities paradigm.” Environ- ment and Planning A 38 (2006), 207-226.

The Worlding of the Jingo Poem

Elleke Boehmer

This essay looks critically at the circulation of the jingo poem as cultural artifact and imperial message through the networked domain of the British empire. Though the jingo poem has never drawn the same critical attention as an ideological vehicle of empire as has the imperial ad- venture story, verse acclaiming British values and exhorting Britons to follow the flag, the essay submits, acted as both a powerful catalyst and a conduit for imperialist attitudes. Indeed, within the increasingly more complicated global webs and circuits of the expanding empire, the jingo poem – tub-thumping and also anthemic, exhortatory but at times ele- giac – provided sources of inspiration and sustaining intimations of fellow feeling, strongly and evocatively expressed. Whereas the novel provided a symbolic cartography, however incomplete, of that expanding world, the jingo poem, never so spatialized or so nuanced, offered in- centives on an emotional level. Traversing colonial borderlines and ocean spaces, migrating, as refrain, from music hall to newspaper page, and, as exhortatory rhetoric, from the oeuvre of one colonial versifier to that of another (Henley, Kipling, Newbolt) – the poem carried not only British imperial convictions but also British nationalist feelings, pro- jected on to a global stage.

The poets, that so often seem So wretched, touching mournful strings, They likewise are a kind of kings, Nor is their empire all a dream.

Their words fly over land and main, Their warblings make the distance glad, Their voices heard hereafter add A glory to a glorious reign.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from “To the Queen” (1851; Ricks 986-7)

On the Move: Mobilities in English Language and Literature. SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 27. Ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and David Britain. Tübingen: Narr, 2012. 17-37.