[email protected] E-ISSN 2300-6250 the Electronic Version of Crossroads

Crossroads@Uwb.Edu.Pl E-ISSN 2300-6250 the Electronic Version of Crossroads

ISSUE 25 2/2019

An electronic journal published by The University of Bialystok ISSUE 25

2/2019

An electronic journal published by The University of Bialystok ......

Publisher: The University of Bialystok The Faculty of Philology Department of English ul. Liniarskiego 3 15-420 Białystok, Poland tel. 0048 85 7457516 [email protected] www.crossroads.uwb.edu.pl e-ISSN 2300-6250 The electronic version of Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies is its primary (referential) version.

Editor-in-chief: Agata Rozumko

Literary editor: Grzegorz Moroz

Editorial Board: Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun, Jerzy Kamionowski, Daniel Karczewski, Weronika Łaszkiewicz, Jacek Partyka, Daniela Francesca Virdis, Beata Piecychna, Tomasz Sawczuk

Editorial Assistant: Ewelina Feldman-Kołodziejuk

Language editors: Kirk Palmer, Peter Foulds

Advisory Board: Pirjo Ahokas (University of Turku), Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-Pędich (SWPS: University of Social Sciences and Humanities), Ali Almanna (Sohar University), Isabella Buniyatova (Borys Ginchenko Kyiev University), Xinren Chen (Nanjing University), Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch (University of Southern California), Zinaida Charytończyk (Minsk State Linguistic University), Gasparyan Gayane (Yerevan State Linguistic University “Bryusov”), Marek Gołębiowski (University of Warsaw), Anne-Line Graedler (Hedmark University College), Cristiano Furiassi (Università degli Studi di Torino), Jarosław Krajka (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University / University of Social Sciences and Humanities), Marcin Krygier (Adam Mickiewicz University), A. Robert Lee (Nihon University), Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld (Jagiellonian University), Zbigniew Maszewski (University of Łódź), Michael W. Thomas (The Open University, UK), Sanae Tokizane (Chiba University), Peter Unseth (Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, Dallas), Daniela Francesca Virdis (University of Cagliari), Valentyna Yakuba (Borys Ginchenko Kyiev University)

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Contents

4 LINGUISTICS

4 TAOFEEK O. DALAMU Language choice as discourse: A transitivity approach to MTN® and ETISALAT® advertising communicative webs in Nigeria

28 JAROSŁAW KRAJKA Teacher language awareness and world Englishes – where (corpus) linguistics, digital literacy and teacher training meet

52 ANNA LISIECKA Comparing multimodal film texts. The case of the movie Fame (1980) and its remake Fame (2009)

66 LITERATURE

66 BOŻENA KUCAŁA Aporia, vortex and the hermeneutic circle in A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale

81 MAŁGORZATA MARTYNUSKA The nostalgic landscape of Miami in Susanna Daniel’s Stiltsville

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TAOFEEK O. DALAMU 1 DOI: 10.15290/CR.2019.25.2.01 Department of English and Literary Studies Anchor University, Lagos, Nigeria ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5494-4854

Language choice as discourse: A transitivity approach to MTN® and ETISALAT® advertising communicative webs in Nigeria

Abstract. Advertising texts are significant to manufacturers to promote and skyrocket products’ consumption. This study examined kinds of textual choices in advertising, accounting for their frequencies. Two advertisements each from MTN® and Etisalat® – of the Nigerian advertising universe – were chosen for sample analysis, employing Transi- tivity and word-formation procedures, as the conceptual frameworks. Transitivity allowed tables and graphs to com- pute the recurrence of textual components. The research revealed Material Processes of has offered, go rock (MTN); and get, pick up (Etisalat) as pronounced choices. Circumstances of Location such as This week… (MTN); and on weeknights… (Etisalat) are choices of communicative augmentations. The investigation further recapitulated creative over-generalization (yous), word play fragmentation (Y’ello), and alphanumeric code (9javaganza) as communicative facilities of MTN and Etisalat constructs. Hence, the researcher suggested that an extensive study of language choice in advertising domains can strengthen government policies to benefit, among others, readers, researchers, manufacturers, and advertising practitioners. Keywords: advertising, discourse, ideational metafunction, language choice, system.

1. Introduction Language, being a hub of both human activities and existence, is thus central to the notions of discourse and advertising. On that ground, one could suggest that discourse and advertising locate ways in which language resources are chosen, constructed, and disseminated to play some functional roles in societies (Cook 1992; Kress 2010; O’Halloran & Lim 2014; Forceville 2017). In respect of that remark, there are some terminologies remarkable to this study as devices of language operations. The basic concepts are discourse, advertising, and language choice. (The italicized lexemes

1 Address for correspondence: Department of English and Literary Studies, Anchor University, Ayobo, Lagos, Nige- ria. E-mail: [email protected] , [email protected]

4 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies are for emphasis). Language choice, as a core mechanism for depicting and expressing meaning (Fontaine et al. 2013), serves as the interface between discourse and advertising. The language of advertising is not short of scholarly evidence. This is because advertising, according to Dalamu (2017a), is as old as man. That recognition seems to have informed the proliferation of discourses of advertising in human sciences. Significantly, it is attestable in the knowledge- based industry that Leech (1966) has set a linguistic pacesetter for advertising analysis, explaining the kind of language that advertising professionals utilize to convince the public. On this key language geometry, extant literature has emanated. Consequently, Williamson (1978) examines interchangeability in advertising frameworks, while Gies (1982), Vestergaard & Schroder (1985), Myers (1994), and Forceville (1996) illuminate advertising scaffolding as the epitome of textual and imagery fabrications. Such phenomenal events, for instance, in Brierley (1995) and Hermerén (1999), are explicated as being metaphorical, elliptical, euphemistic, denotative and connotative. Nevertheless, Dalamu (2018a) claims that textual devices play fundamental roles in exhibiting meaning potential of advertisements (henceforth: ads). Of course, there are other insights, such as Lemke (1995), Geiszinger (2001), Goddard (2002), Fairclough (2003), Dyer (2005), and Carter & Nash (2013), which describe advertising nuances from textual, contextual, historical, socio-cultural, semiotic, and communication points of view. However, this study, as a contribution to the existing literature, differentiates itself from earlier efforts by investigating the choices of lexemes, functional in MTN and Etisalat2 advertising constructions, deployed to persuade readers to consumption. In addition to that, this study considers MTN and Etisalat textual constructs as a kind of discourse for hypnotizing the audience to patronize their services in Nigeria. Nonetheless, Halliday’s grammatical transpose of Transitivity operates as the major processor of the textual facilities, channeling a way for tables and graphs to account for the frequency of the texts. The goal is to demonstrate that Transitivity has the capacity to expound meaning potential of the MTN and Etisalat advertising texts. As a result, one expects that such exposition will further display to readers the structural contents’ recurrence of the frameworks and semantic implications associated with the contents.

2. Literature review

2.1. Discourse, advertising and language choice Fundamentally, the notion of discourse, possessing multidimensional and overlapping descriptions, influences scholars to express different opinions on the subject as a very wide and complex concept (Schiffrin et al. 2002; Jaworski & Coupland 2006; van Dijk 2010; Gee 2011). Perhaps the writer might perceive discourse in this proposal as discourse analysis (DA) because scholars, including Fairclough (2003), claim that discourse is synonymous with DA. Blommaert (2009: 2-3) expatiates discourse as (i) “linguistic structures actually used by people” and (ii) “a meaningful

2 MTN and Etisalat are telecommunication operators (firms) in Nigeria.

5 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies symbolic behavior”. In a similar semantic plane, Fairclough (1992) illuminates discourse as social activities pleasurably conducted by language users. Of significance is the functionalist perspective in which discourse is practically entwined with text in context. Discourse represents a specific spoken language or any social process of communication (Lemke 1995; Hoey 2000). Nonetheless, Johnstone (2008), from a methodical point of view, explicates DA as a systematic consideration of a set of broad analytical topoi and a research mechanism that can be used to answer a variety of questions. Then, it seems to imply that as DA is a social engagement; the notion is as well as a processing facility of human communications. Thus, the present analyst has employed DA in the study as an analytical tool and explanatory paradigm in alignment with Johnstone’s (2008) argument. Advertising plays crucial roles in today’s businesses. Those tasks position advertising as a fascinating device for promoting products in different parameters to increase consumption and achieve economic growth. In addition, advertising constructs a link between language and society, society and business, and products and consumers. Leymore (1975) defines an ad as a stimulant and a means of drawing consumers’ attention to something or informing people of something by provoking the consumer’s anxiety and resolving it. The mission of ads might motivate experts to produce their communications with unique language choices for the intended social interaction (Dyer 2005). Advertising text choices, in Myers’ (1994) argument, accommodate some features such as: clever puzzles, short bursts, and being parasitic in nature. Besides the ubiquitous nature of ads, one might state that the language choices are loaded with concise structures (Ignis 1972). Such strategies aim at attracting attention with simple constructs that contain comprehensive messages. The features of ads stated above appease to justify my interest in analyzing the language choice of MTN and Etisalat advertising discourse in Nigerian communicative space. The notion of language choice, as used in this paper, subscribes to certain specific tendencies, as characterized in cognitive and neuroscience (Lamb 2013), sociolinguistics (Putz 1997), stylistics (Carter & Nash 2013), and systemic practices (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014), in relation to cultural and contextual spheres (Urbach 2013). The neuroscience claims that choice is the potential as well as the concrete selection of part of a system. These parameters invariably position a textual element to be multifunctional. The multifunctional principle pinpoints a relationship between systemic linguistics and neurolinguistics, expressed through Lamb’s relational theory (Gil 2013). In sociolinguistics, the term is alternatively employed either as language choice or choice of language. Particularly, Buda (2006: 1) argues that “sociolinguists have been long fascinated by the phenomenon of bilingualism and the complex language switching patterns that accompany it”. A bilingual could code-switch, in Buda’s (2006) perspective, from one language to another. For instance, a bilingual could switch from English to Yoruba, while a multilingual could switch from English to Yoruba or English to Igbo as the situation demands. In stylistics, scholars (O’Quinn 2012; Donovan 2012) have examined language choice as word choice and writer’s choice. Stylistic experts seem to orient their arguments principally on the choice of words that a writer makes as the writing style. Style is the lexical choices that a writer exhibits to express ideas as s/he decides for a particular communicative rationale. Perhaps the

6 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies choice displays the ways in which meanings are constructed in texts to serve a rich variety of purposes (Ross 1985). To this end, one might appreciate language choice as word constructions, explaining the feelings of a writer. Although neuroscience, sociolinguistic and stylistic views are relevant to how advertisers deploy language choices to persuade consumers’ patronage, this approach hangs on Systemic Functional Linguistics (henceforth: SFL) for its strong emphasis on language as choice. The explanations that SFL offers on language as a network of choices characterize the theory as a device of textual analysis (Halliday 1994). That merit seems to inform Kress (1981) to state that SFL, the Hallidayan theoretical dais, rests on the notion of choice. In Kress’s view, choice represents the crux of meaning-making in interactions. That might be connected to Halliday’s (2013) reinvigorated idea that all human activities involve choice. Based on that discernment, it may be difficult to engage SFL in language analyses without a reference to the concept of choice either explicitly or implicitly. Kress further argues that “The speaker of a language… engaging in any kind of culturally determined behavior… carries out, simultaneously successively, a number of distinct choices” (Kress 1981: 3). To Kress, the cultural context of which a speaker chooses to communicate the message to the audience is still anchoring on the individual’s language choice. In language, choice manifests centrally for it is the selection made out of a range of other lexemes available to a communicator. If someone has a reason for saying something in a certain situation, by implication, the interactant could have said something else if the context has been different. In consonance with that standpoint, Bloor & Bloor (2013) say that language consists of systems which offer the writer an unlimited choice of ways of creating meanings. It is out of the ‘unlimited’ systemic items that a writer makes a choice. Consequently, linguistic choices operate at every point in the production of writing (Matthiessen et al. 2010) as context-related and context- dependent facilities. The idea of choice in SFL connects strongly to the concept of System. System, as a technical concept, is an itemized set of choices in a specific context. A linguistic system, in Kress’s (1981) symbolic insight, is composed of items which have possible alternatives in that position and the domain of its utility. In the mainstream, Kress (1981) mirrors a system as providing a possibility of options for a language user to execute certain communicative tasks. The terminology of choice revolves around Halliday and the theory that he exemplifies. As such, choice being paradigmat- ic and probabilistic is not only axiomatic but a basic tenet in SFL because the thought connects language distinctively pervasively. The impression creates a contrast between what element has been chosen and what elements are left out in a communicative exchange.

2.2. Advertising and language Advertising and language are social enterprises that utilize the text as a means of communication. The text operates as an interface between two social actors, and can serve as an object of request- ing something from readers (Bourdieu 1988; Barry 1997; Hoffman 2002; Brierley 2002; Thompson 2014). Language can function without advertising; nevertheless, it is probable that advertising

7 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies might not operate without language. However, Goffmann (1979: 84) discusses advertising without language when he refers to “hyper-ritualization” (also in DeRosia 2008). That position of the image, playing a wholesome role, is rare in the advertising industry. So, the position that language occupies in advertising elevates the “local magic” (Firth 1957: 185) as a bond in the creativity (text- cum-image) of persuasion. Perhaps it is unarguable that advertising behaviors are globally universal (Mattellart 1991), but contextually, the matter of cultural affiliations influences one advertising professional from another (Daramola 2008; Forceville 2017). Such a division and demarcation could be observed regionally, nationally, and continental-wise. To reiterate, Leech (1966) considers advertising lexemes from Great Britain; Williamson (1978) explains interchangeability and semiotics in advertising; and Tanaka (1994), in her pragmatic approach, examines advertising designs of Britain and Japan. The perspectives of Cook (1992), Forceville (1996), Hermerén (1999), Dyer (2005), and Geiszinger (2001) dominate the circle of the developed western world. It is important to state that Awonusi (1998) and Gully (2012) have discussed political and commercial texts. Some of those texts are neither dialectical nor theoretically-systemic. However, most of these studies have succeeded in interpreting the creative nature of advertising as employed to persuade the audience. The symptom that the analyst observes in earlier efforts and seeks to address is that none of those scholars, to the best of my knowledge, has evaluated advertising texts of MTN and Etisalat, utilizing the Ideational Metafunctional approach as articu- lated in Halliday’s (1994) point of view. The digitization of the lexemic and registerial choices is the open window that the study intends to explore. The application of SFL has the capacity to decom- pose the deployed choices into grammatical constituents (Wodak & Meyer 2001: 3, 8), allowing technological tools to act upon the components (Dalamu 2017b). This will permit textual density’s accountability-cum-computation. Besides the scientific facilities revealing the nature of choices in different hierarchies, SFL processors of Transitivity has unveiled the meaning potential of MTN and Etisalat advertising discourse to readers. These factors position this proposal as an object of digital humanities (DH) with the potency to demonstrate significant values within the Nigerian multilingual domain.

2.3. Theoretical mapping This study has adopted two conceptual spheres, as applications, to analyze the texts of MTN and Etisalat ads. The major one is Transitivity – a grammatical transpose of Ideational Metafunction, and compounding and blending – some terms of morphological methods – represent the minor aspect.

2.3.1. Ideational metafunction The study has considered one of the core elements of SFL’s three Metafunctions as a tool of analysis owing to its resourcefulness in social semiotics and textual analysis (O’Halloran 2008). On that ground, Thompson (2014) indicates that Ideational Metafunction operates to

8 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies create functional meanings in context (also in Butler 2003). One could suggest that Ideational Metafunction is divided into experiential and logical relations. In that respect, Halliday (1994) claims that the Ideational Metafunction exhibits the content of the goings-on in a text. When we use language to interact, Halliday & Matthiessen (2014) emphasize that we use language to express either the world around us or the world within us. Eggins (2004: 213-215) observes further that we use words to talk about our experience and construct the world where “some entity does something”. Ravelli (2000) remarks that the external world focuses things, events qualities, etc. Our internal world represents thoughts, beliefs, feelings, etc. Moreover, Halliday (1994: 106) describes both external and internal worlds as experience as consisting of goings-on. He adds that “the clause is also a mode of reflection… and flow of events” to explicate meaning potential in confidence. These utterances are regarded as texts that are contextually-produced in a particular content. Kress & van Leeuwen (2003: 47) explain that the speaker determines the content with specific meanings embedded thereof. In this regard, language possesses numerous resources that are employed to represent the entities in the world. The module of realizing and analyzing meanings from this standpoint, Thompson (2004) asserts, is called the transitivity system. Also, Thompson (2014) suggests that the Process is brought about, most times, by nominal elements (Participants) involved in the event of negotiating and exchanging interactions. It is also possible that a text may have circumstantial elements to augment the information (Dalamu 2017c). Figure 1 below illustrates the six processes operating in the clauses of English.

Figure 1. Six processes in English clauses (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014)

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The content of the message is, perhaps, central to the communication function in terms of meaning potential and linguistic analysis. As a result of that remark, the contents have its distinct way of presenting both the external and internal worlds to social actors. As publicized in Figure 1, Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 171) argue that “Material, Mental and Relational are the main types of process in English transitivity system” with “Behavioral, Verbal and Existential” on the border lines. Figure 1 is the cyclical posture of the six processes of the Ideational Metafunction, which offers descriptions to how Halliday’s linguistic thoughts analyze textual nuances of communications within the schemata of the independent clause in English.

2.4.2. Compounding and blending Compounding is described as the joining of “two separate words to form a single form” (Yule 1996: 53). Blending is “accomplished by taking only the beginning of one word and joining it to the end of the other” (Yule 1996: 53; also in Napoli 1996: 214-223).

2.3. Research questions This study has used the following questions to reveal the exploration of the MTN and Etisalat choices in their advertising constructs: How has the application of Transitivity conceptual model assisted in deducing meaning potential of processes of MTN and Etisalat advertising choices? What kind of circumstantial elements do MTN and Etisalat deploy to augment the messages of their ads? Of what frequencies have Processes and Circumstantials function in the MTN and Etisalat ads? In what ways have MTN and Etisalat contributed to English through the formation of new coinages? Besides the theoretical terms employed for the analysis, the researcher has utilized statistical instruments such as tables and graphs to accomplish the achievement of some of the questions.

3. Method

3.1. Procedure The analyst selected two ads each from MTN and Etisalat communications, as advertising facilities in The Punch newspaper. The choice of the advertising communications was based on the discourse patterns, contextual relevance as well as neological apparatuses of the texts. The selection’s objective was to demonstrate certain factors in consideration before advertisers deploy texts to the public space. The data presented below displays the textual choices of MTN and Etisalat ads labeled as Ad 1 and Ad 2. The researcher has applied Transitivity, a terminology from SFL, and Compounding and Blending, morphological terms, to process the clauses after being separated with slashes. The paper exhibits the analytical techniques in Figures 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, as shown in the sub-section of Data Analysis. It is worth stressing here that the demarcation of clauses with double slashes and the initial capitalization of concepts characterize the tradition of SFL fathers (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014). A combination of qualitative and quantitative procedures, as SFL

10 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies has permitted, dominates the study. Thus, after the constituents’ analysis, as stated earlier, tables and graphs operate as technological tools, computing and revealing the frequencies of systemic choices, exhibited in Tables 1 and 2, and Figures 7 and 8. The discussions act on the platform of these applications. The symbol, ®, references a registered company as CL is an abbreviation of the clause. Ads are in British English (BrE) in order to retail their lexical originality.

3.2. Data presentation MTN Ad 1: //MyCustomer®, your smile is worth a thousand ‘Thank Yous’// Our celebration starts with you.// For 10 amazing years you have offered us the opportunity to serve you like no other.// This week, we are celebrating a decade full of fond memories// we promise you that the best is yet to come with the continuous roll out of new look. MTN Walk-in centres across Nigeria.// It is always a pleasure to serve you. MTN Ad 2: //MTN Kulturefest Lisabi// Lisabi Cultural Festival.// Let’s go rock Egbaland// It’s going to be a Y’ello Celebration// as all Egbaland honours Lisabi the Great.// From March 1st to 8th, you too can be part of the Lisabi Festival// and experience Egba cultural as well as innovative MTN Products and services on full display.// It’s an experience// that will surely enrich life// Etisalat Ad 1: //wwwherever you are// wwwhenever you wwwant// wwwhatever you need// get up to 1GB freeeee!// it’s easy with easynet.// Get the internet plan of your choice with easynet// Get 1 month free bonus data plan //when you buy any of our 1.5GB, 3GB or 6GB plans// Bonus available instantly upon purchase// Bonus available in the following months after purchase can be used only on weeknights and weekends// Pick up your easynet data SIM and USB modem at any etisalat experience centre// Text ‘help’ to 229.// Etisalat Ad 2: //9javaganza// enjoy free weekend calls// get 50% of airtime spent// it’s your time to talk// From now till March 31, simply make as many calls as you wish to my network on weekends //and get 50% of the amount you spent to make FREE weekend calls to any etisalat line!// And you get this week after week after week// So pick up your 0809ja phone //and start calling!// It’s your time to talk! //Offer opens to all new and existing easystarter and easycliq subscribers.//

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3.3. Data analysis 1 The analysis below demonstrates the application of Halliday & Matthiessen’s (2004) transitivity system to textual devices.

CL1 MyCustomer your smile is worth a thousand 'Thank Yous' Carier Pro.: Rel. attributive Attribute

CL2 Our celebration starts with you Actor Pro.: Material Goal

CL3 For 10 amazing years you have offered us the opportunity to serve you like no other Circum.: Extent Actor Pro.: Material Recipient Goal Circum.: Cause

CL4 This week as we celebrate a decade of fond memories we promise that Circum.: Location Senser Mental

CL5 the best is yet to come with the continuous roll out of new look MTN Walk-In-Centre… Actor Pro.: Ma- terial Goal

CL6 It is a pleasure to serve you Carier Pro.: Rel. attributive Attribute

Figure 2. Analysis of MTN Ad 1

CL1 MTN Kulturefest Lisabi CL2 Lisabi Cultural Festival Participant Participant

CL3 Let's go rock Egbaland Actor Pro.: Material Goal

CL4 It 's going to be a Y'ello Celebration Actor Pro.: Material Goal

CL5 as all Egbaland honours Lisabi the Great Behaver Pro.: Behavioral Behavior

CL6 From March 1st to 8th you too can be part of the Lisabi Festival Circum.: Extent Token Pro.: Rel. identifying Value

CL7 and experience Egba culture as well as innovative MTN products and services of full display Pro.: Mental Phenomenon Circum.: Accompaniment

CL8 It 's an experience Carrier Pro.: Rel. attrib. Attribute

CL9 that will surely enrich your life Pro.: Ma- Circum.: Manner terial

Figure 3. Analysis of MTN Ad 2

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CL1 wwwherever you are CL2 wwwhenever you wwwant Circum.: Location Carrier Pro.: Rel. attrib. Circum.: Location Senser Pro.: Mental

CL3 wwwhatever you need CL4 Get up to 1 GB freeeee Circum.: Matter Senser Pro.: Mental Pro.: Material Goal

CL4 it 's easy with easynet Carrier Pro.: Rel. attrib. Attribute Circum.: Manner

CL5 Get the internet plan of choice with easynet Pro.: Material Goal Circum.: Manner

CL6 Get 1 month free bonus data Pro.: Material Goal

CL7 when you buy any of our 1.5GB Actor Pro.: Material

CL8 Bonus [is] available instantly Carrier Pro.: Rel. attrib. Attribute Circum.: Manner

CL9 Bonus available in the following months after purchase can be used only on weeknights and weekends Actor Pro.:Material Circum.: Location

CL10 Pick up your easynet data SIM and USB modem at any etisalat experience centre Pro.: Material Goal Circum.: Location

CL11 Text 'help' to 229 Pro.: Material Goal Circum.: Location

Figure 4. Analysis of Etisalat Ad 1

CL1 9javaganza CL2 enjoy free weekend calls Participant Pro.: Mental Phenomenon

CL3 get 50% bonus of airtime spent CL4 it 's you time to talk Pro.: Material Goal Value Pro.: Rel. ident Token

CL5 From now till simply make as many calls on weekends 31st March Pro.: as you wish Circum.:Extent Material Goal Circum.:Location

CL6 and get 50% of the amount you spend to make FREE weekend calls to any etisalat line Pro.: Material Goal Circum.: Location

CL7 And you get this week after week after week Actor Pro.: Material Goal Circum.: Location

CL8 so pick up your 0809ja phone CL9 and start calling! Pro.:Material Goal Pro.: Material

CL10 It 's CL11 Offer opens to all new and existing easystarter and Value Pro.: Rel. ident easycliq subscribers Actor Pro.: Material Goal

Figure 5. Analysis of Etisalat Ad 2

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The study, as expressed in the Results section, further translates the Transitivity elements of the analyses in Figures 2, 3, 4 and 5 to tables and graphs. These tools display the language choice frequencies in terms of Processes and Circumstantials as functional in MTN and Etisalat communications.

3.4. Data analysis 2 Below is the list of word-formation processes observed in MTN and Etisalat ads.

Coinages Foremation Processes Original Lexemes MTN Ad 1: My Customer = my + customer my customer Yous = you + s you '-s'

MTN Ad2: Kulturefest = culture + fest culture festival Y'ello = yello + hello yellow hello

Etsalat Ad 1: wwwherever = ww + where + ever wherever wwwhenever = ww + when + ever whenever wwwant = ww + want want wwwhatever = ww + what + ever whatever freeeee = free + eee free easynet = easy + net easy net

Etisalat Ad 2: 9javaganza = 9ja + vaganza Nigeria extravaganza 0809ja = o8o + ja 080 Nigeria easystarter = easy + start + er easy starter easycliq = easy + cliq easy click

Figure 6. Morphological appreciations of MTN and Etisalat ads

4. Results This study displays the outcomes of both systemic applications and morphological processes in this section.

4.1. Outcomes of systemic applications Tables and graphs below reveal the Transitivity constituents of Processes and Circumstantials of MTN and Etisalat ads’ textual choices in their different recurrence capacities and patterns.

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Table 1. Analysis of Processes in MTN ads Table 2. Analysis of Processes in Etisalat ads Processes MTN Frequency Processes Etisalat Frequency Ad 1 Ad 2 Total Ad 1 Ad 2 Total Material 3 3 6 Material 7 7 14 Mental 1 1 2 Mental 2 1 3 Relational 2 2 4 Relational 3 2 5 Behavioral 0 1 1 Behavioral 0 0 0 Verbal 0 0 0 Verbal 0 0 0 Existential 0 0 0 Existential 0 0 0

Out of all the six Processes found in English, Table 1 reveals that only four of the goings-on are functional in the MTN ads, while Table 2 indicates three operational Processes in the Etisalat ads. Thus, the choices present Material, Mental, Relational, and Behavioral as the goings-on of the advertising communications. By implication, as Verbal and Existential Processes are not remarkable choices in both MTN and Etisalat ads, the Etisalat advertiser goes ahead to eliminate the deployment of Behavioral Process. The Process choices of the MTN Ad 1 and Ad 2 operate in similar frequencies. Those are the motivation for Material, Mental, and Relational Processes to recur as 3, 3; 1, 1; and 2, 2 points. In addition, the Behavioral term functions just once in Ad 2. The textual choices in Etisalat record the recurrent higher number of points because of the higher number of clauses employed in persuading the audience. Consequently, the recurrent points of Material Processes are 7 and 7 respectively, in Ad1 and Ad 2. Mental Processes operate in the ration of 2:1, whereas Relational Processes recount 3 and 2 points as shown in Table 2. Figure 7, as indicated below, juxtaposes the frequencies of the MTN and Etisalat ads’ textual choices computed in both Tables 1 and 2.

16 Frequency Processes 14 MTN Etisalat 12 Material 6 14 10 Mental 2 3 8 Relational 4 5 6 Behavioral 1 0 Frequency 4 Verbal 0 0 2 Existential 0 0 0 -2 0 2 4 6 8 Processes

Figure 7. Graphic representation of Processes’ frequency of MTN and Etisalat Ads

Figure 7 contains a table and a graph whose combination pinpoints MTN and Etisalat advertising communications, utilizing Material Processes at the highest frequencies of 6 and 14. That choice was followed by Relational Processes in the two telecommunications operators with 4 and 5 points. There are Mental Processes recurrences of 2 to 3. Although the figure points to the fact

15 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies that minor Processes of Verbal and Existential are irrelevant choices of persuasion, MTN still employs the Behavioral once as a communication point. In all these, one could infer that Material Processes occupy the highest relevant positions in the advertising of both MTN and Etisalat, which are seconded by Relational Processes. Significantly, these choices demonstrate the keen interest of MTN and Etisalat advertising practitioners in getting things done as well as making things happen as quickly as possible. Besides, another sphere of interest, as Figure 7 illustrates, is how to create unbroken relationships with the target audience.

Table 3. Analysis of MTN ads’ Circumstantials Table 4. Analysis of Etisalat ads’ Circumstantials Circumstances MTN Frequency Circumstances Etisalat Frequency Ad 1 Ad 2 Total Ad 1 Ad 2 Total Angle 0 0 0 Angle 0 0 0 Location 1 0 1 Location 5 3 8 Extent 1 1 2 Extent 0 1 1 Contingency 0 0 0 Contingency 0 0 0 Matter 0 0 0 Matter 0 1 1 Cause 1 0 1 Cause 0 0 0 Manner 0 1 1 Manner 3 0 3 Accompaniment 0 1 1 Accompaniment 0 0 0 Role 0 0 0 Role 0 0 0

The Transitivity system, as computed in Tables 3 and 4, unveils Circumstantials of Location, Extent, Matter, Manner, Cause, and Accompaniment as augmentation facilities to inspire readers. There are no choices regarding Angle, Contingency, and Role in the MTN and Etisalat texts. Alternatively, MTN does not utilize Matter so also does Etisalat reject Cause and Accompaniment as devices of manipulating subscribers. As exemplified below, Figure 8 represents the comparison of the MTN and Etisalat ads’ textual choices accounted for in Tables 3 and 4.

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Frequency 9 Circumstances MTN Etisalat 8 Angle 0 0 7 Location 1 8 6 5 Extent 2 1 4 Contingency 0 0 3 Matter 1 1 Frequency 2 Cause 1 0 1 Manner 0 3 0 Accompaniment 1 0 -1 0 2 4 6 8 10 Role 0 0 Circumstantials

Figure 8. Graphic representation of Circumstantials’ frequency of MTN and Etisalat ads

Apart from Extent that records 2 points in the MTN ads, other Circumstantials occur one time each. Seemingly, observations show different frequencies in the Etisalat ads. As the Circumstantial element of Location records a value of 8 and Manner 3; Extent and Matter manifest one point each. As such, the analyst could infer, as illuminated in Figure 8, that Location, Manner, and Extent are the most fascinating choices where MTN’s and Etisalat’s advertising experts utilize domain, quality, and period to sensitize recipients to consumption.

4.2. Outcomes of morphological procedures Moreover, the morphological procedures pinpoint combinations of letters in strange ways. These are: yous (creative over-generalization); y’ello (creative familiarization; wordplay fragmentation); and wwwant (creative association). One could recapitulate the formations as creative fallacy of some kinds because some of the lexemes serve only business purposes. There are also the formations of numbers-cum-letters such as 9ja, and 9javaganza known as alphanumeric codes. In a simple term, these are the communication choices of the ‘neological’ constructs of the analyzed MTN and Etisalat ads.

5. Discussion The researcher organizes the discursive patterns of MTN and Etisalat ads’ textual choices along the lines of Transitivity arrangements in relation to Process, the core element, as well as the systemic semantic implications of the clauses. These logical parameters follow after Halliday & Matthiessen (2014), Thompson (2014), and Dalamu (2018d).

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5.1 MTN ads

MTN Ad 1

There are six declarative clauses, as analyzed in Figure 2, in MTN Ad 1. Clauses one and six are relational of a kind because their contents are propagated as is. The Relational Processes project their Attributes as worth a thousand ‘Thank Yous’ and a pleasure to serve you. The former quan- tifies weight of gains that consumers receive from MTN over the years, which lead individuals to uncontrollable facial expressions. The Transitivity segments the subscribers’ favorable counte- nance as your smile, Carrier. A pleasure, as the Attribute for the later, relates readers to the feelings of the MTN team in providing telecommunications services for Nigerians. Mental Processes, starts with, have offered, and is… to come, are the goings-on of clauses two, three, and five. The advertising professional displays starts with as a pointer to the source of the acclaimed celebration operating as Actor. A reference to consumers is further introduced through have offered, which is an invitation proposed as Goal, the opportunity, for MTN. In that regard, subscribers have perceived MTN as capable of performing some telecommunications’ tasks useful to the people. Such duties tend to treat the public well through unwavering service deliveries. A time-line of 10 amazing years signals the degree of trust that consumers bestow on MTN, which seems incomparable to a favorable chance given to any firm in the telecommunications industry. To serve you better like no other and For 10 amazing years enhance the clause to draw the subscribers’ attention to the message. The linguistic organsour, you, us, and we create strong partnerships between MTN and the public. The Process, is… to come, fingers the future. The best, Actor, incites recipients toward good services expected later from the firm, which is illustrated by the continuous roll out of new centers across the country. The ad proceeds in clause five by utilizing a Mental Process, promise, an object of emotion, to excite readers. Concisely, the commitment is made during a week of festivity that MTN organizes to mark the 10 year anniversary. The affirmation, expounded earlier, is to get very close to the consumers’ reach, hence, the establishment of more satisfying sales outlets. As a strategy, before the communication appreciates the 10 years of the business existence in Nigeria, the ad first and foremost acknowledges consumers’ roles in ensuring that the operations

18 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies are successful through their loyalty. That condescending allegiance informs the planting of more branches in strategic locations. As a result of that notification, the MTN team, as the ad asserts, derives some pleasures in rendering nice services to subscribers. The motivation for services, one could submit, is financial gains from subscribers rather than services rendered. In other words, the cash received through the consumers’ patronage influences MTN consistent services to consumers.

MTN Ad 2

As depicted in Figure 3, MTN Ad 2 accommodates nine clauses divided into two fragmented clauses (clauses one and two), one imperative (clause three), and six declaratives (clauses four and nine). Being punctuated, clauses one and two do not have Processes, which can determine the kind of participating agents of their systems of Transitivity. Thus, MTN Kulturefest Lisabi and Lisabi Cultural Festival are labeled as Participants of nominal group (NG) pertinent identifications. Of importance are the constructs of Kulturefest and Lisabi. Apart from the contextual inclina- tions of the two structures, Kulturefest has three salient fundamentals. First, the K is an adoption phonetic sound from the consonant C (Adetugbo 1997). Second, fest is a pruning remnant of festival (Yule 1996). Third, Kulturefest as a compound device is a combination of two lexemes, that is, culture and festival (Zapata 2000, 2007). One can duly observe the peculiarity of the Material Process, go rock, in clause three with the Actor, Let’s. It is quite unusual for the imperative to have a subject element except in the case of Let’s, which is an indicator of suggestions. Besides, go rock, ‘s going to be, and will… enrich are other contents pointing readers to happening events, such as, a Y’ello celebration and your life. The Behavioral Process, honour, in clause five pinpoints a particular activity that all Egbaland, Behaver, yearly participates in. The advertising communication mentions From March 1st to 8th as the week of Lisabi the Great’s remembrance period. Can be and ‘s, Relational Processes, engage recipients to the cultural connection by identifying with the social commitment in terms of value, part of the Lisabi festival. To the advertiser, the readers’ involvement is further classified as an experience in relation to attribute as well as mental cognition. Although the ad focuses Lisabi Cultural Festival, the communicator also offers some portions for promotional intents. The analyst observes these

19 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies goals, augmented with as well as innovative MTN products and services on full display, and surely enrich your life. The former represents accompaniment in an additive status, while the later functions as manner to demonstrate quality. In the life of an individual or a community, one can emphasize, tradition seems to be vital. The aspect of one’s background and tradition cannot be discarded with a wave of hand (Goddard 2002). MTN might have discovered the certainty; and the company has in-turn fraternized products with Lisabi and, perhaps, other festivals in Nigeria. These various aspects of different traditional festivals are done specifically for the specific communities involved in the festivals. The MTN ad on the Lisabi Cultural Festival is done for the Egba people in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria. MTN does applaud the Egbas as a people with a rich cultural heritage. The MTN ad reminds the Egbas of how Lisabi has served as a symbol of protection and unity for the people. The aim of the lauda- tory ad is to build a harmonious relationship between MTN and the Egbas of which Olusegun Obasanjo, Wole Soyinka, Taofeek Dalamu, etc. are in the membership board.

5.2. Etisalat ads

Etisalat Ad 1

Etisalat Ad 1 has twelve clauses. On the one hand, seven of the clauses are declarative and five are imperative. On the other hand, the twelve clauses organize their contents in the forms of three Relational goings-on, two Mental goings-on, and seven Material goings-on. Apparently, the domi- nance of meaning potential is in Material Processes. The constituents of clauses one and three are very germane because the linguistic organs construct internal communicative rings. First, clauses two and three possess Mental Processes of wwwant and need respectively, which denote desideration (Thompson 2014). Observations locate the second communicative ring in the utiliza- tion of you as Senser(s) indicating participants of wwwant and need. Even the Relational Process, are, accommodates you as Carrier. The third ring is the choices of wwwherever, wwwhenever, and wwwhatever of Location and Matter representing Circumstances of place, time, and condition. Specifically, the www linguistic devices noticed in the constructs are connotations of the Internet website resources identified as World Wide Web (Dalamu 2018c). Moreover, the ad

20 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies deploys Material Processes in a repetitive mode such as Get up to, get, and get in clauses four, six, and seven. All these structures have their Goal(s) as 1 GB freeeee, the internet plan of your choice, and 1 month free bonus data plan, pointing readers to the quantity of benefits derivable from the advertised product. Freeeee is creativity as an advertiser’s language of stimulating the public to consumption. Buy, can be used, Pick up, and Text are other contents of materiality that exhibit the sole mission of advertising in clear terms. In addition, the places where consumers can purchase the plan as well as the appropriate time of its enjoyment are demonstrated as at any etisalat experience centre and on weekninghts and weekends. These pieces of information become necessitated in order to clarify doubts on the product’s availability and to ease the consumers’ stress on the purchase of the service. The communicator consoles subscribers with clauses twelve and five. That is, Text ‘help’ to 229 and it’s easy with easynet. Directing readers to 229 is perhaps an end to discomfort in purchasing the Internet plan, owing to the freedom that consumers could exercise by purchasing the product online. The convenience created alleviates some worries. To further satisfy the public, it’s easy with easynet culminates the message to give readers a peace of mind. Such means could make consumers relax to benefit from the campaigned Etisalat data plan.

Etisalat Ad 2

The eleven clauses of Etisalat Ad 2 contain one disjunctive grammar, seven imperative, and three declarative clauses. The punctuated structure, 9javaganza, is a lexical choice made up of alphanumeric code (Dalamu 2018b). That is, 9 (a number) plus ja plus vaganza (words). As decorated in Figure 6, 9javaganza is a leftover of the punctuated Nigerian extravaganza. From a systemic point of view, 9javaganza is a disestablished participant that cannot be associated with any Process of English. Consequently, 9javaganza has become a non-conformist participating linguistic facility. The textual choice demonstrates the advertiser’s fantastic conduct of benevolence to be lavished on the public, though the waste or recklessness is restricted to only Etisalat consumers. It is upon the intended ‘business’ profligacy, euphemized as generosity, that other ten clauses rest. The Mental Process, enjoy, in clause two creates emotional feelings for consumers on the

21 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies benefit of free weekend calls. Communicative facilities such as get, make, pick up, starts calling, and opens to are Material Processes that inspire readers to consumption. Ad 2 utilizes get repetitively about three times in clauses three, six, and seven as a means of sensitizing the public to gain extra 50% of airtime, obtainable in a consistent weekly basis. That is a probable reason for deploying … to make FREE weekend calls and …week after week as Goal and Circumstance of time respectively. To any etisalat line! is another Circumstance, but, of place, emphasizing Etisalat as a priority. The imperative markers make and pick up, in clauses five and eight, are two bedfellows. The Processes inform the target audience to grasp a telephone loaded with Etisalat line in order to commence communicating friends and relatives with your 0809ja phone. In that respect, the advertiser personalizes both the telephone and Etisalat line as consumers’ properties. That behavior signals an ownership culture that baptizes and entwines the audience into Etisalat family. It’s you time to talk, illuminated in clauses four and ten, pinpoints From now till 31-March as the duration of the proposed FREE weekend calls. The communicator employs opens to to indicate the people who are qualified to take advantage of the campaigned benefits. Thus, Actor, Offer, and Goal, all new and existing easystarter and easycliq subscribers display a sort of generalization of participants to be satisfied.

6. Conclusion One cannot deemphasize the relevance of choice in the language of advertising. It is on that plane that the researcher demonstrates how MTN and Etisalat deploy specific lexemes and registerial coinages to persuade the public to consumption. With the application of Transitivity system, the study reveals that Material Processes (e.g. start), as demonstrated in Figure 7, are the commonest choices of both MTN and Etisalat advertising communications. Nonetheless, Relational Processes (e.g. is) are next in function, which are followed by Mental Processes. In the domain of communication augmentation, MTN and Etisalat utilize Location in terms of time and place to sensitize readers. To a limited degree, the Circumstance of Manner and Extent play some roles as choices of excitements. Although the two communication firms employ similar conceptual terminologies in constructing relationships with subscribers, their lexemic choices are not the same. For instance, MTN uses go, ‘s going to be, and experience, while Etisalat deploys get, get up to, and enjoy to inspire the target audience in order to patronize their goods and services. As well as innovative MTN products… and to any etisalat line! are Circumstantial choices that lay some emphasis on the firms’ goals. From a morphological perspective, the ads fascinate recipients through the poetic license leading to alphanumeric codes, creative fallacies, and word plays of perhaps undefined terms and indefi- nite sequences. Yet, one also observes dissimilarity in the freedom exemplified in their morphological mechanizations such as ‘Thank Yous’, Kulturefest, and Y’ello in MTN, and wwwhenever, 9jevaganza, and 0809ja in Etisalat. The analysis has briefly offered an understanding to the nature of advertising texts in Nigeria. In turn, the effort could motivate advertising professionals, young scholars, and researchers to deepen their understanding about creativity in the advertising industry in this bloc of the universe.

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In addition to that, the study has demonstrated to readers the suitability of SFL as a virile and interpretative tool for advertising discourse choices. By extension, the outcomes could benefit stakeholders as recapitulated thus: To advertising professionals, the analysis could spur new choice of textual creation in the creativity industry, having obtained the knowledge of what is currently obtainable in the industry, as functioning within the Nigerian context. The document could assist manufacturing companies in calibrating the influence of ads on the target audience as that affects sales, thus, operating as a yardstick to quantify sales of products. This is obtainable by realizing the nature of textual choices that assist in generating more consumption of products. The recipients of these kinds of communications will understand the recklessness of advertising as a vehicle for convincing, shaping, and swaying readers’ thoughts in a designed/certain direction. Besides, the analysis will assist in the formulation of policy to adapt textual nuances as devices of leveraging an equal playing ground between communicators and recipients. The investigation could inspire government agencies to promulgate policies to regulate the activities of the advertising industry in ways that their persuasive strategies could contribute to peaceful coexistence that the world urgently needs and seeks rather than to mental-capitalize consumers. The research seems to have the capacity to channel a way for other cross-national and cross-continental studies in communication spheres in order to stimulate structural and contextual knowledge of the advertising industry. To reiterate, the study has facilitated the exposition of language students to SFL’s insights into processing advertising texts. It thus appears that this study might serve as a device to be incorpo- rated into computational linguistics. That is, it could encourage computer experts in collabora- tion with linguists to develop software that can account for advertising communication lexemes. However, such move has the strength to enhance cross-fertilization of interdisciplinary ideas in Digital Humanities.

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O’Halloran, K. L. 2008. Systemic Functional-Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA): Constructing ideational meaning using language and visual imagery. Visual Communication. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1470357208096210 (24 June 2017). O’Halloran, K. & Lim, F. 2014. Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis. In: C. D. Maier & S. Norris (eds.), Texts, Images and Interaction: A Reader in Multimodality, 137- 153. Berlin, GER: Mouton de Gruyter. O’Quinn, K. 2012. How Language Choices Can Make or Break Your Communication. http://www.writingwithclarity.com/wp/wp-content/Words_of_wisdom_Melcrum.pdf. (12 September 2014). Osuala, E. C. 2001. Introduction to Research Methodology. Owerri: African FEB-Publishers. Putz, M. (ed.). 1997. Language Choice. Studies in Language and Society. h t t p:// b e n ja m in. com/#catalog/books/impact.1/main. (29 November 2013). Ravelli, L. 2000. Getting started with functional analysis of texts. In: L. Unsworth (ed.), Researching Language in Schools and Communities 1: 27-63. Ross, D. Jnr. 1985. What surface-structure parsing can tell us about style. In: J. D. Benson & W. S. Greaves (eds.), Systemic Perspectives on Discourse XV, 225-240. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Schiffrin, D., Tannen, D. & Hamilton, H. E. (eds.). 2002. The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. New York: Blackwell Publishing. Tanaka, K. 1994. Advertising Language. A Pragmatic Approach to Advertisements in Britain and Japan. London: Routledge. Thompson, G. 2004. Introducing Functional Grammar. Great Britain: Hodder Arnold. Thompson, G. 2014. Introducing Functional Grammar. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. van Dijk, T. A. 2010. Discourse and Context. A Sociocognitive Approach. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Urbach, C. 2013. Choice in relation to context: A diachronic perspective on cultural valeur. In: L. Fontaine, T. Bartlett & G. O’Grady (eds.), Systemic Functional Linguistics. Exploring Choice, 300-317. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vestergaard, T. & Schroder, K. 1985. The Language of Advertising. New York, GB: Basil Blackwell. Williamson, J. 1978. Decoding Advertising. Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. New York: Marion Boyars. Wodak, R. & Meyer, M. (eds.) 2001. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: SAGE. Yule, G. 1996. The Study of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zapata, A. A. 2000. Handbook of General and Applied Linguistics. Mérida, Venezuela: Trabajo de Ascenso sin publicar. Zapata, A. A. 2007. Types of Words and Word-Formation Processes in English: Inglés IV. http://webdelprofesor.ula.ve/humanidades/azapata/materias/english_4/unit_1_ types_of_words_and_word_formation_processes.pdf. (18 June 2015).

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*** Dr. T. O. Dalamu earned a PhD from the University of Lagos, Nigeria, under a thorough supervi- sion of Prof. Adeyemi Daramola, with specialization in Systemic Functional Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, and Digital Humanities in relation, mostly, to advertising communications. Currently, Dr. T. O. Dalamu teaches English courses at Anchor University, Lagos, Nigeria.

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JAROSŁAW KRAJKA1 DOI: 10.15290/CR.2019.25.2.02 Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin ORCID ID: 0000-0002-4172-9960

Teacher language awareness and world Englishes – where (corpus) linguistics, digital literacy and teacher training meet

Abstract. In the rapidly changing world of today, the role of English as a global language is not to be left unnoticed in pre-service teacher training. Teacher language awareness, encompassing knowledge of language, knowledge about language and knowledge of students, needs to be expanded with the wider sociocultural context in which language education takes place in different parts of the world. At the same time, the changes in the very shape of English and the emergence of World Englishes, New Englishes, English as an International Language and English as a Lingua Franca call for skilful implementation of these concepts in the practice-oriented teacher training module. The paper reports upon a study aiming at joining corpus-based investigations, student-made research into sociocultural context of English learning and use, coursebook analysis and lesson plan evaluation and adaptation into a single Teaching English as an International Language course included in a graduate TEFL module. Results of the study indicate that the experimental treatment brought about statistically significant, though small in effect size, changes in language awareness of prospective teachers in a great number of aspects. Keywords: World Englishes, Data-Driven Learning, corpus linguistics, teacher language awareness.

1. Introduction While most university programmes dealing with language teacher training contain courses devoted to linguistics on the one hand and digital literacy on the other, it is rarely the case that they are actually integrated with the content of professional training to a sufficient extent. At the same time, the globalized world of contemporary language classroom or translation market neces- sitates enlarged language competence, increased awareness of standard and non-standard English, at least general knowledge of New Englishes and nativization processes happening in different parts of the world, which must involve sound linguistic background on the one hand and specific technical competences on the other.

1 Address for correspondence: Institute of German Studies and Applied Linguistics, Maria Curie-Skłodowska Uni- versity, Plac M. C. Sklodowskiej 4a, 20-031 Lublin, Poland. E-mail: [email protected]

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Our purpose in the present paper is to argue that corpus linguistics, digital literacy and teacher training are the three areas that should be intertwined to help increase prospective teachers’ awareness of English(es). The discussion will be substantiated by the findings from a corpus- assisted Teaching English as an International Language component in a graduate teacher training programme, showing how to integrate the three areas into a successful instructional module.

2. Teacher language awareness – towards the diversity of English(es) The issue of teachers’ language awareness of diversity of Englishes has entertained quite a lot of research (e.g., Carter 1995; Crystal 2010; Farrell & Martin 2009; Hazen 2001; Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2005; Rinvolucri 2006). Harmer (2007) mentions some factors which need to be considered while choosing the model of English to be taught in the classroom: • the wishes and needs of learners, • the variety teachers themselves use, • the availability of teaching/learning materials, • education authority policy. When reflecting on what kind of language input to provide in the classroom and how to use it for assessment purposes, Crystal (1999) points out that teachers may have to distinguish between production and reception skills – in terms of the former, ‘pedagogical conservatism’ is advised, which is about deciding to teach a particular variety and sticking to it. As for reception, Crystal (1999) insists on ‘pedagogical innovation,’ exposing learners to as many varieties of English as possible, which these days should not be too challenging (Matsuda 2003). When teaching English to non-native speakers who will use it in the English as an International Language context, Maley (2010) has a similar view, suggesting that the teacher should expose students to different Englishes in the comprehension mode, highlight that it is only one of many varieties of English but be very clear about teaching grammar and demand the production of only its standard variety. The fact that it is only British or American English that is used for grammar instruction and assessment benchmark for oral or written production does not mean that other Englishes should not be brought to light. Failure to bring this linguistic diversity into the language classroom can result in, as is claimed by Matsuda (2002), confusion, resistance or even astonishment of students when they are confronted with different types of English and its uses that divert from the Standard English (Inner Circle) model. At the same time, we need to remember that teacher language awareness is not only about knowledge of which English to teach and assess against. As defined by Hall (2011), teacher language awareness is the combination of three areas of knowledge: knowledge of the language (actual language facility); knowledge about the language (meta-linguistic knowledge and the ability to verbalise it) and knowledge of the students (the ability to see the effect of student characteristics on language instruction). Thus, all the three components need to be brought together in an effective language teacher training programme. Ideally, within a single subject, such as Teaching English

29 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies as an International Language as described below, the three perspectives need to be juxtaposed but also put aside to see how they are complementary rather than contradictory.

3. General picture of new Englishes (Crystal 2005) It is an imperative for language teachers to be up-to-date with the current changes in the language they are going to teach. Failure to become aware of how English is changing and in which directions the changes might be proceeding means that teachers are likely to teach obsolete language – either the one that they acquired themselves as learners a number of years before or the one that is “pre-packaged” for them in globally-published ELT coursebooks. Interesting changes in the role and status of English that we are experiencing nowadays should not be unnoticed in teacher training programmes. As David Crystal (2005) remarks, communities which are putting English to use are doing so in several different ways, which results in the emergence of Englishes (pluralized), not only World Englishes based on geographical or socio-historical criteria (countries belonging to the Commonwealth, for instance), but also New Englishes appearing in all those contexts in which English starts to play a paramount role in the society. According to Crystal (2005), a New English is not a homogeneous entity, with clear-cut boundaries, and an easily definable phonology, grammar and lexicon. Instead, it is a hybrid mixing English and native language(s), in different ways and to a different extent, ranging from single lexical borrowings, adapted or not, to several borrowings even resulting in a sentence being indis- tinguishable from standard English. A sentence might use so many words and constructions from a contact language that it becomes unintelligible to those outside a particular community. Those varying degrees of hybridization can be even visible in consecutive sentences of particular speakers in the same conversation, where, most probably, the familiarity with the topic and easiness of expressing oneself results in more or less unconscious language choices. An interesting example of this mixed-degree hybridization is visible in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. English-Malay code mixing (Crystal 2005: 166)

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In terms of vocabulary, borrowings from indigenous languages are especially noticeable, which is because the amount of borrowing from a local language is extremely sensitive to sociopolitical pressures. It is influenced by both the number of cultures which co-exist and the status which their languages have achieved (Crystal 2005). A word or a phrase from a well-established variety may be adopted by a New English and given a new meaning or use without undergoing any structural change, or, on the contrary, there may be adaptation processes at work, either the ones belonging to the structural pattern of English (e.g., compounding – car lifter, luggage lifter, book lifter, distinctive prefixation/suffixationendeavourance – , ruinification, cronydom, abscondee, wheatish, scapegoatism, word-class conversion - to aircraft, to slogan, to tantamount, the injureds, the deads or abbreviation, clipping and blending - d/o (‘daughter of ’), r/o (‘resident of’), admit card, by-polls) or the word formation rules of indigenous language(s). In terms of semantics, as David Crystal (2005) reports, there are many instances in which a word or phrase from a well-established variety is adopted by a New English and given a new meaning or use, without undergoing any structural change (heavy in the sense of ‘gorgeous’, brutal in the sense of ‘very nice’), thus, semantic shifts can be noticed maiden( name meaning ‘given name’ applied to males or linguist meaning ‘spokesman for the chief’). Finally, there are also many words which keep the same meaning, but display a different frequency of use compared with British or American English, such as the greater frequency of Jamaican bawl (‘shout’, ‘weep’). While vocabulary changes are, obviously, of interest to language teachers, they are not likely to result in much instruction going on, apart from, perhaps, the use of idiosyncratic examples for explaining word formation processes. At the same time, idiosyncratic grammatical structures appearing in New Englishes video subtitles, song lyrics, newspaper articles or ad slogans require much greater attention, since the linguistic character of grammar of New Englishes is more complex. On the one hand, there is little differentiation as for grammar and there is an impression of relative sameness. Grammar changes are much slower to enter the language than it is the case with vocabulary, mainly because grammars are based on written language which is generally more formal, takes educated usage as its corpus basis and is much more reluctant to welcome innovations. On the other hand, as the list of examples from Baumgardner (1990), Kachru (1994), Baskaran (1994) or Mesthrie (1992, 1993a, 1993b) brought below shows, variations are noted with respect to aspect, modals, negation, concord, pronouns, complementation and several other areas. While in some cases (e.g., reduplication or word order in questions) they might be accepted by learners as indicators of colloquial language without much influence on the rules grounded in their competence, many others require confrontation with standard usage and explicit explana- tion pointing out its idiosyncratic nature and possible sociocultural consequences of usage by learners in L2-speaking communities. • Myself I do not know him • That man he is tall • They two very good friends • I am understanding it now

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• I have been singing yesterday • She is crying why? • You stay here first, can or not? • You are coming to the meeting, isn’t it? • We waited-waited for him • equipments, luggages, furnitures, damages, aircrafts • a good advice/a luggage • more better/junior than • quick-quick, now-now, who-who, big big fish What becomes evident, then, is that there arises a need to find proper procedures for student teachers to gain awareness of how to confront such non-standard usage with more established examples, what particular standard of English is actually sought in the institution where they are most likely to work, what are the attitudes towards varieties of English in the target teaching context. While encountering such non-standard examples, student teachers need to know how to cope with them both during lesson preparation (e.g., to check their frequency, to isolate the very English it comes from) and implementation (if, for instance, such examples appear in a less predictable way).

4. Reconciling corpus linguistics, digital literacy and teaching skills – a training proposal

4.1. Implementing corpus-based procedures in a TEIL class Corpus linguistics and its corresponding language teaching area, Data-Driven Learning, have been flourishing for years, and it is no wonder that they can effectively enhance the impact of teacher training within a Teaching as an International Language context. To quote just a few studies, we have witnessed the use of small corpora to respond to students’ needs (Aston 1997) vs. large corpus concordancing (Bernardini 2000; de Schryver 2002); concordancing used to improve writing performance at lower (Yoon & Hirvela 2004; Gaskell & Cobb 2004) and advanced levels (Chambers & O’Sullivan 2004); grammar presentation (Hadley 2002) and rule inferencing (St. John 2001); vocabulary acquisition (Cobb 1997; Cobb 1998) and foreign language reading (Cobb et al. 2001; Horst et al. 2005). An interesting perspective, the one which is also seen on the horizon of the present study, is learner corpus self-compilation (Lee & Swales 2006). Even though there have been studies into the use of corpora in teacher training (e.g., Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2001; Leńko- Szymańska 2005; Kaszubski 2006), there have been few attempts to actually combine Data-Driven Learning procedures with context-based language instruction and buildup of global teaching skills. Since, as we claim elsewhere (Krajka 2015), building language teachers’ awareness and making them ready to deliver language instruction in multiple cultural contexts needs to go beyond the usual set of methodology-related concepts, ample reflection is needed on how sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, language policy and planning and educational practice are to be effectively brought together in a teacher training programme. Most importantly, as we try to demonstrate

32 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies in the present study, it is not enough to cover the usual set of concepts, theories and approaches in terms of English as a Foreign/Second Language. More importantly, teacher trainees need to see in practice the two sides of the language teaching reality in different parts of the world – on the one hand, the linguistic aspect, namely, the knowledge of the inter- and intralingual influence of English on the native language and vice versa, and, on the other hand, the effect of local conditions/organizational cultures/learning habits on the way a foreign language is taught and assessed. Teacher trainees might be involved in cross-linguistic analyses comparing, for instance, British and American English as Inner Circle countries, Jamaican or Singaporean English as Outer Circle countries or Spanish English (Spanglish) or Saudi English as Expanding Circle countries. Once such teacher-led investigations are done, for instance, with online corpora collected at Corpus. byu.edu (see Figure 2 below), teacher trainees can effectively gain searching skills based on the same query interface, yet changing corpora or subcorpora to gain different points of reference. This means not being confined to one particular corpus, but rather doing a kind of “semi-guided treasure hunt” task, in which teacher trainees are given tasks and are instructed in how to use a particular query interface (here, corpus.byu.edu), however, they are not told exactly which corpus to go to in order to find the very answers.

Figure 2. Freely available corpora demonstrating diverse Englishes collected at Corpus.byu.edu

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Quite understandably, as regards Expanding Circle countries, they are not likely to be represented in the freely available corpora. For that matter, the instructor would have to compile a teacher-made mini-corpus, for instance, out of newspaper articles, literature repositories, legislation databases, specialist discussion group postings and digests, equipment manuals, encyclopedia articles, which would adhere to a clear set of criteria in terms of a regional and diachronic variety of English, text type (spoken/written, news, fiction, legal texts etc.), text register, text purpose (general reference or specific purpose) or source authority. Learner training in corpus use (either ready-made, such as Corpus.byu.edu, or teacher-made), might go along one of the following procedures: • the “apprenticeship model” of classroom concordancing, which aims at promoting learning by example and experience, where corpus-based activities are carried out gradually, with T giving directions and asking additional questions, while Ss working in small groups and later reporting to the whole class (Jones 1991); • the three-step model comprising identifying which words to investigate (in this case items on the high-frequency PET word list); giving learners access to take away lexical information in hard copy (or else most of the lab hour was spent transcribing from the screen); building in motivation for considering each word in several sentence contexts (Cobb 1999); • the question-search-conclusion strategy: formulating the question: e.g., ‘Which preposition can be used after orario when speaking of a timetable for something?’; devising a search strategy; observing the examples and select relevant ones; drawing conclusions (Kennedy & Miceli 2001). Other language-related tasks successfully used in English for Academic Purposes studies (e.g., Gaskell & Cobb 2004; Marinov 2013) might be as follows: • Lexical cloze – completing gaps in sentences with selected options (e.g., multiple adjectives to be chosen from); • Colligation – matching verbs and prepositions to find patterns; • Learning more about the word – following guiding questions to find out more about selected words (e.g., how frequent it is, is it more frequent in oral or written language, is it formal or colloquial, what are its most frequent left/right collocates); • Analyse the differences – scrutinizing selected concordances to make conclusions about what makes similar words different – e.g., alone and lonely or packed and crowded; • Word-class gap-fill – completing texts with provided words, either giving them the nominal or verbal shape depending on the context, finding help through left/right context search in a corpus; • Corpus-based error correction – providing erroneous sentences (e.g., the ones containing frequent mistakes made by Polish learners of English) and a set of concordance lines (or instructions for corpus queries for students to find data themselves) to trigger correction.

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Figure 3. A sample corpus-based error correction task available at Lextutor (Gaskell & Cobb 2004)

Depending on how advanced teacher trainees are or how quickly they grasp concordancing procedures, possible avenues to extend the study of World Englishes via corpus-based tasks might encompass the following activities: 1. Students compile their own mini-corpora for use with IntelliText/TextSTAT from a clearly narrowed down domain (e.g., Wikipedia articles about Russian pop stars in English; Russian-based discussion forums in English). 2. Students extract samples of language (e.g., from tabloid English-language newspapers from two different Expanding Circle countries) and compare them to isolate key differences in usage or frequency using Lextutor’s Text-Lex Compare or IntelliText. 3. Students create tasks based on language problems that are isolated by the instructor from relevant literature (e.g., characteristic features of Russian English). 4. Students take one another’s tasks and try to solve them assisted by GloWBE corpus or a teacher-made corpus. 5. Students take the tasks from step 4 and try to solve them using a different corpus than before, afterwards, they are guided to make generalizations. 6. Students reach conclusions on how effective Data-Driven Learning is for studying World Englishes and for confronting their own writing pieces with either Inner Circle or Expanding Circle corpora.

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4.2. Framing language methodology in the sociocultural context Studying the linguistic characteristics of the English used in different countries of the world, be it Inner Circle countries other than the UK, Outer Circle or Expanding Circle countries, is only one side of expanding the context of English language instruction for teacher trainees. The other important sphere is the awareness of the sociocultural context in which English language education is taking place in a particular part of the world. This encompasses, among others, the status of English in the country, the social distance between the British or American culture and the native culture (Schumann 1976; Brown 1994), the attitudes towards L2 country and its inhabitants, the mutual interrelationships between English and native languages, local preferences for learning and teaching styles and strategies, the way English language instruction is organized at schools etc. While, obviously, it is impossible for teacher trainees to gain knowledge about every single country in the world, it is important for them to see how selected countries compare in terms of role and status of the English language and the organization of English language teaching. Doing individual research, finding and evaluating data sources, investigating legislation and school practice, examining discussion forums or social media grouping English language teachers from a particular country, seeking access to scientific articles on the topic, all enable teacher trainees to become independent researchers gaining awareness of the role societal and political factors play in the way a particular foreign language is taught and learnt, what status the language teacher can have, what aims can be realistically set for students to achieve. These objectives can be achieved in a Teaching English as an International Language class in multiple ways. Most importantly, teacher trainees are to conduct research on selected countries, prepare and deliver an in-class presentation followed by discussion on the contexts of English language learning and teaching.

TASK 1. FINDING OUT THE CONTEXT FOR LANGUAGE USE AND LANGUAGE LEARNING – COMPARATIVE RESEARCH OF SELECTED COUNTRIES

• Ss select two countries for individual research; • they investigate status of English, shape of English language teaching, relations between English and native languages, attitudes towards English in the country; • they gather data from various sources (country articles from World Englishes journal, reports from ministries/statistical offices/school examination boards, videos from YouTube); • they substantiate their discussion with examples of English-local language relationship (nativisation of English or transfer from English).

For language teachers, it is imperative to understand how coursebooks are responsive to the local needs for which they are targeted, or, on the contrary, how they achieve global reference and impact with no acknowledgement of local cultures of learning. At the same time, teacher trainees need to learn how to notice the “hidden curriculum” in the coursebook, the underlying teaching

36 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies and learning philosophy, the methodology that coursebook authors adhere to. Therefore, coursebook analysis for aspects of culture and language is another important task increasing teacher awareness and expanding upon their global teaching skills.

TASK 2. BUILDING TLA OF WEs – ANALYSING CBs FOR LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

• Ss select three coursebooks for the same target audience – ideally, from different publishers, if possible, both local and global ones; • they establish their own criteria for analysis of English(es) and cultures; • they focus on the coverage of different geographical areas and social strata and isolate ingredients of the target culture; • they analyse the function of various culture-loaded elements (texts, headings, pictures, recordings, titles); • they make generalisations on the image of language and culture promoted by the coursebooks, reaching conclusions on the most globalised ones; • they put the results into an essay form, with examples/screenshots/citations, which are later distributed to other teacher trainees via class Moodle for reflection and analysis.

The final important element of situated language instruction as advocated in the present study is work with lesson plans. Teacher-made lesson plans are a useful way for observing how methodology assumptions are operationalised into observable and comparable units. The way teachers educated in different countries use lesson openings and closings, the proportion of various forms of work (pair/groupwork vs. teacher-fronted lockstep vs. individual work), the ways grammatical structures and lexical expressions are introduced and practiced (deductively vs. inductively) or the way learners are assessed on a daily basis are best demonstrated in lesson plans. An important part of TEIL instruction aimed at preparing language teachers of tomorrow to meet challenges of teaching English in multicultural settings is analyzing, evaluating and adapting lesson plans. In the case of the study to follow, these were retrieved from an international MOOC in which the researcher took part himself. Alternatively, rather than use ready-made lesson plans, teacher trainees can be asked to make their own ones that would meaningfully exploit World Englishes to either expand target learners’ comprehension skills (oral or written) or make them aware of standard/non-standard features of the phonological, grammatical or lexical system of English.

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TASK 3. BUILDING TLA OF WEs – EVALUATING/ADAPTING LESSON PLANS OR DESIGNING LESSON PLANS BASED ON NEW ENGLISHES

• Ss design two different lesson plans (one focusing on listening comprehension and the other on reading skills) based on a selected New English/World English; • they use WE materials in the receptive mode, not for language production; • they learn how to assess the comprehensibility of the text and how to select task/s to achieve appropriate level of difficulty; • they are careful to design tasks in such a way so as not to locate task answers in too idiosyncratic phrases/constructions.

5. The study

5.1. The aims and context of the study A small-scale study was implemented in order to verify the feasibility of the abovementioned teacher training proposal aiming at expanding future teachers’ language awareness and encompassing the sociocultural and sociolinguistic dimensions in foreign language teaching. The main objective of the study was to see whether the application of the experimental programme joining corpus linguistics and World Englishes/English as a Lingua Franca with student independent sociolinguistic and sociocultural research and practical tasks of coursebook analysis and lesson plan design would lead to enhanced perception of different components of global teaching skills. A supplementary objective was to verify how feasible such an experimental Teaching English as an International Language course is, what problems or obstacles can be encountered during its implementation and what solutions can be proposed to solve or prevent them. The context for the study was a middle-sized private university in Warsaw, training future teachers of English in the extramural M.A. programme in English language and literature. The participants of the study were 20 students attending the teaching specialization. All of them completed first-cycle programme in English language teaching and were seeking M.A. to obtain full teaching qualifications. The group comprised 17 females and 3 males, half being 20-25 years of age, one- fourth over 35, with the remaining one-fourth spread evenly in the 26-30 and 31-35 age range. The teaching module at the university, among others, encompassed Teaching English as an International Language course spanning 20 hours in the winter semester of 2016/2017 academic year. The whole teaching module is visible in Figure 4 below.

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Winter term Summer term

“Psychology: Selected Issues” “Lesson Observation and Evaluation” “Pedagogical Theory: Selected Issues” “Language Testing” “Teaching Children and Adolescents” “ELT Materials Evaluation” “Teaching Adult Learners”

“New Trends in Language Education” “Success and Failure in Language Teaching” “Teaching English as an International “Autonomy in Language Learning and Language” Teaching” “Teaching English for Specific Purposes” “Information and Communication Technology”

Figure 4. Full listing of TEFL module components in the M.A. extramural programme

The syllabus of the experimental TEIL course comprised the topics aimed at building theoretical knowledge of major concepts, distinctions, typologies and approaches involved in teaching English worldwide (English as an International Language, Teaching English as an International Language, English as a Lingua Franca, English as an International Lingua Franca, Lingua Franca Core, World/New Englishes, Circles of English), the practical skills of planning, delivering and evaluating instruction to multinational students (adapting materials, differentiating instruction, evaluating coursebooks, developing materials, assessing learners, investigating status of English) and attitudes (openness, tolerance, respect for diversity, adherence to standards). The full list of topics can be seen in Figure 5 below:

1. Sociocultural context of FLA 2. English as a global language 3. Changing English, World Englishes, regional varieties 4. Studying Englishes with corpora – corpus-based procedures in TEIL 5. Diverse contexts for ELT – ESL and World Englishes. Status of English in different countries 6. EIL language teacher: skills, competences, training, materials 7. ELF and culture. Teaching foreign languages in an intercultural world 8. Incorporating World Englishes and culture in curriculum design and lesson planning 9. Materials and aids in ELF. Culture and language in EFL coursebooks 10. Student presentations: reading/listening comprehension tasks based on non-British varieties/coursebook analysis of language and culture/

Figure 5. Syllabus for Teaching English as an International Language graduate course

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5.2. Design and procedure The study comprised teaching a TEIL course with the use of selected interventions as described above: corpus-based linguistic investigations, student independent research into selected countries, lesson plan adaptation and evaluation and coursebook analysis. All these were interspersed with regular topics of the course as indicated above. At the beginning of the course the participants were administered a self-assessment survey to evaluate their perceived level of abilities within different components of global teaching competence (Appreciating values and cultures, Seeking standards and promoting diversity, Global teaching skills, Selecting resources and adapting materials). The participants were supposed to assess their skills on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 denoted “I feel completely unprepared to do that”, while 5 meant “I feel very confident about it”. Exactly the same survey was repeated at the end of the course to assess possible change in the perceptions of participants and assess the impact of the course. The data were processed with SPSS package version 24.

5.3. Results and findings As it is demonstrated in the tables below, the participants initially assessed different components of global teaching competence around the mid-point value (3) in the five-point scale (Mean BT – before treatment). The mean values ranged between 3 and 4, none of the components exceeded 4.0 (the highest scores were reported for statement 5 – “I can avoid bias or discrimination in my expression on the perceived roles of males and females in the culture of my students” and statement 7 – “I can notice and appreciate my students’ experiences in their own culture and in other cultures”). The reason for that might be the focus on intercultural teaching and Intercultural Communicative Competence in the teacher training programme at the B.A. level as well as general sensitivity to gender equality and family roles in the contemporary society. However, some areas of competence clearly fall behind – the ability to make use of historical/economical/technological factors influencing the relationship between L1 and L2 (statement 10 – 2.69), doing linguistic research (statement 13 – 2.94), noticing the gap between mother culture and target culture and predicting its consequences on teaching (statement 28 – 2.88) and designing classroom materials based on New Englishes (statement 40 – 2.88). This finding shows how an experimental programme within the Teaching English as an International Language course needs to expand the socio-cultural context of language teaching skills on the one hand and equip teacher trainees with the practical abilities of evaluating, planning and adapting instruction (either in terms of lesson plans, materials or activities) to fit the local cultures of learning on the other. These important findings were to be used in the design of quasi-experimental treatment.

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Table 1. Descriptive statistics (means, standard deviation before and after treatment and change)

B1. Appreciating values and cultures

Mean Mean SD SD Change BT AT

I can identify the expected variety of English 3.37 1.63 4.13 1.09 0.75 in the institution where I teach.

I can recognise the value and belief systems 3.25 1.34 4.31 0.79 1.06 that are a part of the culture of my students.

I can use techniques that do not reinforce 3.56 1.41 4.50 0.73 0.94 stereotypes of any culture, including the culture of my students.

I can suit the expected level of participation 3.19 1.22 3.94 1.06 0.75 of my students in a task to the characteristics of their culture.

I can avoid bias or discrimination in my 4.0 1.32 4.50 0.73 0.50 expression on the perceived roles of males and females in the culture of my students.

I can use techniques which connect specific 3.31 1.25 4.19 0.75 0.88 language features (e.g., grammatical categories, lexis, discourse) to cultural ways of feeling, thinking and acting.

I can notice and appreciate my students’ 4.0 1.32 4.69 0.48 0.69 experiences in their own culture and in other cultures.

I can draw on my students’ cultural 3.56 1.41 4.38 0.72 0.81 experiences by giving them an opportunity to express these in oral or written tasks.

I can withdraw from imposing a values 3.25 1.06 3.88 0.72 0.63 system of either English or my own on my students.

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B1. Appreciating values and cultures

Mean Mean SD SD Change BT AT

I can identify and make good use of 2.69 1.08 3.81 0.91 1.12 historical/economical/technological factors influencing the relationship between English and the language of my students.

I can promote students’ understanding 3.0 1.26 3.94 1.0 0.94 of how pragmatic norms can differ cross- culturally.

I can identify my students’ motivations, 3.5 1.26 4.38 0.72 0.88 beliefs and practice opportunities outside class.

I can do research prior to class to investigate 2.94 1.29 4.0 1.03 1.06 target students’ learning characteristics.

B2. Seeking standards and promoting diversity

Mean Mean SD SD Change BT AT

I can use my own English in writing and 3.88 1.09 4.25 0.77 0.38 speaking consistently according to one adopted standard (e.g., RP, American English).

I can evaluate my students’ oral and written 3.56 1.21 4.06 0.77 0.5 performance according to the standard expected in my institution.

I can appreciate my students’ attempts to find 3.56 1.21 4.31 0.87 0.75 diverse listening and reading opportunities in English.

I can explain to my students major 3.44 1.36 4.19 0.83 0.75 differences between key varieties of English (e.g., between British English and American English).

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B2. Seeking standards and promoting diversity

Mean Mean SD SD Change BT AT

I can recognise the value of linguistic 3.25 1.29 4.0 0.89 0.75 diversity of language input in receptive skills instruction.

I can reconcile the need for diversity with 3.0 1.37 3.81 0.91 0.81 the need for establishing a standard for my students.

I can tell the difference between standard 3.13 1.5 4.06 1.18 0.93 and non-standard examples of usage.

I can select appropriate examples of usage for 3.63 1.20 4.38 0.62 0.75 grammar/vocabulary presentation.

I can give recognition to other languages 3.44 0.96 4.31 0.60 0.87 spoken by English speakers.

I can exemplify and appreciate English- 3.5 1.15 4.38 0.72 0.87 language interactions of non-native speakers.

B3. Global teaching skills

Mean Mean SD SD Change BT AT

I can set objectives that are equally 3.25 1.34 4.13 0.72 0.88 achievable for students in a multi-cultural class.

I can diagnose and analyse the needs of 3.13 1.45 4.13 0.72 1.0 students in a multi-cultural class.

I can present lexical or grammatical items 3.13 1.36 4.0 1.03 0.88 in such a way so as to reach students coming from different cultures.

I can use organisational forms of work 3.19 1.17 3.94 0.68 0.75 in relevance to the learning habits and preferences of students coming from different cultures.

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B3. Global teaching skills

Mean Mean SD SD Change BT AT

I can see the gap between my own culture 2.88 1.09 4.0 0.63 1.12 and the culture(s) of my students and predict its potential positive/negative consequences on my teaching.

I can group international students in a way 3.06 1.12 4.0 0.82 0.94 that assures effective learning.

I can level out possible disparities between 3.06 1.24 4.06 0.68 1.0 different cultures of my students.

I can adapt my language instruction to 3.19 0.98 4.13 0.72 0.94 respect the local culture of learning.

I can identify my strengths and weaknesses 3.88 0.81 4.38 0.62 0.5 as a native/non-native teacher of English.

I can establish effective communication 3.56 1.26 4.25 0.68 0.69 code with my students, also at lower levels (simplified L2, students’ L1).

B4. Selecting resources and adapting materials

Mean Mean SD SD Change BT AT

I can make use of specimens of both high 3.19 1.05 4.19 0.91 1.0 and low English culture in a way relevant to students coming from different cultures.

I can introduce interesting people from 3.13 1.31 3.81 0.98 0.68 different ethnic groups and their views and opinions (e.g. novels, articles, news reports) as well as from British or American points of view.

I can offer opportunities for language/ 3.19 1.11 4.0 0.82 0.81 cultural/critical awareness that help learners to reflect on their own use of language as well as those of others.

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B4. Selecting resources and adapting materials

Mean Mean SD SD Change BT AT

I can provide materials that expose my 3.13 1.20 3.69 0.79 0.56 students to different varieties of language (e.g. social, ethnic, gender, age).

I can provide materials that offer 3.06 1.29 4.06 0.77 1.0 opportunities to observe effective ways of communication with people of various backgrounds and value systems.

I can evaluate and select New Englishes texts 3.06 1.24 4.0 0.73 0.94 and recordings in accordance to my students’ needs.

I can design reading comprehension and 2.88 1.36 3.94 0.93 1.06 listening comprehension tasks in such a way so as to make tasks based on New Englishes texts achievable for my students.

On the other hand, as could be expected, the self-assessment of components of intercultural teaching competence exhibited by teacher trainees after treatment (Mean AT) generally rose, by a differing figure, ranging from around 0.5 to 1.12. This shows steady increase of awareness of different aspects involved in planning, implementing and evaluating situated language teaching, most notably, appreciation of values and cultures, awareness of standards and diversity, global teaching skills and materials evaluation and adaptation. This is a promising figure for future studies of experimental nature, which could use appropriate triangulation of data with teacher trainees’ self- assessment cross-checked with observation for assessment of how they actually teach. There is one figure that requires greater mention at this point – an exceptionally low increase of 0.38 was recorded for statement 14 – ‘I can use my own English in writing and speaking consistently according to one adopted standard (e.g., RP, American English)’. It is evident that greater focus on the linguistic character of English, not only New Englishes, but also “old” varieties such as American English or Australian English is needed in much more systematic way. The linguistic component of the M.A. in English language teaching could be the appropriate place to establish such a systematic basis on which language teaching skills could be built. Apart from descriptive statistics and means data indicated above, it is essential to apply appropriate statistical calculations to see whether there is a positive relationship between the participation in the quasi-experimental programme and self-assessment of specific components of global teaching competence, and whether the increase is of statistical significance, i.e., whether it is not

45 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies attributable to chance. For this to happen, self-assessment data of participants were entered into SPSS version 24 program and subjected to the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test. The test (also known as the Wilcoxon matched pairs signed ranks test) is designed for use with repeated measures; that is, when the same participants are measured on two occasions, or under two different conditions. Here, the same group of teacher trainees had their self-assessment of global teaching competence probed into before and after the quasi-experimental treatment. As a result, it turns out that for as many as 15 (out of 40) can-do statements from the instrument the statistical significance was equal or lower than 0.005, as indicated in the table below, which shows that the increase in the self-rating of these competences was not subject to pure chance, but was systematically motivated. While, obviously, there are certain intervening variables that could contribute to the increase in teacher trainees’ target language awareness, the participation in experimental treatment might have significantly contributed to that. Moreover, it needs to be mentioned that had the significance level been set at a less stringent figure of 0.10, it is only statement 14 that would not prove to be statistically significant. This finding might also corroborate the assumption that there is a relationship between participation in research-based and skill-oriented TEIL instruction as described above and the increased self-assessment of global teaching skills and target language awareness. However, the effect size (Cohen’s r, Cohen 1988) for all of the cases above proved to be small (r ≤ 0.1), which suggests great caution needs to be taken before regarding the increase in self-assessment as high (which might be suggested only by descriptive statistics as demonstrated in Table 1).

5.4. Pedagogical implications and limitations of the present study The present study is quasi-experimental in nature, however, due to its certain limitations the results are to be treated with a great amount of caution as highly preliminary. Most importantly, the treatment could not be randomized, with a control group as a point of reference for an experimental group due to the fact that the teaching specialization encompasses only one group in this particular university. Moreover, data triangulation was not accomplished due to logistical reasons – while it would be interesting to actually observe participants using the skills acquired during the experimental treatment in instruction, undertaking classroom observation was abandoned as unfeasible since they were in the extramural programme and came from very geographically dispersed locations. Moreover, not all participants were actually practicing teachers, which would make the situation of different student teachers difficult to compare. Finally, the researcher bias could not be avoided at that point – due to shortage of teacher training courses at this particular institution, the present researcher is commissioned to teach not fewer than two different courses with the experimental group each semester over the period of two years. This, naturally, largely influences student involvement and their self-assessment. Even though the present study had only diagnostic value, intended to check the feasibility of the experimental treatment, find organizational pitfalls and test-drive the combinatory approach adopted in the course, it does yield some interesting points for further implementation and study.

46 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies 40B 40B - 40A -2.850b 0.004 0.089 38B - 38A -2.701b 0.007 0.0844 36B - 36A -2.754b 0.006 0.086 35B – 35A -2.598b 0.009 0.078 31B - 31A -2.877b 0.004 0.090 30B - 30A -2.873b 0.004 0.090 29B - 29A -2.879b 0.004 0.090 28B - 28A -3.145b 0.002 0.098 23B - 23A -2.807b 0.005 0.088 22B - 22A -2.889b 0.004 0.090 15B - 15A -2.060b 0.039 0.064 13B - 13A -2.913b 0.004 0.091 10B 10B - 10A -2.842b 0.004 0.089 4B - 4B 4A -2.807b 0.005 0.088 2B - 2B 2A -3.022b 0.003 0.094 Z Asymp. Sig. (2-tailed) Effect size (r) a. Wilcoxon signed rank test. Basedb. negative on ranks.

Table 2. Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test results for the research sample

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Most importantly, it can be concluded that linguistics and digital skills training can expand the teacher’s skillset for more effective instruction, while changes in the status, role, perception, shape of the English language call for ample focus on NEs/WEs in the language classroom. A wider view on teacher language awareness needs to be adopted in the era of increased mobility, migrations or job openings abroad. In the present case, TLA is built by a combination of language data analysis, coursebook analysis, sociopolitical context and classroom materials development. Thus, the integration of theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics and foreign language methodology can be achieved to increase English language teacher’s mindset.

6. Conclusion The quasi-experimental treatment revealed some important dilemmas of Teaching English as an International Language instruction that would need to be resolved and subjected to empirical investigation in future studies. First of all, should such courses head for Teaching English as an International Language, with the linguistic focus on Englishes, or, on Teaching English in International Contexts, namely on the way methodology is adapted to fit local contexts? As a result, to what extent should instruction be focused on knowledge and attitudes and to what on pedagogical skills, with either linguistic aspects of EIL/ELF/WE or pedagogical abilities of materials evaluation/adaptation becoming the centre of training? For most effective build-up of global teaching skills, TEIL focus would need to reappear in other components of the teacher training module. Since the participants were taught also other teacher training courses by the same researcher, spreading TEIL instruction across the whole module was possible (Lesson Observation, ELT Materials Evaluation, Language Testing). However, in other institutions this might not be the case, hence, instruction would need to be relegated to a dedicated TEIL class. Moreover, the question arises how explicit instructors should be about expanding global teaching skills, whether such an explicitly stated purpose would actually reflect needs of participants, and how to encompass this in assessment. These dilemmas would surely continue while similar studies are executed in the future. Despite encountering a certain number of limitations, it might be concluded that we have at least managed to sketch the pathway to improved teacher training, encompassing awareness of New/World Englishes, research-based approach, corpus investigations and sociocultural context assessment in a single Teaching English as an International Language course. It is hoped that future studies would give clear answers to the questions and dilemmas posed above, and language teacher training will successfully benefit from other related disciplines such as sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, language policy and planning for more comprehensive instruction increasing employability of university graduates.

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Hadley, G. 2002. Sensing the winds of change: An introduction to Data-Driven Learning. RELC Journal 33(2): 99-124. Hall, G. 2011. Exploring English Language Teaching. Language in Action. London: Routledge. Harmer, J. 2007. The Practice of English Language Teaching. Harlow: Longman. (Original work published 1983). Hazen, K. 2001. Teaching about dialects. ERIC Digest. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ E D 45 6 6 74.p d f. (30 August 2016). Horst, M., Cobb, T. & Nicolae, I. 2005. Expanding academic vocabulary with a collaborative online database. Language Learning & Technology 9(2): 90-110. Johns, T. 1991. Should you be persuaded: two samples of data-driven learning materials. English Language Research Journal 4: 1-16. Kachru, B. 1994. English in South Asia. In: R. Burchﬁeld (ed.), Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. V. English in Britain and Overseas, 497-553. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaszubski, P. 2006. Web-based concordancing and ESAP writing. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 41: 161-193. Kennedy, C. & Miceli, T. 2001. An evaluation of intermediate students’ approaches to corpus investigation. Language Learning & Technology 5 (3): 77-90. Krajka, J. 2015. Towards target language awareness of English language teachers – three stories of teacher education projects. Journal of Education 4(1): 45-51. http://journal.ibsu.edu.ge/index.php/sje/article/view/662/555. (1 September 2018). Lee, D. & Swales, J. 2006. A corpus-based EAP course for NNS doctoral students: Moving from available specialized corpora to self-compiled corpora. English for Speciﬁc Purposes 25: 56-75. Leńko-Szymańska, A. 2005. Korpusy w nauczaniu języków obcych. In: B. Lewandowska- Tomaszczyk (ed.), Podstawy językoznawstwa korpusowego, 221-239. Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. 2001. Acquisition of lexis, language corpora and foreign language teaching. In: B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk & I. Czwenar (eds), A New Curriculum for English Studies. Piotrków: College Press. Maley, A. 2010. The reality of EIL and the myth of EFL. In: C. Gagliardi & A. Maley (eds.), EIL. EFL, Global English: Teaching and Learning Issues vol. 96, 25-44. Bern: Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers. Marinov, S. 2013. Training ESP students in corpus use – challenges of using corpus-based exercises with students of non-philological studies. Teaching English with Technology 13(4): 49-76. Matsuda, A. 2002. ‘International understanding’ through teaching world Englishes. World Englishes 21(3): 436-440. Matsuda, A. 2003. The ownership of English in Japanese secondary schools. World Englishes 22(4): 483-496. Mesthrie, R. 1992. Lexicon of South African English. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press.

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Mesthrie, R. 1993a. English in South Africa. English Today 33: 27-33. Mesthrie, R. 1993b. South African Indian English. English Today 34: 12-16. Rinvolucri, M. 2006. What sort of standard does English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) need to reach? The Teacher 12(44): 35-36. Schumann, J. 1976. Social distance as a factor in Second Language Acquisition. Language Learning 26(1): 135-143. St. John, E. 2001. A case for using a parallel corpus and concordancer for beginners of a foreign language. Language Learning & Technology 5(3): 185-203. Yoon, H. & Hirvela, A. 2004. ESL student attitudes towards corpus use in L2 writing. Journal of Second Language Writing 13: 257-283.

*** Jarosław Krajka, Director of Institute of German Studies and Applied Linguistics at Maria Curie- Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. He has a Ph.D. degree in Computer-Assisted Language Learning and a habilitated doctor degree in EFL teacher training. He authored two books on CALL (English Language Teaching in the Internet-Assisted Environment and The Language Teacher in the Digital Age) and co-authored two more on EFL methodology (with Hanna Komorowska, Monolingualism – Bilingualism – Multilingualism. The Teacher’s Perspective) and intercultural communication (with Weronika Wilczyńska and Maciej Mackiewicz, Komunikacja interkul- turowa, Wprowadzenie). He is the editor-in-chief of a Scopus-listed journal Teaching English with Technology (http://tewtjournal.org).

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ANNA LISIECKA1 DOI: 10.15290/CR.2019.25.2.03 The Philological School of Higher Education Wroclaw, Poland ORCID ID: 0000-0002-1314-4332

Comparing multimodal film texts. The case of the movie Fame (1980) and its remake Fame (2009)

Abstract. This paper focuses on the issue of comparison of two movies linked by the relationship of remaking. Its specific aim is to show that the complexity of multimodal texts, to which filmic texts and therefore remakes belong, does not prevent the analyst from examining the contrastive elements of such films and multimodal film texts in general. As a corollary, the present paper outlines a framework for a comparative multimodal analysis of two movies, the relevant illustrations coming from Fame (1980) and its remake Fame (2009). The basis of our comparative analysis is the narrative-compositional structure of filmic texts as discussed and amply illustrated in Post (2017). The sample multimodal comparative analysis presented in the last section of this paper relies on the selected instruments of Post’s (2017) proposal, Krzeszowski’s theory of contrastive analysis (1967, 1990) and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) multimodal discourse analysis. This approach to film texts is compatible with Tabakowska’s (2001) theory of cognitive translation, the main theoretical concept of which is Langacker’s (1991) image schema, well fitting the aforementioned compositional level and the narrative-compositional of filmic texts. It is believed that with the instruments selected from the works enumerated above, it was possible to construct an interpretive model capable of revealing relevant differences and similarities between two multimodal filmic texts linked by the relationship of remaking. Keywords: remake, film text, narrative-compositional structure, multimodality, multimodal text analysis.

1. Subject matter and the research perspective The aim proper of this paper is to present a model of a comparative analysis of multimodal film texts. The illustrations and support for our model come from the movie Fame (Alan Parker 1980) and its remake Fame (Kevin Tancharoen 2009). From the viewpoint of the relationship of equivalence, the source film and its remake represent the case of two texts linked by the relation in question. In the presented model of comparative analysis the content of the relationship of equivalence can be adequately defined in terms of Langacker’s (1991) image schemas.

1 Address for correspondence: The Philological School of Higher Education, ul. Sienkiewicza 32, 50-335 Wrocław, Poland. E-mail: [email protected].

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The foundation of the proposed model of comparative analysis is the movies’ narrative-compositional structure. As regards the view of general internal structure of texts, it has been abstract- ed from the literary and linguistic genological researches of Skwarczyńska (1965), Gajda (2008), Witosz (2005), Ostaszewska & Cudak (2008), and Post (2014). For the comparative framework outlined in this paper, we have followed the theories proposed by Krajka & Zgorzelski (1974), and Post (2017). The former proposal has been offered for analyses of literature, while the latter for analyses of film texts. We view movies as multimodal texts, i.e. texts that use three semiotic codes or modes - pictures, sounds and language. The three jointly create the multimodal messages. More precisely, in the movies the message for the viewers emerges from the message chunks composed of moving pictures, language, and sounds (cf. Bateman & Schmidt 2012; Burn 2013; Wildfeuer 2014; Post 2017). The multimodal parts of our analysis have been backed up by the researches of such scholars as Kress and Van Leuwen (2006), Burn (2013), Wildfeuer (2014), and Bateman (2014) who advocate the multimodal approach to film texts as an adequate method for film text interpretations. The proposed model of comparative analysis reveals the contrastive aspects of the selected film texts with the instruments borrowed from the works by such outstanding Polish contrastivists as Jacek Fisiak, Tomasz P. Krzeszowski, Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Aleksander Szwedek, to name the main scholars. In particular, the proposal of this paper applies the basic principles of the contrastive analysis as elaborated by Fisiak (1991), Krzeszowski (1967, 1992), and Morciniec (2014). The central theoretical tools of this approach to comparison of languages are the three-step comparative procedure, Tertium Comparationis and the relationships of equivalence. The present paper consists of three basic parts. In the following section, 2, we discuss the foundations of film text analysis. Section 3 surveys the specific, selected instruments of comparative analysis of film texts. Section 4 is devoted to an exemplary comparison of the selected movies.

2. Foundations of film text analysis The idea that films are texts is evidenced by different explanations and definitions, which extend from metaphorical to non-metaphorical ones. For instance, Garry Gillard (2016, online) adheres to the former view. He maintains that “[…] the notion of ‘film as text’ is a metaphor drawn from the idea of reading a book. It suggests that in many ways reading a book is like watching a film, and that we might take some of the things we know about the one and apply them to the other”. We follow the non-metaphorical understanding of the concept of text as explained in detail in Post (2017). The aspect that is common for both literary and non-literary texts is their general internal structure (see Post 2013, 2017). It consists of the same levels shared by language and film texts. However, they do not have the same hierarchical structure. Depending on the scholar’s goal, a particular level can be the center and enter the interaction with the other levels. For the purpose of our comparative analysis we chose the narrative-compositional structure as central to films of all narrative genres.

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The film text structure is both linear and hierarchical. The general narrative-compositional structure has its origin in ancient times, specifically, in Aristotle’s claim that a good story has its beginning, middle and end (Aristotle 1983 [ca. 335 BC]). However, his suggestion is not detailed enough for the compositional analysis of movies. As a result, we have adopted the elaborate divisions by Krajka & Zgorzelski (1974), who distinguished seven segments of the narrative: PROLOGUE, EXPOSITION, INCITING MOMENT, DEVELOPMENT OF THE ACTION, CLIMAX, DENOUEMENT and EPILOGUE. As regards the overall compositional structure of film texts, the highest level of their narrative-compositional structures consists of three elements, such as the opening metaframe, text proper and the closing metaframe (see Post 2017). For our detailed comparative analysis, the theory of MOVES and Steps by Swales (1990) has also been adopted. According to this point of view, the metaframes and the text proper consist of their MOVES, and MOVES in turn have their representation in Steps, which create the ultimate level of the compositional hierarchy (see Post 2017). The enumerated compositional segments are correlated with the themes of the film text. After Post (2017), two understandings of themes are recognized in this paper. According to the first one, themes are the contents of each compositional segment. As a corollary, the themes of bigger compositional segments are the functions of the thematic content of smaller segments, that is, the themes of MOVES are the functions of the themes of their Steps. The second type of theme corresponds to the threads of the theory of literature. In the language text analysis the term motif is used, but for the purpose of multimodal film text analysis the term thread is more adequate. The thread-theme’s content has its representation in different, consecutive segments of the compositional structure. The complete content of thread-themes is the function of the content of the segments it which it is located. The aim of the multimodal research on text and discourse is to explain the use of different semiotic systems and tools in the creation of meaning (cf. Kress & van Leeuwen 2006). From this point of view, the multimodal film analysis attempts to illustrate the usage of linguistic and non-linguistic elements and explain their role in telling the film stories. The multimodality of film texts is connected with three main modes which correlate with what the cinema audiences do, that is they watch the movie – visual mode, they listen to what the characters say – linguistic mode, and listen to the background music and noises – auditory mode. From the multimodal perspective, visual modes have the primary role, because of the fact that it is through the visual narration that the story is told to the audience (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006). The indicated three modalities form message units of variable size called Multimodal Message Chunks (see Post 2017). Such an understanding of multimodality of film texts can account for the connection of all segments of the linear and hierarchical compositional structure with the three modalities. Thus MOVES have their multimodal character because of the multimodality of their

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Steps and metaframes and the segments of the text proper in turn, derive their multimodal character from the multimodality of their MOVES (see Post 2017).

3. The main instruments of comparative analysis of film texts Our model of comparative analysis of film texts is based on the three-step procedure of classi- cal contrastive analysis as proposed by Krzeszowski (1990). The three consecutive steps of the procedure in question are DESCRIPTION, JUXTAPOSITION and COMPARISON. In linguistics research, it is required that the DESCRIPTIONS of two compared objects be executed within the same theoretical framework. The elements of such a framework for film texts have been enumerated in the preceding section and in the present one. At the JUXTPOSITION stage of the comparative analysis decisions are made about the actual elements to be subjected to comparison. Finally, the similarities and differences between the selected elements are revealed at the last stage of COMPARISON. Two objects subjected to comparison have to share a common platform, so called Tertium Comparationis. The proposed model of the comparative analysis of film texts uses segments of narrative-compositional structure as shared grounds of comparison. To be more precise, for two compared movies this common platform can be any of the seven segments of texts proper (Krajka & Zgorzelski 1974). Thus PROLOGUES may be examined for similarities and differences at the level of their MOVES. Also MOVES with the same narrative content may be compared in terms of Steps they involve. The prosed interpretive model uses different Tertia Comparationis, all of them being segments of narrative-compositional structure. Two segments with shared Tertium Comparationis are bound by the relationship of equivalence. In the present paper the equivalence of the compared compositional segments of all level of narrative-compositional structure is described in terms of the concept of the image schemas (see Langacker 1991; Tabakowska 2001). The actual image schemas that we have applied come from the works of Kress & Van Leeuwen’s (2006:177). Kress and Van Leeuwen’ s mental constructs are directly linked with particular parts of the screen and film frame – LEFT-RIGHT, TOP-BOTTOM, CENTRE-MARGIN, FRONT-BACK. We have assumed that the enumerated film frame and screen dimensions are correlated with the following permanent information values: LEFT  GIVEN and RIGHT NEW; TOP IDEAL and BOTTOM  REAL; CENTRE SALIENT and MARGINs LESS or NON-SALIENT; FRONT  SALIENT and BACK LESS or NON-SALIENT.

4. Exemplary comparison of the selected movies Our exemplary comparison of the original movie and its remake focuses on their two aspects, which are (i) the selected equivalent segments of their narrative-compositional structures and (ii) the themes linked with these selected segments. Our exemplary comparative analysis is consistent with the general patterns of such comparisons as outlined in Post (2017).

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4.1. Comparison at the level of narrative-compositional structures The actually selected segments of the narrative-compositional structures of the two movies, that is Alan Parker’s Fame (1980) and its remake, Kevin Tancharoen movie of the same title, Fame (2009), are their EXPOSITIONS. According to the generally accepted view (cf. for example Krajka & Zgorzelski 1974; Głowiński et al. 1975), the role of EXPOSITIONS is to insert important initial background information about the film’s story, that is, information about the setting, characters’ backgrounds, prior events, general historical background, etc. In general EXPOSITIONS contain the elements that introduce the film’s actions. The texts proper of both selected movies have their EXPOSITIONS, contain the same elements crucial to the story told by the films, however, the remake manages them in a way different from its filmic predecessor. The EXPOSITION of the original movie Fame( , 1980) illustrates the main relationships and conflicts that occur in the movie. At the very beginning of the EXPOSITION, the viewers see the lunchroom where students sing, dance and play musical instruments in order to demonstrate their skills and talents. It shows the students as spontaneous and multitalented youngsters. While most of the students enjoy themselves in the lunchroom, Doris decides to leave, because she does not feel comfortable in such a place and company. At the staircase she meets Montgomery who is similarly dissatisfied. Their meeting makes them become close friends. Other, new friendships come to be established too. Longing for success, Coco tries to convince Bruno to establish a band with her. However, he is focused on his music only and does not want to show it to the public. At the same time, Doris, Montgomery and Ralph prepare for a performance of a theatre play. At first, Ralph teases them but later they accept his behavior and get on with him well. There are conflicts too. At the English classes, the viewers watch one of the main conflicts of the movie, the one involving Leroy and the English teacher. Leroy is a poor student who gets into the art school by accident. He is a very good dancer but he is illiterate. Also Bruno and his father are in conflict. Bruno’s father is angry with him, because his son does not want to play his music in public and, what is more, he does not have any friends. Bruno tries to explain to his father that only music is important to him. Finally, the viewers watch the conflict between Lisa and Miss. Berg. Lisa has been a dancer since her early childhood. Therefore, she believes that she does not have to work hard during her dance classes, which attitude Miss. Berg does not accept. The above content of the movie’s EXPOSITION has been given the following narrative-compositional structure.

EXPOSITION (Alan Parker’s Fame (1980)) MOVE 3 The lunchroom Step 1 Students demonstrate their talents Step 2 Doris meets Montgomery at the staircase MOVE 4 New relationships

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Step 1 Coco encourages Bruno to establish a band Step 2 Doris and Montgomery become closer friends during their acting in the same play. Step 3 Doris and Montgomery become close friends with Ralph MOVE 5 Conflicts Step 1 The illiterate Leroy is in a conflict with his English teacher Step 2 Bruno is in a conflict with his father, because he does not want to play his music in public Step 3 Miss. Berg thinks Lisa is too weak to become a professional dancer

The remake’s EXPOSITION Fame( 2009) also shows the students in their lunchroom, where they sing, dance and play musical instruments for the same purpose of showing their talents and skills. Denise does not feel comfortable in this place and decide to leave it. At the staircase she meets Malik who does not like the atmosphere of the lunchroom either. It follows from their conversation that Denise has very intolerant parents who do not like her focusing on too many things at the same time. Malik, in turn, tells her that his mother does not know about his art school, because she thinks that such a school is not good for her son. The meeting brings Denise and Malik close to each other and they become good friends eventually. At the same time, Malik’s mother opens the letter from the school with the grades that Malik received. To her surprise, she finds out that her son attends an art school, which makes her angry. Malik tries to convince his mother that he is an art-predisposed student but she would not listen to him. Angry, she leaves Malik alone. The remake’s EXPOSITION has arranged the above content in the following narrative-compositional structure.

EXPOSITION (Kevin Tancharoen’s Fame (2009)) MOVE 3 The lunchroom Step 1 Students demonstrate their talents Step 2 Denise and Malik meet at the staircase MOVE 4 Conflicts Step 1 Malik’s mum reluctantly learns about Malik’s art school Step 2 The quarrel between Malik and his mother

The above discussion represents the DESCRIPTION stage of the comparative procedure. The EXPOSITIONS in both movies are very much similar to each other. The re-makeFame ( 2009) includes the key elements of the original movie. Both of the movies share similar content and information. The time and place of the actions are also similar. In both movies, students present their talents in the lunchroom and the main characters meet at the staircase. The EXPOSITIONS also include elements about the proceeding conflicts between the characters. The narrative- compositional correlations between the EXPOSITIONS of the two movies are illustrated by the

57 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies table below, which is meant to represent the second part of the comparative procedure, namely its JUXTAPOSITION. Table 1. JUXTAPOSTION of the narrative-compositional structures of the EXPOSITIONS of Fame (1980) and its remake Fame (2009)

Fame 1980 Fame 2009

MOVE 3 The lunch room The lunch room MOVE 3

Step 1 Students demonstrate their Students demonstrate their Step 1 talents talents

Step 2 Doris meets Montgomery at Denise and Malik meet at the Step 2 the staircase staircase

MOVE 4 Relationships Conflicts MOVE 4

Step 1 Coco encourages Bruno to Malik’s mother reluctantly learns Step 1 set the band about her son’s art school

Step 2 Doris and Montgomery The quarrel between Malik and Step 2 become closer friends his mother during their acting in the same play

Step 3 Doris and Montgomery become close friends with Ralph

MOVE 5 Conflicts

Step 1 The illiterate Leroy is in a conflict with his English teacher

Step 2 Bruno is in a conflict with his father because he does not want to play his music in public

Step 3 Miss. Berg thinks that Lisa is too week to become a professional dancer

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Below we have presented a relatively detailed discussion of Table 1, which is meant to constitute the third part of the comparative analysis, namely COMPARISON. Table 1 shows that both EXPOSITIONS do not contain the same number of MOVES; however, they share some similarities. In some cases MOVES and Steps of both movies correlate with each other: MOVE 3 = MOVE 3; MOVE 3 Step 1 (Fame 1980) = MOVE 3 Step 1 (Fame 2009); MOVE 3 Step 2 (Fame 1980) = MOVE 3-Step 2 (Fame 2009); MOVE 5 = MOVE 4. MOVE 4 of Fame (1980) does not have its equivalent in the re-make. It shows the relationships between the main characters, which are not highlighted in the remake. MOVE 5 of Fame (1980) illustrates all main conflicts that occur in the movie, which are the content of MOVE 4 of the remake (Fame 2009). The similarity of narrative-compositional structures of EXPOSITIONS can also be detected at the level of Steps. For instance, Step 1of MOVE 1 shows the students in the lunchroom, where they suddenly start to dance, sing and play musical instruments. This segment shows how multitalented they are. Step 1 of MOVE 1 has a direct narrative-compositional counterpart in the remake. The others correlations of Steps in the EXPOSITIONS are as follows: Step 2 of MOVE 3 in which, not feeling comfortable in the lunchroom, Doris leaves the room and meets Montgomery at the staircase, who shares her feelings. They talk and eventually become friends. Step 2 of MOVE 3 shows Denise, who feeling uncomfortable in the lunchroom, leaves the place and meets Malik at the staircase. During this meeting she confesses that she plays the piano because her dad makes her do it. In turn, Malik admits that his mother does not know that he attends the art school. The last correlation holds between and Step 2 of MOVE 5 Fame( 1980) and Step 1 and 2 of MOVE 4 (Fame 2009). Step 2 of MOVE 5 illustrates the conflict between Bruno and his father. Bruno creates music and nothing else is important to him. However, his father wants him to play his music to the public. In his opinion, without the audience Bruno would never be famous. Step 1 and 2 of MOVE 4 present the conflict between Malik and his mother. By accident and to her dismay, she finds out that her son attends the art school. She believes that does not bring him money in the future and does not want to believe that he is really gifted student. Naturally, the narrative-compositional structures of both movies also differ, because it is consistent with and required by the nature of the remake. For example, Table 1 shows that the EXPOSITION of the movie Fame (2009), including the key elements of the original movie, is less elaborate in its narrative-compositional structure than the movie Fame (1980). However, a detailed enumeration of the differences goes beyond the methodological goal of the present paper.

4.2. Comparison at the thematic level As indicated in section 2, for our comparative model we have adopted two understandings of the concept of ‘theme’ (cf. Post 2017). According to the first one, themes convey the content of MOVES (Macro Themes) and Steps (Micro Themes), which present the episodes of the movie one after another. Macro Themes refers to the most general themes and they are on the highest position in the hierarchy, whereas, the Micro Themes are the realization of the selected Macro Themes. The notation adopted for such themes is short phrases and simple sentences. The complete content

59 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies of the EXPOSITION of Alan Parker’s Fame (1980) has already been represented in section 4.1. For the sake of convenience, we repeat it below, all the themes associated with specific compositional segments being explicitly marked.

EXPOSITION MOVE 3 The lunchroom (Macro theme) Step 1 Students demonstrate their talents (Micro theme 1) Step 2 Doris meets Montgomery at the staircase (Micro theme 2) MOVE 4 Relationships (Macro theme) Step 1 Coco and Bruno (Micro theme 1) Step 2 Doris and Montgomery (Micro theme 1) Step 3 Doris, Montgomery and Ralph (Micro theme 3) MOVE 5 Conflicts (Macro theme) Step 1 Leroy and Mrs. Sherwood (Micro theme 1) Step 2 Bruno and his father (Micro theme 2) Step 3 Lisa and Miss. Berg (Micro theme 3)

Below we present the entire content of the EXPOSITION of Kevin Tancharoen’s Fame (2009) as represented by its themes, all being associated with specific compositional segments.

EXPOSITION MOVE 3 The lunchroom (Macro theme) Step 1 Students demonstrate their talents (Micro theme 1) Step 2 Denis and Malik meet at the staircase (Micro theme 2) MOVE 4 Conflicts (Macro Theme) Step 1 Malik’s reluctantly learns about Malik’s art school (Micro theme 1) Step 2 The quarrel between Malik and his mother (Micro theme 2)

In section 1 we said that from the viewpoint of the relationship of equivalence, the source film (Fame 1980) and its remake (Fame 2009) represent the case of two film texts linked by the relation in question. In the presented model of comparative analysis the content of the segments linked by the relationship of thematic equivalence can be adequately defined in terms of Langackerian image schemas. For the exemplary analysis, we have selected the micro theme ‘Doris meets Montgomery at the staircase’, linked with Step 2 of MOVE 3 and the micro theme ‘Denis and Malik meet at the staircase’, linked with Step 2 of MOVE 3 of the remake. The presentation below is more than sketchy as it meant to illustrate only the postulated method. In both movies the characters meet, sit and talk at the staircase, therefore the relevant films frames focus on the two pairs of main characters. The analyzed scenes are based on dialogues

60 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies rather than on the action. Nevertheless, the visual composition of the analyzed scenes conveys a lot of additional information. The frame of Doris and Montgomery is based on FIGURE-GROUND scheme, the LEFT-RIGHT scheme and the GIVEN-NEW scheme. We suggest that Montgomery is the FIGURE, while Doris and the other elements of the staircase create the GROUND. At the same time, the LEFTGIVEN and RIGHTNEW schemas are employed. Doris is presented on the LEFT, which indicates her as temporarily less prominent character, while the RIGHT part of the frame, at which Montgomery is located, implies that he is the key character in this frame.

Scene 1. Doris and Montgomery on the staircase

In the frames with Denise and Malik, the same FIGURE-GRUND, LEFT-RIGHT and GIVEN- NEW schemas have been applied. Doris and Malik are presented as the FIGURE of this part of the movie, while the GROUND is the staircase and the part of the corridor. In the LEFTGIVEN and RIGHTNEW schemas, the school staircase is shown an obvious and less important part than the RIGHT part of the frame, which shows Denise and Malik as the new and key elements in this frame, to whom the attention should be paid.

Scene 2. Denise and Malik on the staircase

As indicated above, for our comparative model we have adopted two understandings of the concept of ’theme’ (cf. Post 2017). According to the second one, themes are “threads” (Pol. wątki), which spread over the entire narrative-compositional structures. Below we have listed “thread- themes” that are connected with the main characters of the discussed movies. In both sets, 1 and 2 illustrate the central “thread-themes”, whereas 3 and 4 are the peripheral ones.

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Fame (1980) 1. Bruno’s outrageous attitude to music 2. Doris’ problems with the relationships 3. Lisa’s willingness to become a professional dancer 4. Lisa’s difficult family situation

Fame (2009) 1. Victor ‘s outrageous attitude to music 2. Jenny’s problems with the relationship 3. Kevin’s willingness to become a professional dancer 4. Malik’s difficult family situation

Below we discuss the spread over the narrative-compositional structure of the “thread-theme” 1 illustrating Bruno’s and Victor’s attitudes to music, in Fame (1980) and its re-make, respectively. Both of them involve much of the narrative-compositional structure. The attitude to music in the former movie has been encoded in four compositional segments of the text proper, which are: PROLOGUE, EXPOSITION, INCITING MOMENT and EPILOGUE. In the PROLOGUE, Bruno is introduced the main character endowed with the extraordinary talent for music (MOVE 1 Step 1 and 3). Next, Bruno’s relationship with Coco is presented in EXPOSITION (MOVE 4 Step 1) and in the INCITING MMOMENT (MOVE 6 Step 1). In the EXPOSITION and the INCITING MOMENT, Bruno’s conflict with his father over his music is shown (MOVE 5 Step 2; MOVE 6 Step 1; MOVE 7 Step 5). As regards Bruno’s conflict with Mr. Shorofsky, the INCITING MOMENT hosts it (MOVE 7 Step 2). Finally, in the EPILOGUE, Bruno decides to play his music publicly (MOVE 14 Step 3). The table below shows the spread of the “thread-theme” ‘Bruno’s outrageous attitude to music’ over the narrative-compositional structure of Fame (1980).

Table 2. The spread of the “thread-theme” ‘Bruno’s outrageous attitude to music’ over the narrative-compositional structure of Fame (1980)

Thread-theme- 1 MOVE Step Micro-themes

Bruno’s outrageous attitude to music

PROLOGUE 1 1,3 Bruno goes on the audition to present his electronic music to the conservative teacher Mr. Shorofsky

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EXPOSITION 4 1 Coco is trying to encourage Bruno to create a band with her but he isn’t interested.

INCITING 5 2 Bruno has a quarrel with his father MOMENT because of the lack of having friends and his reluctance to perform his music in public.

6 1,2 Coco and Bruno spend some time together. On music classes, Bruno makes Mr. Shorofsky angry because of his playing the violin

7 2 Bruno and Mr. Shorofsky debate about the idea of traditional orchestra and synthesized instruments

EPILOGUE 14 3 Bruno plays his music sharing it with others.

In the movie Fame (2009), the attitude to music occupies two narrative-compositional segments of the text proper. They are PROLOGUE and INCITING MOMENT. In the PROLOGUE, Victor is presented as one of the main character and also as an extremely talented pianist (MOVE 1 Step 4). In the INCITING MOMENT, Victor’s conflict with his piano teacher Mr. Cranston is shown to the viewer. (MOVE 6 Steps 1 and 2). Table 3 shows the spread of the “thread-theme” ‘Victor’s outrageous attitude to music’ over the narrative-compositional structure of Fame (2009).

Table 3. The spread of the “thread-theme” ‘Victor’s outrageous attitude to music’ over the narrative-compositional structure of Fame (2009)

Thread-theme- 1 MOVE Step Micro-themes

Victor’s outrageous attitude to music

PROLOGUE 1 4 Victor goes on the audition to present his electronic music to the conservative teacher Mr. Cranston

INCITING 6 1,2 The illustration of the conflict between MOMENT Victor and his piano teacher

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The above tables illustrate the correlation between equivalent thread-themes of both movies and their narrative compositional structures. Comparing the information conveyed, both movies convey the same message about conflicts with piano teachers. Despite the fact that the thread- theme of the original movie is introduced in four super segments of the text proper, whereas the thread-theme of the re-make in only two.

5. Final remarks The author of the article has selected relevant instruments of contrastive linguistics and applied them to a comparative analysis of film texts. It should be underlined in this context that the clas- sical contrastive researchers were mainly focused on phonology and syntax. They did not analyze texts and discourses, from neither theoretical nor descriptive point of view. As a consequence, no comprehensive models of comparative text analysis are available. To fill this gap, a model of comparative text analysis has been designed for filmic texts and presented in this paper. For the sake of the analysis, for the illustration and support of the model, the films selected by the present author were the ones linked by the relationship of remaking. In the author’s opinion, such a pair of film texts naturally satisfies the fundamental stipulation of the comparative analysis that the compared items be equivalent. Film texts have multimodal characters. That is, such texts use three main semiotic codes: pictures, sounds and language, which modes jointly create multimodal messages. The proposed model of analysis indicates a possible way of analyzing and describing films from a multimodal linguistic point of view. As usual, it is for the reader of the present paper to decide whether the proposed model of film text comparative analysis is likely to possess the required adequacy.

References Aristotle. 1983 [ca. 335]. Poetyka. Polish translation by Henryk Podbielski. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich (Biblioteka Narodowa, seria II, nr 209). Bateman, J. A. 2014. Text and Image: A Critical Introduction to the Visual/Verbal Divide. New York/London: Routledge. Bateman, J. A. & Schmidt, K.-H. 2012. Multimodal Film Analysis: How Film Mean. New York/ London: Routledge. Burn, A. 2013. The kineikonic mode: Towards a multimodal approach to moving image media. NCRM Working Paper. NCRM, London, UK. (Unpublished). Fisiak, J. 1991. On the present status of some metatheoretical and theoretical issues in contrastive linguistics. In: J. Fisiak (ed.), Further Insights into Contrastive Analysis, 3-22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gajda, S. 2008 [1993]. Gatunkowe wzorce wypowiedzi. In: J. Bartmiński (ed.), Encyklopedia kul- tury polskiej XX wieku. Tom 2: Współczesny język polski, 130-142.Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich. Gillard, G. 2016. Film as Text. http://garrygillard.net/writing/filmastext. html (DW 13.10.2016).

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Głowiński, M., Okopień-Sławińska, A., Sławiński, J. 1975. Zarys teorii literatury. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne. Krajka, W. & Zgorzelski, A. 1974. O analizie tekstu literackiego. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS. Kress, G. R. & Van Leeuwen, T. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Virtual Design. New York/ London: Routledge. Krzeszowski, T. P. 1967. Fundamental principles of structural contrastive studies. Glottodidactica II: 107-147. Krzeszowski, T. P. 1990. Contrasting Languages. The Scope of Contrastive Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, R. W. 1991. Concept, Image and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Morciniec, N. 2014. Gramatyka kontrastywna. Wprowadzenie do niemiecko-polskiej gramatyki kontrastywnej. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Wyższej Szkoły Filologicznej we Wrocławiu. Ostaszewska, D. & Cudak, R. (eds.) 2008. Polska genologia lingwistyczna. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Parker, A. (dir.) 1980. Fame. USA: Warner Home Video. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Post, M. 2013. Speech Acts and Speech Genres. An Axiological Linguistics Perspective. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Wyższej Szkoły Filologicznej we Wrocławiu. Post, M. 2014. Akty i gatunki mowy. Próba wielopłaszczyznowego zbliżenia. In: P. Stelmaszczyk & P. Cap (eds.), 197-226. Pragmatyka, retoryka, argumentacja. Obraz języka i dyskursu w na- ukach humanistycznych. Kraków: Universitas. Post, M. 2017. Film jako tekst multimodalny. Założenia i narzędzia jego analizy. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Wyższej Szkoły Filologicznej. Skwarczyńska, S. 1965/1954–1965. Wstęp do nauki o literaturze. Vols. I-III. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Swales, J. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Setting. Cambridge: CUP. Tabakowska, E. 2001. Językoznawstwo kognitywne a poetyka przekładu. Kraków: Universitas. Tancharoen, K. (dir.) 2009. Fame. USA: Lakeshore Entertainment. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. United Artists. Witosz, B. 2005. Genologia lingwistyczna. Zarys problematyki. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego. Wildfeuer, J. 2014. Film Discourse Interpretation: Towards a New Paradigm for Multimodal Film Analysis. New York/London: Routledge.

*** Anna Lisiecka is a graduate of The Philological School of Higher Education in Wroclaw. In 2001, she defended her Master’s thesis in the area of speech genres. Her current research interests focus on the multimodal analysis of texts and discourses.

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BOŻENA KUCAŁA1 DOI: 10.15290/CR.2019.25.2.04 Jagiellonian University in Kraków ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9882-9305

Aporia, vortex and the hermeneutic circle in A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale

Abstract. Reflecting A.S. Byatt’s mistrust of the prevalence of literary theory, expressed in her own critical writings as well as in her earlier, most successful novel Possession (1990), The Biographer’s Tale (2000) recounts a literary scholar’s attempt to reach out towards a world of things, as opposed to arid theoretical concepts. However, his biographical project, undertaken as an alternative to poststructuralist studies, ends in an impasse. This article argues that, compared with the developments in Possession, the protagonist’s “liberation” from academia is far more ambiguous; his failed attempt to write a biography illustrates rather than satirises some of the dilemmas posed by literary theory. Phineas Nanson remains trapped in poststructuralist concepts which wreck his project, such as the elusiveness of the self, textual indeterminacy, and the demise of the author. Keywords: A.S. Byatt, academic fiction, campus novel, literary theory, metafiction, biography.

A.S. Byatt is the author of eleven novels, five collections of short stories as well as a comparable number of scholarly publications. A graduate of the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, she lectured at the University of London before leaving her position to focus on her own writing (Rennison 2005: 38). The duality of Byatt’s career is reflected in her fiction, which is strongly grounded in cultural and literary tradition and which she herself describes as “self-conscious realism” (Byatt 2001b: 4). This writerly self-consciousness incorporates elements of academic fiction since Byatt regards her academic background as inseparable from her career as a novelist: “It is customary for writer-academics to claim a kind of schizoid personality, and state that their research, or philosophical thinking, has nothing to do with their work as makers of fiction. […] I have myself always felt that reading and writing and teaching were all part of some whole that it was dangerous to disintegrate” (2001b: 92). In his overview of Byatt’s career, Richard Todd comments that “Byatt’s own creative work reflects on the extent to which the writer is justified in drawing on the experiences of her own life” (1997: 5). Two of her novels, Possession (1990) and The Biographer’s Tale (2000), stand out as self-reflexive illustrations of Byatt’s fusion of creative and academic writing. In each novel the plot

1 Address for correspondence: Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University, al. Adama Mickiewicza 9, 31-120 Kraków, Poland. E-mail: [email protected].

66 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies revolves around academics pursuing their research in an uneasy relation to their private lives; in each a similar tendency may be observed, namely to reach out from the textual to the real, to supplant or enrich a scholar’s arid existence with engagement with life outside academia. In the much more famous Possession the fairy-tale ending quite unequivocally heralds a happy equilib- rium between personal and professional life and at the same time a liberation from the constraints and limitations of literary theory. The conclusion of The Biographer’s Tale echoes Possession to a certain extent − like Roland Mitchell in the earlier novel, the protagonist of The Biographer’s Tale eventually acquires a private life, finds love, starts travelling and learns to take pleasure in the natural world (even becoming an amateur entomologist). Claiming that both novels are academic satires which mock “the second-hand quality of scholarly research”, Jane Campbell identifies as a crucial difference between them the fact that while in Possession academic discourse gives way to poetry, in The Biographer’s Tale “the primary place […] is now given to the physical world, which will always be beyond language” (Campbell 2012: 216); the unfolding events bring the protagonist “out of his paper world and closer to the world of growth and change” (221). Katsura Sako also reads The Biographer’s Tale as a story of social integration and the overcoming of scholarly solip- sism; as she puts it, it is “a tale of a self-conscious biographer who finds his place among others” (2010: 280); at the end of the story, he “leave[s] the world of dead abstraction and text to explore the realm of sensual, emotional and affective experience” (286). This article offers a less optimistic interpretation of the novel and argues that The Biographer’s Tale is in fact a novel about failure and impasse rather than liberation. Indeed, the novel itself may be said to be a failure in that it never gets off to a proper start, let alone develops an engaging plot or presents a well-rounded, plausible character. The material is a work in progress, waiting to be converted into a tale but never cohering into it. One reviewer remarked that “Byatt has chosen to write a novel that reads like a research notebook” (Scurr 2000: 38) while another described it as “erudite and dense without being the least bit engaging” (Kakutani 2001). By tracing its protagonist-narrator’s struggles with writing, The Biographer’s Tale, “relentlessly self-reflexive” and “the most papery of Byatt’s novels” (Campbell 2012: 219), aligns itself with the metafictional strand common to a large proportion of academic fiction (cf. Selejan 2014: 101-102; Gruszewska-Blaim 2014: 46). The book recounts the genesis of a biography which ultimately never gets written. In keeping with the protagonist’s poststructuralist training, it could be said that the title itself should be placed under erasure: this is not quite a tale, nor does the narrator eventually become a biographer. But again, if the novel is a failure, it is a deliberate failure which, paradoxically, succeeds in achieving a match between its form and its content. In her study of neo-Victorian narratives, Victoriana – Histories, Fictions, Criticisms, Cora Kaplan cites Byatt’s novel as a fictionalised reflection on the impossibility of a liberal-humanist biography at the turn of the twenty-first century (2007: 44-45). However, the novel ought to be read in a broader context, as an exemplification of the impasse in literary studies caused by the predominance of literary theory. Whereas Possession mockingly exposes the pitfalls of methodologies and theoretical approaches, it can be argued that The Biographer’s Tale adopts an equivocal

67 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies stance. Through the protagonist’s failed pursuit, it demonstrates the constraints of literary theory without, however, dismissing the problems which poststructuralism, in particular, addresses. Taking a satirical and parodic stance towards current theoretical approaches (psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism), Possession is undoubtedly an instance of what Mona Kratzert and Deborah Richey call “anti-theory fiction” within the genre of the academic novel. According to Kratzert and Richey, towards the end of the twentieth century novelists responded to the “bewil- dering array of new methodologies and critical approaches” by criticising, satirising or parody- ing their excesses (1998: 93). However, The Biographer’s Tale, despite depicting an extreme case of scholarly helplessness, illustrates rather than satirises some of the dilemmas that theoretical studies explore.2 In her own scholarly work, Byatt occasionally resorts to theory without committing herself to any particular approach; in the introduction to her collections of essays Passions of the Mind (1991), she explains: “… I have used recent literary theory where that seemed useful, though my temperament is agnostic, and I am a non-believer and a non-belonger to schools of thought” (2). If Byatt’s novels tend to be informed by her scholarly preoccupations, The Biographer’s Tale may be traced back to her ambivalent attitude to poststructuralism. In Passions of the Mind, she writes: “I am afraid of, and fascinated by, theories of language as a self-referring system of signs, which doesn’t touch the world. I am afraid of, and resistant to, artistic stances which say we explore only our own subjectivity” (11). The novel begins with an act of rebellion against poststructuralist literary criticism. The narrator-protagonist Phineas G. Nanson suddenly decides to abandon his postgraduate seminar. The opening comes in medias res in a double sense: the narrative lacks exposition, and the narrator is in the middle of his theoretical class. Phineas briefly indicates the causes of his growing discontent with the theory, whose chief fault appears to be a repetitive, uniformly deconstructive approach to texts and a fixation with textual indeterminacy. In the seminars that he has participated in all texts have been subject to the same procedure: “We found the same clefts and crevices, transgressions and disintegrations, lures and deceptions beneath, no matter what surface we were scrying” (Byatt 2001a: 1). Phineas also deplores the frequent but not necessarily competent references to fashion- able theoreticians, the application of abstruse concepts in literary analysis and the unquestion- ing acceptance of scepticism, inaccuracy and uncertainty as an integral part of scholarly endeavour. The narrator recognises that poststructuralist criticism runs counter to the traditional aim of scholarship, which should be illumination rather than obfuscation (4).3 He identifies the precise

2 According to Bruce Robbins, there is a consensus about the periodisation of the academic novel. In the first half of the twentieth century the genre was dominated by the pastoral mode (exemplified by Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited [1945]); the postwar decades were dominated by satire (e.g. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim [1954], David Lodge’s Changing Places [1975] and Small World [1984], Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man [1975]) (Robbins 2006: 251). Possession may be cited as another illustration of the satirical mode; the opening of The Biographer’s Tale belongs in the same category. 3 Terry Eagleton is a well-known detractor of poststructuralism and deconstruction; his views overlap with those of Byatt’s fictional scholar. Eagleton disapproves of structuralism’s overwhelming scepticism, which results in compro-

68 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies moment when his dissatisfaction reached a critical point: the necessity to abandon his studies dawned on him as the group were discussing “Lacan’s theory of morcellement, the dismember- ment of the imagined body” (1). Phineas comes to realise that the practice of relentless dissection of imagined bodies and literary texts entraps aspiring scholars like him in a narrow, solipsistic and self-referential world. In keeping with a frequent motif in the academic novel,4 his world is depicted as distinctly small (cf. Gruszewska-Blaim 2014: 37-38). The dirty window of the seminar room, which he instinctively interprets as a metaphor for his inability to see the real world outside, reinforces his determination to seek things and facts (4). However, the protagonist’s forceful rejection of his postmodern critical persona is not matched by an equally resolute decision concerning what to do instead. The desire to seek reality, although obviously formulated in opposition to Phineas’s previous pursuits, is too vague to be a viable alternative. Thus, The Biographer’s Tale, which in a sense is the would-be biographer’s autobiography, immediately comes up against an impasse, or an aporia – to use a key deconstructive term5 – the first of many such moments in the novel. Professor Ormerod Goode, whose advice he seeks, suggests the idea of writing a biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes, the author of a biography of a Victorian scholar and polymath, Sir Elmer Bole. The prospect of writing a biography appeals to Phineas precisely because it flies in the face of the major tenets of poststructuralist criticism. A biography impresses him as “a model of factual solidity, just what is needed as a corrective of the poststructuralist seminar he has left” (Campbell 2012: 216). As Goode says, “The art of biography is a despised art because it is an art of things, of facts, of arranged facts” (5). Writing a biography implies that reality is knowable and may be expressed in a verbal account, that words correspond to things, that it is possible to reconstruct someone’s life from the existing material, mainly textual, evidence.6

mising concepts such as “truth”, “certainty”, and “the real” (Eagleton 1989: 144) and, as a consequence, undermines any debates about social or political issues (146). 4 In his essay “The Rise of the Academic Novel” Jeffrey J. Williams distinguishes between the academic novel and the campus novel – terms which are often used interchangeably. He defines the former as a novel featuring academic professionals and portraying “adult predicaments in marriage and home as well as the workplace”. The latter takes place on campus, centres on students and frequently takes the shape of a coming-of-age narrative (2012: 561-562). This division, however, cannot be maintained in relation to a large proportion of academic fiction, and is certainly inadequate with regard to The Biographer’s Tale, which shows almost nothing of campus life and features a solitary, estranged postgraduate student confronting scholarly problems. That is why in the present article the term “academic novel” is used as the most general term for fiction concerned with scholarly life. 5 In the words of Eagleton, “The tactic of deconstructive criticism […] is to show how texts come to embarrass their own ruling systems of logic; and deconstruction shows this by fastening on the ‘symptomatic’ points, the aporia or impasses of meaning, where texts get into trouble, come unstuck, offer to contradict themselves” (1989: 133-134). 6 Routledge Encyclopedia of Literary Theory defines biography as “a genre of historiography concerned with representing the lives of individual people” and claims that “[s]ince the eighteenth-century, all definitions of biography have come to depend on a set of three core criteria. A biography (1) consists of a written text; (2) represents the life of a real person; and (3) does so in the mode of factual speech, that is, it is to be understood as true” (2008: 42).

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Poststructuralism, by contrast, intentionally subverts empiricism (Berman 1988: 199-200), “subverts the presumption of a coherent, non-contradictory, comprehensible (clearly interpreta- ble) meaning [of a text]” and insists on the inherent indeterminacy of language as “an unfounded chain of signifiers” (Berman 1988: 211). Poststructuralism is also informed by a “strongly anti- humanist perspective” (Bertens 2001: 120); in the words of Nicolas Tredell, “Post-structuralism and deconstruction have focused particularly on attacking the concept of the individual human subject” (1987: 99). The low status of biography at the time of the emergence of poststructuralism reflected the current critique of the idea of the self as “a singular or coherent entity”; hence, within the changed cultural framework biographical writing was largely ignored rather than openly attacked (Caine 2010: 22). For pre-postmodern scholars, the art of biography presupposed the existence of a unique individual; as Professor Goode puts it in his conversation with Phineas, “From egg to eventual decay, each of us is unique. What can be nobler […] or more exacting, than to explore, to constitute, to open, a whole man, a whole opus, to us?” (5).7 It is worth noting that Goode’s advice is based on the outmoded assumption that the truth about an individual’s life is to be discovered rather than constructed (let alone deconstructed).8 But, ironically, the protagonist’s own condition seems to contradict the humanist notion of the self. His as yet unformed academic persona corresponds to the amorphousness of his self. At the beginning his personal life appears non-existent. He reveals very little about his past besides saying that his father “disappeared” (3) and his mother died recently, an event which he associates with missing his seminar due to her burial (1). Hence, Phineas embarks on his new life by deciding to engage with another man’s life, which, however, is not likely to liberate him from a dependence on other people’s concepts. What makes his project even more ironic, at the same time undermining it at its inception, is the fact that he is fascinated not so much by the biographer whose life he is supposed to research but the man Destry-Scholes wrote about. In his attempt to reach out to the empirical world Phineas is erroneously inclined to treat a textual reconstruction of a life as a point of access to reality:

It is difficult to recall the state of febrile excitement I was in over my own release from a life of theoretical pedagogy. […] Perhaps because my own life was a fluid vacuum, I became obsessed with the glittery fullness of the life of Elmer Bole. Compared to the busy systems, the cross-referred abstractions, of the life I had renounced, the three volumes loomed in my mind as an almost impossible achievement of contact with a concrete world (always eschew the word ‘real’ is an imperative I have carried over from my past) of arrangement of things and events for delight and instruction. (18-19)

7 Cf. Hermione Lee: “Biographies of human beings are generally about real people, not fictional or mythological characters. Therefore the biographer has a responsibility to the truth, and should tell us what actually happened in the life” (2009: 6). 8 In his article on contemporary biographical approaches, John Given observes that nowadays accounts of “fragmented”, “alienated” or “saturated” selves are typical in reflections on the postmodern condition (2015: 56).

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Enthusiastic about his project, Phineas fails to notice that the vicariousness of the subject of his research may entrap him in an interminable poststructuralist chain of deferred meaning – which it soon does: “It occurred to me that it was a delicious, delicate tact, being, so to speak, the third in line, organising my own attention to the attention of a man intent on discovering the whole truth about yet a third man” (24). Even though he is well versed in poststructuralist theory, it seems to escape his notice that his biographical plans blatantly contravene, for example, the implications of Paul de Man’s concept of the textuality of the self. In his classic deconstructive work, Allegories of Reading, de Man stresses that the self, which in his view is constituted by discourse, is, like any deconstructed text, implicated in a process of “endless regression”: “The discourse by which the figural structure of the self is asserted fails to escape from the categories it claims to deconstruct, and this remains true, of course, of any discourse which pretends to rein- scribe in its turn the figure of this aporia. There can be no escape from the dialectical movement which produces the text” (1979: 186-87). Phineas is deeply impressed by the eventfulness of the Victorian man’s life and the diversity of his interests as reflected in the biography, which leads him to conclude that researching this life must have enabled Destry-Scholes to share, at a remove, the richness of Bole’s experience. By repeating the strategy the narrator hopes to achieve the same effect. This calculation, however, misfires since Bole’s biographer turns out to be a strangely elusive, even insignificant man. Phineas’s quest for information about Destry-Scholes yields almost no result. The journey to the town of his birth leads to a dead end, when the protagonist not only finds out nothing at all but begins to “feel trapped by this ordinary place” (32), which reminds him of the uninspiring neighbourhood of his own childhood. Although identification with the subject of one’s research is a taboo in academic work, Phineas cannot help feeling an affinity with Destry-Scholes. The sense of resemblance grows when the obscurity of the man turns out to be comparable to the paucity of his biographer’s personal life. The protagonist’s continuing immersion in poststructuralist habits of thought may be observed also in his pedantic linguistic convolutions: “It has been dinned into me that objectivity is an exploded and deconstructed notion. But subjectivity – the meeting of two hypothetical subjects, in this case Scholes Destry-Scholes and myself – is just as suspect, since it can’t be looked at objectively” (98). As his search continues, Phineas discovers only oblique traces of the man. Professor Goode has some vague recollections of him from the time when he came to give a lecture about thirty years before; Destry-Scholes’s niece, his only living relative, never met her uncle and can supply no information; Destry-Scholes’s disjointed archive of notes and photographs contains no photograph of the man himself and almost no personal statements, in contrast to a multitude of quotations from other sources. It appears that Destry-Scholes amassed an array of material about other

71 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies people while effacing himself.9 Perplexed by the archive,10 Phineas reflects on the failure of his quest, suspecting that Destry-Scholes, in contradiction to the principles underlying the art of biography, may have anticipated the postmodern scepticism about the existence of a unified self:

… it could be argued that Destry-Scholes himself, in evading the identification of his ‘characters’ for so long, was intending to show that identity, that the self, is a dubious matter, not of the first consequence. (97)11

In the seminal poststructuralist essay “The Death of the Author” (1967) Roland Barthes chal- lenged the status of the author, arguing against the practice of taking account of the author’s biography and authorial intention in critical analysis. Barthes rejects the view that the author is the origin of the text, the source of its meaning and its interpretation. In a well-known formulation, Barthes insists that a text is “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (2001: 1468); he further compares a text to a fabric: “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (1468), […] the structure can be followed, ‘run’, like the thread of a stocking, at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath” (1469). Thus, Barthes refutes the idea of originality in literature, at the same time reducing the author to the function of a scriptor.12 Implicit in his argument is the notion that the self is a linguistic construct. Barthes describes writing as “that neutral, composite, oblique

9 Jacques Derrida explores the notion of the archive in relation to Freud’s work, suggesting that the desire for the archive is motivated by contradictory drives − the wish to preserve the past is accompanied by the desire to eradicate it. As Derrida puts it, “there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruction drive” (2005: 19). It is likely that the archive which Phineas studies is a result of such conflicting desires: on the one hand, to accumulate traces of several biographies, and, on the other hand, to prevent the potential researcher from gaining any substantial access to the men’s lives. 10 Apparently, Phineas is guided by the traditional concept of the archive as a collection of primary records, endowed with authority by virtue of their authenticity, which promise to offer the starting point for research. As Derrida explains in Archive Fever, the Greek etymology of the word “archive” evokes at once the ideas of commencement and commandment: “the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence”, and “the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given” (2005: 1). 11 Destry-Scholes’s career as a biographer appears to illustrate changes in the approaches to the genre of biography, as outlined by Hermione Lee: “The belief in a definable, consistent self, an identity that develops through the course of a life-story and that can be conclusively described, breaks down, to a great extent, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at a time when psychoanalysis, scientific discoveries such as the theory of relativity, and experiments in art forms, are producing a more indeterminate approach to identity. Western biography from this time has more to say about contradictions and fluctuations in identity, and about the unknowability of the self. But such contrasting ways of describing the self overlap and conflict, rather than following each other in a neatly chronological order” (2009: 16). 12 In a similar vein, Derrida contends in Of Grammatology that “the person writing is inscribed in a determined textual system” (1984: 160).

72 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (1466). Barthes’s radical statement of the author’s dissolution among a tissue of citations – which, as Tredell observes, “can be situated within a much broader challenge to the idea of the ‘individual’” (1987: 99) – may serve as an adequate description of Byatt’s character’s failed search for the author. Having almost no other evidence, he sets out to study Destry-Scholes’s writings with the express aim of revealing the author’s identity, intention and life story behind the texts. Yet he finds himself confronting precisely the problems he thought he had evaded by abandoning his seminar. The two collections of Destry-Scholes’s papers he receives do not even need dismantling since they are already fragmented, discontinuous, incoherent and unreliable. What the protagonist tries to do is reverse the practice of textual deconstruction by building a biographical narrative out of the multifarious, incompatible pieces. Yet the texts successfully resist his efforts. The textual fabric cannot be contained and controlled: “the threads ran out all the time, from Linnaeus to Artedi, from Galton to Darwin and Pearson” (167); “… no string has an end” (168). The first set of documents, which he receives from an archivist at the University of Lincoln, is an immediate disappointment. The papers are flawed – worn out, poorly typed, with some words and sentences missing. The first stage of Phineas’s work consists in selection and ordering: he identifies the pieces to be fragments of three biographical accounts of personages who are later revealed to be Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton and Henrik Ibsen. However, even when divided into the three categories, the texts puzzle the scholar with their fragmentariness and generic diversity, and, often, uncertain authorship: they range from extracts from the three men’s notebooks and their scientific (Linnaeus and Galton) or literary works (Ibsen), to autobiographies as well as Destry-Scholes’s own summaries and comments. To his further confusion, the would-be biographer suspects that some of the materials were fabricated by Destry-Scholes, which in hindsight calls into question the reliability of his biography of Elmer Bole. The metaphor of the mosaic which Phineas employs to describe the status of the material he is exploring is a counterpart of Barthes’s “tissue of quotations”. As Campbell points out (2012: 220), following his reading of Destry-Scholes’s biography of Bole, whose diverse interests included mosaic-making, Phineas detects an analogy between this process and how Destry-Scholes lifted and reworked material for his own purposes so that the boundaries between originality, plagiarism and invention blur. Nonetheless, the papers throw no light on Destry-Scholes himself. The fact that all the papers, under the heading “Three documents” are quoted in extenso by the narrator (they occupy fifty- nine pages in the novel) must be taken as an expression of his inability to cope with the material at hand, and possibly his wish for his prospective reader (whose existence he often evokes and at the same denies) to share his confusion and helplessness. Phineas never moves beyond that stage; the material confronts him with a major deadlock, provoking a futile quest to follow up some of the leads in the three quasi-biographies left by Destry-Scholes. He seeks to impose order, coher- ence and unity. However, his interpretative effort initiates the well-known problem of the hermeneutic circle: texts refer him back and forth to other texts, throwing some light on what he has

73 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies already read but revealing further gaps and puzzles. Phineas decides to opt out of this self-referential (vicious) circle: he could pursue the clues further, but, he asks himself, “where would it stop? Linnaeus would lead to Swedenborg, Galton to Darwin, Ibsen to Strindberg or Shaw, and I would run like a ferret from library to library, shelf to shelf” (102). Ultimately, he is unable to determine the significance of the disjointed archive. The texts might have been collected with a view to another project, or three separate projects, or perhaps none. The parallels between the three incomplete biographies may be meaningful, but it is just as likely that they are accidental. What is most frustrating is that Destry-Scholes appears to lurk there, behind the texts, but remains invis- ible and unreachable. The author’s tantalising absence from the texts is compounded by the mysterious circumstances of his death. Destry-Scholes had travelled to the Maelstrøm in the North Sea and disappeared, presumably having drowned. However, his body was never recovered; an empty boat was found near the famous vortex. As a result, his would-be biographer lacks a piece of information which would be required “to make up a complete and gratifying, in a realist sense, narrative of Destry- Scholes’s life” (Sako 2010: 283).13 In his desperate search for connections and explanations, Phineas speculates that the biographer went there in the footsteps of Linnaeus, who described his own journey to the Maelstrøm in his autobiographical writings. However, biographical guesses are compounded by the discovery that Linnaeus fabricated the account, never having been to the location. Several biographical clues offer themselves, none of which can be verified. Destry-Scholes might have gone to the north to pursue his research on the Swedish scientist, or simply out of personal interest. But the narrator’s experience substantiates yet another line of speculation. After his extensive (though ultimately futile) research on Linnaeus, the image of the dangerous vortex holds a special fascination for him. His academic failure and his attraction to the Maelstrøm appear to be somehow connected. He asks for a job at a travel agency after seeing a paper model of the Maelstrøm in its window, and explains to the managers “That I was thinking of writing a book that had run into the ground for lack of information. That I wanted eventually to see the Maelstrøm, though I was not quite sure why. My ‘subject’, I said, had possibly, not certainly, drowned in it” (107). If there exists some convergence between the experience of Destry-Scholes and his would-be biographer, then it is plausible that Destry-Scholes’s journey was also a response to his inability to make his materials cohere into a biography (or biographies). The drowning could then be regarded as an ill-fated attempt at escape from the scholarly deadlock, or as a metaphor for his hopeless engulfment by texts. The narrator, however, resumes his efforts when he is contacted by Destry-Scholes’s niece who offers him access to another set of her uncle’s materials. Phineas repeats the same strategies: arranging and rearranging the card index, dividing and categorising the documents, which concern mainly the same three aforementioned personages: Linnaeus, Galton and Ibsen. Phineas,

13 Cf. Hermione Lee: “There is a lingering idea of biography as the complete, true story of a human being, the last word on a life” (2009: 18).

74 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies by turns, studies those three lives, discovering more and more leads that could be pursued further and further, as his research begins to branch out. He learns a number of facts, is able to improve on Destry-Scholes’s findings, and yet again is compelled to conclude that his newly acquired knowledge is useless since the texts, in their entirety, remain undecidable. Consequently, the second stage of his research is “second” only chronologically; rather than advancing his work, it only re-enacts the first failure. One element in this archive seems increasingly significant to the protagonist and has a bearing on his biographical project. The accompanying collection of photographs contains Galton’s “composites”. The Victorian scientist developed a technique of fusing images of several persons into one, with a view to creating a new, single image, which would combine the features of all the individuals. These experiments were motivated by his growing scepticism about the idea of the unique self. Some of the index cards cite his views:

We as yet understand nothing of the way in which our conscious selves are related to the separate lives of the billions of cells of which the body of each of us is composed. […] Our part in the universe may possibly in some distant way be analogues to that of the cells in an organised body, and our personalities may be the transient but essential elements of an immortal and cosmic mind. (225)

Galton liked to create composites of people who were related in order to capture their common features. One of the photographs is a composite picture of Linnaeus’s family, which, Phineas speculates, might actually have been produced by Destry-Scholes (184). Unable to make sense of the archive, the researcher concludes that it could be Destry-Scholes’s counterpart of Galton’s composite pictures. Destry-Scholes had made a thorough study of three eminent individuals, yet “appeared […] to have been more interested in what they had in common than in what made them unique” (239). Thus, the array of texts Phineas deals with turns out to be a Barthesian “tissue of quotations”, “that composite, oblique space […] where all identity is lost” (Barthes 2001: 1466), and this also pertains to the identity of the author of the archive. Naturally, the erasure of a person’s individuality pre-empts the aims of biographical writing. This might be the reason why Destry-Scholes’s outstanding biography of Elmer Bole was not followed by another publication in the same genre. Once again, and this time finally, the protagonist admits defeat. Not only his research but also his life has reached a dead end: “I had no idea what to do with myself. None at all” (245). The brief story of his attempt to abandon poststructuralism, instead of progressing, comes full circle. He again consults Professor Goode, who accepts his admission of defeat without offering him any further suggestions, besides casting doubt on the narrator’s suitability for academic work. The fact that approximately half the space in the book is taken up by Destry-Scholes’s documents causes also the narrator’s own identity to be elided by other personas, which replicates the phenomenon of the author’s near-absence – in this case from Phineas’s own autobiographical “tale”. His project

75 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies degenerates into postmodern clichés about “the slippery nature of human identity” and “the inevi- table difficulty of recovering historical truth” (cf. Alfer & Edwards de Campos 2010: 130). The protagonist’s decision to discontinue his research is again intertwined with the significance of the Maelstrøm. He is presented with a newspaper report concerning Destry-Scholes’s disap- pearance, accompanied by a photograph of an empty boat – a final illustration of how completely the man disappeared from any records. Confronted with the image of the whirlpool which in all probability engulfed his biographee, Phineas metaphorically hovers near the edge of the vortex of the scholarly endeavour that has nearly erased his own life and identity. Meanwhile, he has discovered the dizzying depths into which further research on the subject would have plunged him: “Destry-Scholes’s fabrication of Linnaeus’s fabrication of his visit to the Maelstrøm was a pastiche of Edgar Allan Poe”14 [256]). The room of the Scandinavian scholar he consults, who obsessively researches that dangerous place in the North Sea – and who supplies the relevant copy of the newspaper – serves as a conclusive warning of some of the perils of academic life: “… there he was, in a dusty attic, behind a dusty table loaded with precarious heaps of leather volumes and yellow- ing papers, and crumbs. […] Jespersen sat in the gloom, in a nest of ivory hair, his long white beard wound into his papers, his long white hair merging into it, his papery-white, wrinkled face and his pale, cracked lips” (247). Jerpersen, a cloistered scholar, represents a traditional, meticulous mode of scholarship, which has brought upon him a condition of life-in-death.15 Yet the dirty window in his room reminds the protagonist of the poststructuralist seminar room which he abandoned at the beginning of his story. Hence, the conclusion of the tale may be described by means of the metaphors of a blocked path, a vicious circle and a vortex. The end is distinctly anti-climactic, as the character flatly gives up his plans: “I could, in theory, have gone and searched [the newspaper’s] archive. But I didn’t think I would. I stared at the empty boat, and the dark newsprinted water, and thanked Jespersen, and thanked Ormerod Goode, and went home” (249). In the last few pages of the novel the protagonist briefly recounts his subsequent travels, his love affairs, his growing appreciation of the natural world. This may be regarded as a fulfilment of his desire to become involved with “things” rather than dealing with mere words. The fact that the protagonist acquires a life outside the confines of academia and develops some sense of self- hood relates this novel to Possession. But there are major differences as well. Possession is about characters “for whom literature and intellectual pursuits are central to the shape and meaning of their lives” (Rennison 2005: 41). In the earlier novel the scholars’ private and professional lives successfully intersect: the literary critics Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey fall in love, Roland discovers a gift for poetry, they jointly complete their biographical search and achieve academic

14 The reference is to Edgar Alan Poe’s story “A Descent into the Maelstrom”. 15 A parallel may be found in the image of “the Ash Factory” – basement rooms in the British Museum, occupied by scholars working on the poet Randolph Ash in Possession.

76 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies success; at the end, prospects for new research are opening up.16 In The Biographer’s Tale, the next stage in the narrator’s life is the aftermath of his academic failure. Even structurally the novel tips the balance in favour of the exhaustive account of Phineas’s defeat. As Michiko Kakutani observes, the last chapters “come too late to make the reader the least bit interested in Phineas’s sentimental education. They remain overshadowed by the ponderous chapters that have gone before, and they feel like an incongruous coda to what is an otherwise lugubrious and flat-footed novel” (Kakutani 2001). Having rejected poststructuralist criticism, the protagonist was unable to find a viable alternative and became entangled in precisely the problems which poststructuralism foregrounds in literary studies: the instability of language, the dissolution of the unified self, the slipperiness and infinite connectivity of texts, the provisionality of knowledge, the questionability of the autonomy of the author. The protagonist’s academic experience confirms Derrida’s radical proposition in Of Grammatology that “There is nothing outside of the text” (1984: 158)17 since his incapacity to track down his biographee proves that he cannot transcend the text and reach reality. Professor Gertrude Himmelfarb, a well-known American conservative intellectual, an admirer of Victorian values and a defender of traditional historiography, takes a decisively negative stance towards the effect of postmodernism on academia. She objects to the widespread arbitrariness of interpretation, the assumption of the linguistic constitution of reality, “a denial of the fixity of any ‘text’”, and the consequent undermining of any truth about reality (1997: 158).18 As she has ironically put it, the ultimate ambition of postmodernism is “to liberate us all from the coercive ideas of reality and truth” (1997: 161). Postmodernist history does it by celebrating aporia: “difference, discontinuity, disparity, contradiction, discord, indeterminacy, ambiguity, irony, paradox, perver- sity, opacity, obscurity, anarchy, chaos” (Himmelfarb 1997: 170). Postmodernism, for Himmelfarb, is a dead end; for all its apparent attractiveness, it might be “an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide” (1997: 173). In her view, both in postmodernist history and in postmodernist literary criticism “theory has become a calling in itself”, which results in the abandonment of hands-on research (1997: 162). However, she speculates that, like other intellectual fashions, postmodernism, in its diverse versions, will before long be supplanted by new ideas. Writing in the late 1990s (i.e. just before the publication of Byatt’s novel), she judges deconstruction to be already passé, as well as detects the first signs of disaffection with postmodernism (1997: 171).

16 Sally Dalton-Brown observes that one of the conventions on which the academic novel is based is the academic’s dilemma “whether to opt for the life of the mind or the life of desires, whether sexual, status-oriented, or commercial lust” (2008: 592). The protagonists of Possession are spared the choice and eventually are set to enjoy the best of both worlds. Phineas Nanson in The Biographer’s Tale drifts towards the latter option but it is a matter of necessity rather than choice. 17 Derrida states that reading “cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of language, that is to say, in the sense that we give here to that word, outside of writing in general” (1984: 158). 18 Her article appeared first in Times Literary Supplement on 16 October 1992.

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In his essay, “Postmodernism and Textual Anxieties” (1999), Hayden White, whom Himmelfarb invokes as one of her chief antagonists, to a degree accepts her description of the implications of postmodernist thinking for contemporary historiography, but disputes Himmelfarb’s unreserv- edly negative evaluation of the new tendencies. Insofar as in studying the past postmodern scholars indeed do foreground its textuality while at the same time rejecting any “fixity” of texts, their methodology helps to expose the idea of an established, objective truth about the past as an ideo- logically-tainted delusion (1999: 35-37). White echoes the tenets of deconstruction when he admits that for postmodernists a text “is always at odds with itself”, it “knows neither its archetype nor its genealogy”, and “may be said to write its reader quite as much as its writer can be said only to read it” (1999: 36-37). This observation, however, leads White to conclusions which are fundamentally at variance with Himmelfarb’s: postmodernism’s denial of objectivism does not amount to a commitment to “lie, delusion, fantasy, or fiction”; rather, it is “is more interested in reality than it is in truth as an end in itself” (1999: 38). Postmodernism, according to White, is underlain by the recognition that “reality” is always partly constructed through discourse. It would appear that the protagonist of Byatt’s novel is caught between these two positions. He discovers in himself a yearning for a traditional methodology, which promises to yield the ideal of truth and objectivity, but in the course of his work he finds out that at least some of the problems raised by contemporary theory are not unfounded. Unable to find a way out of his dilemmas, he fails to create an academic identity for himself. That is why, unlike the protagonists of Possession – and unlike the author of both novels – Phineas has to separate the two dimensions of his life and abandons literary studies altogether. The fact that he eventually finds fulfilment and endows his life with meaning outside academia poses disturbing questions about the value and relevance of contemporary literary scholarship.

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Tredell, N. 1987. Euphoria (Ltd) – The Limitations of Post-structuralism and Deconstruction. In: P.Barry (ed.), Issues in Contemporary Critical Theory, 91-104. Houndsmills: Macmillan. White, H. 1999. Postmodernism and textual anxieties. In: B. Stråth & N. Witoszek (eds.), The Postmodern Challenge: Perspectives East and West, 27-45. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Williams, J. J. 2012. The rise of the academic novel. American Literary History 24(3): 561-589.

*** Bożena Kucała is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where she teaches nineteenth-century and contemporary English literature. Her research interests include contemporary English fiction, especially the historical novel and neo-Victorian fiction. Main publications: Intertextual Dialogue with the Victorian Past in the Contemporary Novel (2012), co-edited books: Writer and Time: James Joyce and After (2010), Confronting the Burden of History: Literary Representations of the Past (2012), Travelling Texts: J.M. Coetzee and Other Writers (2014), The Art of Literature, Art in Literature (2014), Powieść brytyjska w XXI wieku (2018). She has also published numerous articles on contemporary British and Irish writers (Graham Swift, A.S. Byatt, David Mitchell, John Banville).

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MAŁGORZATA MARTYNUSKA1 DOI: 10.15290/CR.2019.25.2.05 University of Rzeszow ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5028-5046

The nostalgic landscape of Miami in Susanna Daniel’s Stiltsville

Abstract. The article examines the nostalgic landscape of Miami depicted in Susanna Daniel’s debut novel Stiltsville (2010). The setting of the novel is the actual community named in the title of the book and it refers to a group of houses built on pilings about a mile offshore in Biscayne Bay. The analysis proceeds according to methodology presented by the literary theorist Hana Wirth-Nesher in her article titled “Impartial Maps: Reading and Writing Cities”, published in Handbook of Urban Studies (2001), in which she identifies four aspects of cityscape in the representation of the city in narrative: the built, the ‘natural’, the human, and the verbal. The paper discusses the nostalgic construction of the past in the novel. Nostalgic notions of preserving the past have been linked with the concepts of cultural heritage and the preservation movement. Keywords: Stiltsville, Florida, marine environment, Hurricane Andrew, landscape, nostalgia.

1. Introduction The article examines the nostalgic cityscape of Miami depicted in Susanna Daniel’s debut novel Stiltsville, published in 2010 by HarperCollins Publishers. The author, who was born and spent most of her childhood in Miami, Florida, graduated from Columbia University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first novel, Stiltsville, was awarded the PEN/Bingham prize for best debut work published in 2010, and it was also placed on the 2011 Summer Reading List selection by Oprah.com. The setting is the actual community named in the title of the book and it refers to a group of houses built on pilings about a mile offshore in Biscayne Bay in Florida. Scott Eyman in his review published in The Palm Beach Post (2010) writes: “The most exotic thing about the novel is the setting”. The author grew up in Miami’s Coral Gables and her family had a house in Stiltsville, which Daniel considered to be an excellent setting for a novel. Her family shared the stilt house and paid its maintenance costs together with other families until it was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew. There are biographical traces in Daniel’s construction of the main character. “Frances is my mother in a lot of ways; I wrote Frances to honor my mother”, says Daniel (Eyman 2010). In an interview with Laura Valeri, Susanna Daniel talks about the inspiration for her novel:

1 Address for correspondence: Institute of English Studies, University of Rzeszów, al. Mjr. Kopisto 2B, 35-315 Rzeszów, Poland. E-mail: [email protected]

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“I wanted to parallel the story of a long marriage to the history of Stiltsville, the place, and the coming-of-age of the city where I grew up”. The author emphasizes the significance of changes by saying: “Stiltsville is both relegated to history and also still in existence, in a different form–like a lot of families, including mine” (Valeri 2011). The book depicts the long marriage of Dennis and Frances DuVal, but at the same time, it focuses on the moments in which the family experienced unexpected changes. The story is narra ted by the main character, 26-year old Frances Ellerby, who moves to Miami from Decatur, Georgia, close to Atlanta. The people Frances spends most of her time with in Miami are her husband Dennis DuVal, his sister Betty, and her friend Marse Heiger. The novel follows Frances through her courtship with Dennis, their marriage and raising their only child, Margo. The story relies on the narrator’s memory and recollections of particular periods and events from the past which are vital for Frances. The novel spans 25 years and is divided into chapters corresponding to the chronological time periods: 1969, 1970, 1976, 1982, 1990, 1992, 1993. The first chapter, concerning events in 1969, begins when Frances makes her first-ever visit to Miami to attend the wedding of a college girlfriend. At the beginning of the novel Frances appears not to fit sultry South Florida, as for a young girl from Georgia, Miami seems decadent. Eventually, she leaves behind her old life and a boring bank job in Atlanta and starts a new life in Miami which focuses on Stiltsville. As time passes, numerous changes occur affecting both Frances’s family and the city of Miami until Hurricane Andrew destroys their stilt house. The present analysis of the novel is constructed according to methodology presented by the lite rary theorist Hana Wirth-Nesher in her article titled “Impartial Maps: Reading and Writing Cities”, published in Handbook of Urban Studies (2001), in which she identifies four aspects of cityscape in the representation of the city in narrative: the human, the built, the ‘natural’, and the verbal. The built environment depicts the city’s architecture, streets, squares, and other man-made objects. The ‘natural’ environment refers to the incorporation of nature in the metropolitan imagination: land- scapes, parks, plants, even weather. The human environment does not refer to the main characters of the novel but rather to those human features that define the setting, such as city-dwellers, tou rists and shop owners. The verbal environment describes the language of the novel and refers to the written names of places and streets, the language of notices and advertisements as well as the spoken language the characters use in the narrative (Wirth-Nesher 2001: 54). The purpose of this paper is not only an examination of the four environments of Miami’s cityscape that are featured in the novel Stiltsville but also discussion of the narrator’s nostalgic construction of the past, an example of the nostalgic notions that have been linked with the cultural heritage of South Florida. The concept of nostalgia, coined in 1688 by a Swiss physician, Johannes Hofer, was primarily associated with homesickness (Tierney 2013). Later, the term started to express a longing for the past and acquired a connotation of sentimentality. Fred Davis defined nostalgia in the following words: “a form of sentimental yearning for any object, event, or place in the past or a positively formed evocation of the past” (1979: 18). Looking back at the past and reconstructing it provides a positive context for present life; however, a nostalgic vision of the past is not the same as the actual

82 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies past. It is a selection of events from the past rather than a true historical account. Nostalgic narratives are embedded in a social context and comment on how memory works. American heritage historian and geographer David Lowenthal claims that while recollecting the past we transform it with the aim of preserving it; however, the actual past was not like our memories about it because “Nostalgia evokes better-off as well as better times” (2015: 41). In our own memories, we discard events from the past that are unwanted in contemporary times and present an idealized version of the past. You cannot retrieve the past because you “can return to a place, but never to a past” (Lowenthal 2015: 50). Political scholar Kimberly Smith (2000: 509) claims that nostalgia is a cognitive process in which one not only memorizes certain things but adopts a particular attitude towards things to roman- ticize the past. Literary theorist Svetlana Boym describes ‘reflective nostalgia’ as making people contemplate the passage of time and their identity by reflecting upon the value of the past for present purposes. Reflective nostalgia refers to “individual and cultural memory” (2001: 41) which emphasizes the imperfect process of remembrance. It accepts the fact that some events belong to the past but cherishes emotions evoked by the experience of recollecting the past. The acknow ledg- ment of the irretrievability of the past creates a space in which memory selects events for our emotional pleasure, and the fact that experience belongs to the past makes us enjoy it in the present. As sociologist Janelle Wilson notices, the experience of nostalgia helps people to infuse the past with new meaning that is significant in the present (2005: 23). Past experiences may be remade, rediscovered or even renewed; however, a nostalgic image may be blurry because nostalgia mytho logizes the past. Past recollections concern specific times and places, but even after returning to a particular place we find that nothing has stayed the same as numerous changes have occurred. What matters is not that the past is recreated but how the past is reconstructed in re-telling. The research conducted by Sedikides, et al. revealed that nostalgia may facilitate continuity between past and present, and in this way “use positive perceptions about the past to bolster a sense of continuity and meaning in one’s life” (2008: 306). Reverting to the past is seen as a way of compensation for the threatening changes occurring in the modern world. The notion of nostalgia has found recognition in the field of urban studies and it has been associated with the creation of remembrance museums, heritage preservation parks and with concepts of the recovery, restoration, and maintenance of traditions. Urbanization caused the destruction of numerous historical landmarks, which made Americans feel a nostalgic sense of loss. In the 1960s the federal government began to fund projects aimed at the preservation of historic heritage and architects turned to history and the celebration of vernacular housing (Zukin 1982: 75). Literary theorist Linda Hutcheon claims that nostalgia is connected with the manifestation of vernacular-revival architecture and preservation activity (2002: 177). Historian Alison Isenberg (2004) links nostalgia with urban revitalization policies, as nostalgic themes became a part of landscape planning and urban aesthetics. The movement for the preservation of American historic heritage was stimulated by nostalgia as well as its tourist potential. According to Lowenthal, the preservation movement concerns not only single pieces of architecture but larger areas. “Preservation

83 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies reaches beyond single structures to embrace neighborhoods and entire towns” (2015: 421). Every American state has its own unique culture that may be the object of nostalgic preservation and the state of Florida even has a term – Floridiana – which applies to its characteristic artifacts, historical heritage, geography, architecture or folklore. Merriam Webster Dictionary defines ‘Floridiana’ as “material (as documents, anecdotes, or artifacts) distinctively bearing on or characteristic of Florida or its people or culture”. The cityscape of Miami is a kind of palimpsest landscape combi ning historical, architectural and cultural features of the city with the geographic environment of Floridiana, and the Stiltsville enclave is a symbolic landscape of Miami, which synthesizes its urban and marine environments.

2. Cityscape of Stiltsville: the built environment The built environment of the novel Stiltsville represents both the existing artifacts of Floridiana and structures invented by the author. The former “derive their significance from both the text in which they are represented and the existing repertoire of city tropes in the arts and literature” (Wirth-Nesher 2001: 55). Stiltsville has been featured as the setting of other novels: Skin Tight (1989) by Carl Hiaasen; Done Deal (1993) by Les Standiford; Dearly Devoted Dexter (2005) which is the second novel in the crime series about Dexter written by Jeff Lindsay; and Sea Creatures (2013) by Susanna Daniel. Although the novel Stiltsville does not make any references to the mentioned books, the fact that the houses on piles in Biscayne Bay inspire so many writers proves the prominence of the enclave. The fictional world of Daniel is set in the physical landscape of Miami. The narrative encompasses two Miami spaces: the mainland and offshore Stiltsville, which is located five miles from the city downtown. Despite this distance, Stiltsville is considered part of the Miami cityscape, so part of Floridiana as well. The enclave is both included in the urban metropolitan environment and excluded from it, as it is only accessible by boat. This closed community, resembling an island, developed as a kind of weekend paradise and provides a sense of intimacy for its residents. The separation between the public and the private is maintained because the characters spend week- days in Miami whereas the stilt house serves as a private enclave and a refuge from urban life reserved for weekends. The narrator calls the stilt house “our little island, our weekend oasis” (75). The city of Miami plays an important role in Frances’s life; however, meaningful events happen at Stiltsville. The narrator selects only particular years for the story and presents them chronologically. It is not an actual description of the past but a selection of key experiences which are always connected with the stilt house. As Lowenthal puts it, “Heritage is scolded for swerving from the true past–selecting, altering, inventing” (2015: 112). Wirth-Nesher states that the novelist incorporates some aspects of real cityscape into fictive reconstruction by providing the names of streets, places, and landmarks. In this way the author enables the reader to place the character in the real setting and to recognize the significance of particular localities as a “vocabulary of cityscape elements” arrives at “universal determinants of legibility” (2001: 52). At the beginning of the novel, Frances’s friend Marse takes her on a sightseeing

84 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies boat trip. In this way Daniel affectionately evokes the Miami landmarks, starting with Freedom Tower in the city’s downtown. Then, Marse points to the bridge connecting the downtown to Key Biscayne – the area including the neighborhood of Stiltsville. Marse presents other parts of the city, starting from the southwest: The Everglades, Turkey Point, Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, and to the east: the Cape Florida Lighthouse located at the tip of Key Biscayne. The lighthouse, built in 1825, is the oldest building in south Florida. Another architectural spot worth visiting mentioned further in the first chapter is Vizcaya – a villa in the Renaissance style surrounded by elaborate gardens and located on the bay in Coconut Grove. The narrator in her nostalgic memories presents the historic heritage of the city which corresponds with Linda Hutcheon’s theory linking nostalgia with pre servation activity (2002). As the story develops, Frances seems constantly fascinated with the city of Miami: “Because a century ago, swampland enveloped this shoreline, before developers drained it and built a city from the bog. Because our piece of Florida was invented, not discovered” (148). It is Dennis’s parents who own the stilt house, built in 1945 by Dennis’s father, Grady, who adopted the idea of a local fisherman named “Crawfish” Eddie Walker (21). It is a direct reference to the real history of Stiltsville which was started in the days of prohibition by “Crawfish” who sold bait and beer at his stilt house, so the author uses elements of the historical account of Floridiana heritage for her fictional story. Frances describes her first sight of Stiltsville, which consisted of 14 houses elevated above the water on pilings, in the following way: “They stood on cement pillars, flanking a dark channel along the rim of the bay as if guarding it from the open ocean” (2). Theirs is a red- painted house with white shutters which is later referred to in the story as the “stilt house”. This place turns out to be a special location where the characters always return when something significant happens in their lives. It is the stilt house where Frances is introduced to Dennis DuVal and it is also the place where he proposes to her. It seems that the romantic scenery of the house built on the water makes an ideal setting for events that are meaningful for Frances. Nina Sankovitch (2011) in a review of the novel published in The Huffington Post writes: “Frances is enchanted by the neighborhood hovering over water, and falls in love with the rhythm and beauty of Southern Florida”. Even her mother remarks during one of her winter visits to see Frances: “Miami suits you” (253). Frances emphasizes in her narration that despite the changes that occur in the life of the family, Stiltsville continues to play a prominent role for all of the family members, including her daughter Margo. She takes up a number of activities at school to gain extra credits for her university application. One of the activities she practices is competitive sailing, but she gives it up saying that “the regattas monopolized all her weekends” (153), so she had no time for visiting Stiltsville. When Margo transfers from the University of Miami to the University of Florida, she spends her last night with the family at Stiltsville. It is also at the stilt house where Margo expresses a request to move out of the dorms into an apartment complex off campus. It seems that all the decisions that are important for the family are discussed and made at Stiltsville. The family members are aware that their custom of staying at the stilt house will have to end soon because the state of Florida has declared Biscayne Bay a national park, which meant that private ownership of the stilt houses was going to be brought to an end. Again, the fictional narrative refers to real state

85 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies regulations. Even though the family still keeps the place they are aware of how much they are going to miss the house after losing it. Their life is constantly changing but the loss of Stiltsville induces a complete change of their lifestyle. When Margo leaves for university, Frances suddenly realizes she has extra time to occupy, which is difficult because Frances “wasn’t used to spending time outside other than at Stiltsville” (164). The narrator makes nostalgic recollections to compen- sate for violent changes occurring in her life. As sociology professor Jan Willen Duyvendak puts it in The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States, a home may be a non-material place or its image linked to a concrete manifestation of the home in the past (2011: 37). Pam Cook states that “nostalgia is predicated on a dialectic between longing for something idealized that has been lost, and an acknowledgment that this idealized something can never be retrieved in actuality, and can only be accessed through images” (2005: 3). While reminiscing on the past, Frances not only makes recollections of the actual past but also depicts a nostalgic vision of home by presenting its images, like the one depicting what Stiltsville would look like from the view of a plane: “…the houses perched on stilts in the bay would dissolve in the blurring of waves and sky” (73). Another image Frances produces is connected with the potential destruction of the stilt house by the hurricane, which is immediately connected with the concept of the family:

Maybe we would anchor where our stilt house had stood and dive the spot like any wreck, searching for bed frames, shutters, shoes. We would feel loss and lost, and I would realize once again: this is what it means to be part of a family. There are no maps and the territory is continually changing (117).

After having learned the house has been destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, Frances narrates: “I imagined pieces of our stilt house stranded there–shutters or dock planks or even the hurricane tracking map that hung in the kitchen, its little red and blue magnets scattered across the bay floor” (229). Frances expresses what the house meant to her: “It was a treasure, this sense of isolation. How would we achieve it, if we didn’t rebuild?” (231). The images of the house produced by the narrator correspond with Duyvendak’s concept of defining nostalgia as not only longing for a place but mourning over changes that have occurred in that particular place. You cannot truly return to that place because it exists mostly in your imagination (2011: 24). Duyvendak connects the notion of place with the activity of home-making as the necessity for the place to be transformed into a home. He claims that the building itself has no real ‘home’ value if there are no feelings attached or if it is not connected with activities occurring in that particular place. “Home is more the result of home-making than the effect of the place itself” (2011: 37). When Frances wants to show Margo’s husband, Stuart, what the stilt house looked like, she searches through the old photographs, but it turns out that there is actually no record showing the whole house. Instead, they can see Margo on the dock, Dennis with a railing behind, or Frances in the doorway. Surprised, Frances narrates: “There was no photo of the house the way I remember

86 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies it: from a distance, wholly intact. I did not understand, taking those pictures, that history must be collected while the subject exists” (243). Actually, the pictures reflect what the stilt house meant to them – a family place. The house was significant only when family members occupied it. Frances recollects the good old days when a physical therapist comes to help Dennis with exercises that would slow the degeneration of his muscles. When they are doing some exercises in the water, Frances nostalgizes about the family time at the stilt house when Margo was a little girl and Dennis used to teach her to swim. Once, when Dennis is strong enough, Frances takes him and Margo on the boat at night and they anchor in the spot where their stilt house stood. They are eating crabs and looking at the downtown skyline like they used to in the past. Although Frances misses Stiltsville, she realizes that even if their stilt house had not been destroyed, they would not be able to use it because of Dennis’s illness. “It had collapsed before becoming a sad, abandoned treasure” (287). The narrator identifies with the house even when it no longer exists which corresponds with Svetlana Boym’s concept of ‘reflective nostalgia’ (2001). Duyvendak states that there are places that have the meaning of ‘home’ as a fixed physical space, which is significant because it gives people a sense of belonging and identity. This does not mean that individuals are fixed in place but rather that the place has a particular value for the individual (2011: 8). Frances identifies with Stiltsville but in a broader context she identifies with the whole city of Miami: “Miami is the only place in this country where Stiltsville could exist, and for a while I had the good fortune of spending time there” (72). After Dennis’s death, Frances moves to Asheville, North Carolina where in the past they both spent a weekend hiking and watching street musicians. She narrates: “When I think about Miami, it is as if all I loved about the place no longer exists” (303). She means Dennis and the stilt house. According to Lowenthal, the heritage and preservation movement may reflect nostalgia for the lost community (2015: 6). The coastal environment of Florida provides numerous obstacles to the preservation of the houses which are threatened by hurricanes and surrounded by saltwater. The tropical storms enumerated in the narrative are part of the actual history of Florida which is frequently devastated by their disastrous force. After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the Stiltsville community shrank substantially and only seven structures remained. This fact is true for both the fictional landscape of the novel and the real account of Miami’s history. Those seven houses have also survived the most recent Hurricane Irma (2017) relatively unscathed; just one of the houses needed roof repairs and some dock and railing were damaged (Rabin 2017). Daniel was not able to acknowledge this fact in her book which was published in 2010, seven years before Hurricane Irma.

3. Cityscape of Stiltsville: the ‘natural’ environment The ‘natural’ cityscape of the novel is focused on the coastal and marine environment of Miami which determines the characters’ routine of celebrating weekends. They develop a habit of staying at Stiltsville together with Dennis’s parents, his sister Betty, and occasionally they are joined by their friend Marse. They spend time sailing, swimming, walking on the sandbar between the stilt houses which they call the ‘flats’ and looking for starfish, sea worms and fire coral. Then they eat fish,

87 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies lobsters, or other sea creatures they have caught themselves. Daniel also mentions clubs connected with the marine environment of Miami, like the Biscayne Bay Yacht Club which Dennis joins in 1976 and the Coconut Grove Sailing Club where Betty teaches sailing lessons. Duyvendak claims that the choice of home is often closely connected with the choice of lifestyle because the place known as home and its surroundings enable the individual to realize his or her passion, e.g. club- bing, sailing (10). The stilt house definitely assumes the meaning of ‘home’ to Frances, who becomes totally absorbed with her new lifestyle and totally removed from her previous life in Georgia. The literary depiction of the stilt house evokes the image of the marine environment. Frances describes the house in the following words:

The main room of the stilt house was paneled with wood and stocked with old appliances and a shabby wicker sofa with turquoise vinyl cushions … The kitchen and the living area shared one open space, with two doors that opened onto the west and north porches. This design gave the house an inside-out quality, like the interior of a cabana or, I imagined, a yacht (12).

A decorative rope on the counter, a stack of fishing and boating magazines on a coffee table, and a huge marlin placed above the kitchen sink added touches of the marine environment to the interior of the house. Moreover, one of the bedrooms had a special type of furniture, namely, two bunk beds. The purpose of the downstairs’ area was described in France’s narration as “existing only to elevate the second floor away from the water” (13). The second story of the house had a veranda with a white wooden railing, but the first story had no railing so inhabitants or visitors to the house could simply jump directly from it into the water. A nostalgic look at the house idealizes it with the spirit of coziness and togetherness. The depiction evokes a great deal of sentimentality which corresponds with Fred Davis’s definition of nostalgia (1979). The characters enjoy the benefits of the coastal environment but at the same time show respect for its fauna and flora and caution with regard to its dangers. The reader can see how seriously Dennis treats the marine environment in the way he spends his time with his daughter at the stilt house. They study together survival tactics, discuss what to do when lost at sea, how to recognize which fish are poisonous, how to check the wind. When they learn that an electric eel lives in a bowl under the dock of the house, they seem to be proud of the fact that this wild creature chose this particular house for its habitat. Their intention is not to kill the eel but to catch it and find it a new home in a reef cave. However, during one of the summer weekends Marse’s cousin dives down beneath the dock with a machete and chops off the electric eel’s head. Afterward, Dennis tells Marse that her family is not welcome anymore. This event clearly proves that a wild sea creature living in the proximity of the stilt house was seen as a permanent neighbor for the house residents and killing it meant a betrayal of trust for Dennis. The eel belonged to the house and the family identified with it as they identified with the house. Killing the eel was a negative change in the stability of the house and its ideal surroundings.

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Frances evokes nostalgic memories connected with nice tropical weather by describing what spring and summer meant to her. The South Floridian spring is depicted in the following words: “bright warm days and few mosquitoes, and nights as crisp as seventy degrees” (54). Then, she refers to summer in the subtropics: “it was beautiful, clear, and sunny until mid-afternoon, then rained heavily for an hour, then the clouds cleared and the sun came out again” (255). She stresses a sort of temporality of bad weather which is always likely to change for the better. Geographer Harm de Blij in his book The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, elaborates on the “geography of jeopardy” and tries to answer the question of why many Americans build their second homes along coastlines vulnerable to hurricanes. He argues that danger “forms a significant factor in the composite power of place” (2009: 108), and continues: “the power of place manifests itself in continua of opportunity and risk, advantage and privation” (2009: 136). A dangerous aspect of the marine and coastal environment of Florida is the stormy weather. At the opening of the novel, Frances asks: “How much weather could the house withstand?”. This quality of living in the stilt house is reflected by the hurricane tracking map with tiny magnets indicating weather warnings. Frances narrates: “On land, one looks toward the ocean to predict whether the storm is coming. From the ocean, one looks to the horizon” (25). Frances describes the destructive force of the hurricanes which had hit Stiltsville over the years. In 1960 Hurricane Donna leveled all but the six of the houses. Many residents rebuilt their houses in a new cottage-style and more solidly designed. Unfortunately, after Hurricane Betsy in 1965 only 14 structures were left. Other tropical storms mentioned in the narrative are Hurricane Agnes which hit Florida in 1972, Hurricane David which in 1979 tore part of the roof from the stilt house and Hurricane Hugo which struck in 1989. The narrator recollects the past with concern about two dimensions which cannot be separated: specific time and space. In the words of Christine Sprengler: “nostalgia retained its spatial dimen- sion” (2009: 15). The stilt house from the novel survived Hurricanes Betsy, Agnes, and Hugo. Then, in 1992, Hurricane Andrew came. When the National Hurricane Center issued a storm warning for Dade County, Frances “imagined the stilt house without its roof, the dock splintered” (217). When the storm started, she knew that “there would be nothing left” (217). After the hurricane, the city of Coral Gables closed the canal to private traffic and they did not know the fate of Stiltsville. Dennis said: “If the stilt house is gone, I don’t want to rebuild”. Many people lost their houses in the hurricane so had to depend on the Red Cross, which prepared tents for the newly homeless. Frances narrates: “Our neighborhood felt to me like an island refuge – like Stiltsville, in a way – isolated from a continent of disaster and disaster relief” (225). Finally, they were able to get to Stiltsville to learn the fate of their house and check the hurricane damage. Frances narrates this experience: “Our stilt house had stood seventh from the right. We counted under our breath: one, two, three houses remained, all west of where ours had been. The house was gone. From a distance, the breach seemed neat and deliberate, as if God had plucked our stilt house from its stem” (228). Nostalgia is used as a tool for representing a ‘paradise lost’ which existed not only in the past but at a specific time in the past. Their stilt house existed till 1992; then it became a ‘paradise lost’.

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The stilt house becomes the metaphor for happiness that was lost instantly in a storm. The destruction of the house by a hurricane makes it the material for nostalgia and foreshadows Frances’s husband’s death which occurs shortly afterward. Roberta Rubenstein in Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction, defines nostalgia as “a kind of haunted longing: figures of earlier relationships and the places with which they are associated” (2011: 5). It is not only longing for a significant place but for a figure strongly associated with the place. Frances constructs her identity in relation to the stilt house and her husband.

4. Cityscape of Stiltsville: the human environment The human cityscape of the novelStiltsville consists mainly of white people and Hispanics, particularly Cubans. The most important character not belonging to the family is Frances’s friend –Marse. They both meet frequently and spend time talking about Marse’s acquaintances. It seems that in certain Miami circles people have known each other’s families for decades. “In so many ways, Miami was a small town” (195). However, it is mostly whites that they talk about and spend time with, which does not mean that they are oblivious to the Hispanic presence in the city. Frances meets some Cuban ladies at the YMCA gym in Miami, but no Cuban is ever a close acquaintance of her family: “Miami was more than half Cuban at this point, and yet I could count the Cuban couples in our social circle on one hand” (239). This situation may be explained by American architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright who writes in Modern Architectures in History: “American cities were segregating commercial and residential environments, yet urban social life retained a dynamic creole mixture” (2008: 37). The characters of the novel rarely contact Hispanics in their private lives but frequently meet them in their public lives as Latinx, particularly Cubans, combine a permanent and constantly growing fixture of Miami’s cityscape. The Cuban landscape of Miami is introduced by the city’s landmark – Freedom Tower. Frances mentions that from the stilt house it was possible to distinguish the shape of the lighthouse or Freedom Tower. Then, she makes a reflection. “Considering the blue expanse of ocean in my vision and the thousands of glassy wavelets and the fathoms of veiled blond seafloor, I would have thought I could see to Cuba” (14). Although Frances’s life in Miami is in a peculiar way almost entirely isolated from contacts with any members of the Cuban diaspora, she realizes the strange- ness of this situation. She mentions Freedom Tower and immediately Cuba comes to her mind because that particular construction serves as the reception center for Cuban refugees. Another Hispanic accent occurs in the chapter narrating events from 1970 when Frances sees young girls wearing quinceañera outfits posing for photographs at the Spanish-style arches in Coral Gables. There is also a Hispanic character of Lola – an Ecuadorian therapist who helps Dennis when he is diagnosed with ALS. The Cuban presence in the city is shown when Frances starts a sort of flirta- tious relationship with her tennis coach Jack. They go to the beach together and next to their spot there is a Cuban family having a picnic. Again, the Cubans are in the background of events and do not play any role in the activities performed by Frances. The novel pictures an undisturbed relationship between the whites and Hispanics. Both groups live close to each other in their isolated

90 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies worlds but when they occasionally meet, harmony is maintained. The Cubans, although largely represented in the city, do not induce violent changes in Miami’s landscape. Unlike them, the Africans do. The African component of Miami’s ethnic mosaic is introduced in the novel with the dramatic events that happened in 1980, following the so-called McDuffie case. Arthur McDuffie was a black insurance agent who was fatally beaten by Dade County police officers. The all-white jury in the McDuffie case acquitted the accused officers and the verdict caused riots in three Miami neighborhoods inhabited by African Americans. In the interview with Valeri, Daniel says: “When you live in a place like Miami, there’s no separating the drama of family life from the drama of their surroundings” (Valeri 2011). Frances experiences the riots, but they do not touch her directly as she observes the events from afar – from the stilt house: “From Stiltsville, we could see smoke rising over the city, and when we got home, South Bayshore was a ghost town” (145). The human environment of the novel, as well as the city itself, begins to change. Frances mentions in her narration that due to the changing demographics of the city many Miami dwellers start to move north, as do the Suttons who owned the stilt house directly west of Frances’s house. They transfer their land lease and sell their house to a man who differs from other Stiltsville occu- pants as he does not treat the house as weekend accommodation but lives on the bay full-time and employs runners to bring food to him. His stay becomes so permanent that he does not even have a boat tied to his dock, which seems unwise considering emergency situations. Frances realizes that the city is changing but at the same time those changes do not affect her family which feels in a way insulated by the circles they move in. In his book Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel, John J. Sue writes about the prominence of place as “a response to a global shift in how individuals relate to the locations they inhabit” (2005: 20). The human environment of the novel implies changes connected with people’s mobility and the narrative does not suggest temporality but rather the permanent character of those transformations. Frances is not touched directly by the social and urban transformations of Miami’s cityscape because she finds comfort and safety in her magical place which is Stiltsville. In this context, the stilt house serves as protection against changes occurring in the human environment. Frances in her nostalgic memories recollects both the permanent routines of Stiltsville weekends and the times of meaningful changes, which she was able to stand due to the comforting refuge the house provided.

5. Cityscape of Stiltsville: the verbal environment The verbal environment refers to both the written and spoken language of the novel. According to Wirth-Nesher the names of the cities themselves “signify beyond their geographical referent” (2001: 56). The written language of the novel makes use of narrative cartography to introduce the tropicalism of the places e.g. Coral Gables or Coconut Grove. Moreover, the Caribbean aspects of the city’s charm are depicted by the names of trees and plants: banyans, mangroves, oranges, alla- manda bushes, gumbo-limbo trees, and palms. The marine environment of Florida is evoked not only by flora but also fauna: pelicans, manatees, stone crabs, alligators, starfish, sea urchins, coral,

91 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies sand dollars, electric eels and numerous types of shark: tiger, nurse, hammerheads, blacktip, bull, lemon. The seascape is clearly suggested by the names of restaurants: Fisheating Creek Inn, Diner Key Marina, Hungry Sailor. The spoken language of the novel stresses the senses. John Urry in his article “City Life and the Senses” elaborates on the “sensuous geography” used to depict how the senses contribute to people’s orientation in space and their appreciation of their environment. The senses are connected with visuality which provides an encounter with the environment and “sense of the surround- ing townscape” (2003: 389-393). Frances affectionately describes the tropicality of Miami and emphasizes the sense of smell “I loved…smell the rotting sweetness of a ripening mango tree”. She continues by stressing the visual aspect of the tropical environment: “I loved the limestone and the coral rock, the fountains and the ocean and the winding blue canals. I loved the giant banyans and the dense wet mangroves and gumbo-limbo trees and the many-sized, many-shaped palms” (72). When Frances gives birth to a baby daughter, she names her Margo because she feels that this name sounds south Floridian and tropical at the same time. The visuality aspect of the environment is mentioned during one of Margo’s visits home from the university, which occurs on Independence Day. The family goes to the stilt house to “to watch fireworks over the skyline” (171) which suggests that the experience of watching the show is better at Stiltsville than from the Miami mainland. The visual aspect of the marine environment is emphasized by the use of colors: “the blue of the sky was rich and dense” (12), “the blue expanse of ocean in my vision” (14). Dark colors stress the dramatism of the night the hurricane hit: “Between flashes of lightning, the sky was purple-black and inky” (243). The language of the cityscape clearly shows that the characters live in a city with a substantial Hispanic population which is made up mostly of Cubans. The exemplary situation occurs when Frances visits Dennis at his apartment and he goes out to buy limes at the mini market on the corner. Dennis calls the shop “bodega” which signifies that it specializes in Hispanic groceries. During his absence, Frances admires the sunset from the balcony and she sees two Cuban men standing at the entrance to the café and talking in Spanish. The Hispanic cityscape is visible in the food names mentioned in the narration. On one occasion Frances goes with her tennis coach to a Cuban restaurant in Little Havana and has a Cuban meal and drinks café con leche. Another time Frances takes Margo to a Mexican restaurant in Coconut Grove where they have tortilla chips, salsa, and enchiladas. The narration introduces the reader to Miami’s Hispanics by presenting their Spanish-sounding names, e.g. Margo’s teacher of English is named Mr. Lopez, and her social studies teacher is Mrs. Gonzalez. When Margo and her newly-wed husband, Stuart, are looking for a house to buy, they visit the one belonging to Ms. Penny Morales who speaks with a heavy accent suggesting her Cuban roots. On another occasion, Frances mentions: “I loved to eavesdrop on the loud conversations of the ladies at the deli counter, ferreting out select phrases using the lazy Spanish I’d acquired over the years” (72). It became a sort of trend in certain Miami circles to drop some Spanish into casual conversation, but not too much, in order to avoid a discussion with the Hispanic housekeeper.

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Frances exemplifies this with a situation when Margo thanks to her friend’s mother for inviting her to a birthday party. The woman welcomes Margo and says: “Qué linda”. The verbal environment of the novel exemplified by the characters’ dialogues and their dialect suggests ethnic subdi- visions of the city. Spanish-speaking residents of the city are in the background of events that happen in Frances’ life and they never visit Stiltsville. The verbal aspect of the cityscape marks some aspects of Miami’s social hierarchy, as certain Miami circles are reserved only for English- speaking whites.

6. Conclusion The novel portrays both Frances’s marriage and the Stiltsville community, which is as old as the city of Miami and constitutes architecturally a significant example of Floridiana. The novel allows the readers to experience the marine environment of South Florida and the best it has to offer: the sky, the water, the boating, and fishing. The stilt houses represent an environmental sensibility and how nature translates into architecture. Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaïka in their article: “The Environment of the City…or the Urbanization of Nature”, argue that the environment of the city results from the process of urbanization of nature. Society and nature are inseparable and their interactions “narrate many interrelated tales of the city” making the city a “palimpsest landscape” (2011: 569-571). The novel portrays the urban space of Miami as palimpsests of different environments: the built, the ‘natural’, the human and the verbal. The marine environment of Miami directly connected with the main setting of the novel – the Stiltsville enclave – is deeply affected by the hurricane. This dramatic event not only destroys the main built environment of the novel but also makes the characters change their lifestyle. The ‘natural’ environment has a binary depiction: idealized, mysterious, sentimental on one hand and dangerous, threatening, destructive and deadly on the other. The novel presents an idealized image of the human cityscape as people do not commit any violent acts except for the ones occurring during the McDuffie riots. The real danger is not created by humans but by nature, which poses a threat to the built and human aspects of the cityscape, including the special place of Stiltsville. The built environment translates into the human environment when the city landmark – Freedom Tower – is brought into the narrative to symbolize Cuban refugees. The verbal environment accompanies the ‘natural’ to emphasize the tropicality of the place. It also assists the depiction of the human environment by emphasizing the Hispanic presence in the city with the inclusion of Spanish-sounding names and the practice of dropping Spanish words into conversations. Daniel’s reflections demonstrate the sentimentality and selectivity characteristics of nostalgia. The characters identify with a place that is meaningful for them, one that both belongs to them and they belong to. John Sue states: “individuals can identify with mediated representations of place as well as the places themselves” (2005: 97). The narrator identifies with the place even when it disappears and she tries to retrieve it in two ways: by revoking past recollections and by deve loping the image of it. In both cases, Frances idealizes the home and depicts it with a great deal of sentimentality. Nostalgia and positive emotions are evoked again when she describes her

93 ...... CROSSROADS. A Journal of English Studies husband: “He seemed to regard fatherhood and husbandhood the way a magician regards magic: the delight is in the mystery” (133). The narrator reconstructs the past in her storytelling, but the representation of the past is revisionary because only certain periods are selected for the remi- niscence. Nostalgia is triggered by past recollections taking the form of shattered fragments of memory. The narrator allows us to enjoy the experience again and again; as cultural scholar Sean Scanlan puts it, “Nostalgia keeps on returning” (2004: 2). Frances keeps on returning to the stilt house which serves as an embodiment of her idealized past. The novel is about yearning for the figure and the place from the past that give meaning to the narrator’s life, and it exemplifies the type of nostalgia that Svetlana Boym names ‘reflective’ as it stresses the meaning of emotions and social bonds that the characters develop in their lives in the place that is special for the narrator, the stilt house. Boym’s concept of reflective nostalgia, which is linked with “individual and cultural memory”, is present in the novel through the direct relationship between the writer’s biography, the story’s narrator and the storm-struck history of South Florida. The narrator’s house no longer exists but the remaining structures of the Stiltsville community are the object of conservation activities. It is her heritage that she wishes to preserve; she cannot retrieve the past but she can keep recollections and create images. The historical Stiltsville enclave is regarded as a living heritage of the past that is being preserved for the future. This magic landscape, which inspires historians, geographers, architects, and writers, may be destroyed by the tropical storms that are certain to hit Florida’s shores in the future. If the state of Florida does not preserve and rebuild the stilt houses, those signature constructions which are part of Florida’s cultural heritage will remain only in images and nostalgic memories.

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Lowenthal, D. 2015. The Past Is a Foreign Country – Revisited. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Merriam Webster Dictionary online. (19 January 2019). https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Floridiana. Rabin, C. 2017. Stiltsville still standing after Hurricane Irma’s winds blew through. Miami Herald (21 September 2017). https://www.miamiherald.com/news/weather/hurricane/ar- ticle174542451.html Rubenstein, R. 2011. Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sankovitch, N. 2011. Life’s sturdy pilings: Stiltsville by Susanna Daniel. Huffington Post (25 May 2011). https://www.huffingtonpost.com/nina-sankovitch/lifes-sturdy-pilings- emst_b_675081.html?guccounter=1 Scanlan, S. 2004. Introduction: Nostalgia. Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 5.1: 2-9. Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Arndt, J. & Routledge, C. 2008. Nostalgia. Past, present, and future. Current Directions in Psychological Science 17.5: 304-307. Smith, K. K. 2000. Mere nostalgia. Notes on a progressive paratheory. Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3.4: 505-527. Sprengler, C. 2009. Screening Nostalgia. Populuxe props and Technicolor aesthetics in contemporary American film. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. Stiltsville Trust. Seven remaining houses. http://stiltsvilletrust.org/pages/stiltsville_ remaining_houses.html Sue, J. J. 2005. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Swyngedouw E. & Kaïka, M. 2011. The environment of the city … or the urbanization of nature. In: G. Bridge & S. Watson (eds.), A Companion to the City, 567-580. Malden, MA, USA/Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Tierney, J. 2013. What is nostalgia good for? Quite a bit, research shows. The New York Times (8 July 2013). https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/science/what-is-nostalgia-good-for- quite-a-bit-research-shows.html Urry, J. 2003. City life and the senses. In: G. Bridge & S. Watson (eds.), A Companion to the City, 388-397. Malden, MA, USA/Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Valeri, L. A. 2011. A texture the facts can’t convey: An interview with Susanna Daniel. Fiction Writers Review (28 March 2011). https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/a-texture- the-facts-cant-convey-an-interview-with-susanna-daniel/ Wilson, J. L. 2005. Nostalgia. Sanctuary of Meaning. Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont Publishing. Wirth-Nesher, H. 2001. Impartial maps: Reading and writing cities. In: R. Paddison (ed.), Handbook of Urban Studies, 52-66. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications. Wright, G. 2008. USA: Modern Architectures in History. London, UK: Reaktion Books.

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*** Małgorzata Martynuska is an Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Rzeszow, Poland. She is a graduate of American Studies Center at University of Warsaw (MA) and the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora at Jagiellonian University in Cracow (PhD). She completed her habilitation at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. Her scholarly interests focus on cultural hybridity of US Latinx, acculturation patterns, transculturation and ethnic representations in American popular culture.