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“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? – Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” This is how the English poet Wilfred Owen gave words to the horrors of World War I in 1917. Written under the impression of the trench warfare in Flanders, he called the poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth”: To him and his fellow-soldiers the world had become a place Frauke Reitemeier (ed.) of hopelessness and despair. Armed conflicts seem to be inextricably linked to human nature. They reduce men to mere animals and bring about utter despair; men “grope in the dark without light” (Job 12:25). Yet humans are by nature extremely vulnerable, with neither “Deepe things out of darkenesse” a crocodile’s plate armour nor an elephant’s tusks, weight and size: War should be essentially foreign to their nature. In spite of their claim to rationality, though, which supposedly distinguishes them from animals, humans continue trying English and American Representations of Conflicts to solve their problems by taking up arms against each other. Representations of conflicts have found their way into various art forms. The Bible, the written cornerstone of the Christian faith – with forgiveness and peacefulness as central tenets – , contains many tales of military engagements, of murder and conquest. Conflicts do not always imply the use of armed force, though. There are also less deadly, though not necessarily less fierce ‘wars’: wars of ideology, for example, or the ‘price wars’ of retailers. The papers in this volume Göttinger Schriften zur Englischen Philologie explore a variety of different conflicts and their representations – among them the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan in American films – but also depictions of other kinds of hostilities closer to home, such as the ‘Shakespeare wars’. Band 7 2013 Frauke Reitemeier (ed.) “Deepe things out of darkenesse” things Frauke Reitemeier (ed.) “Deepe ISBN: 978-3-86395-129-0 Universitätsdrucke Göttingen Universitätsdrucke Göttingen Frauke Reitemeier (ed.) “Deepe things out of darkenesse” This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License 3.0 “by-nd”, allowing you to download, distribute and print the document in a few copies for private or educational use, given that the document stays unchanged and the creator is mentioned. You are not allowed to sell copies of the free version. erschienen in der Reihe der Universitätsdrucke im Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2013 Frauke Reitemeier (ed.) “Deepe things out of darkenesse” English and American Representations of Conflicts Göttinger Schriften zur Englischen Philologie, Band 7 Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2013 Bibliographische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliographie; detaillierte bibliographische Daten sind im Internet über <http://dnb.ddb.de> abrufbar. Anschrift der Herausgeberin Frauke Reitemeier Seminar für Englische Philologie Käte-Hamburger-Weg 3 37073 Göttingen e-mail: [email protected] This work is protected by German Intellectual Property Right Law. It is also available as an Open Access version through the publisher’s homepage and the Online Catalogue of the State and University Library of Goettingen (http://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de). Users of the free online version are invited to read, download and distribute it. Users may also print a small number for educational or private use. Satz und Layout: Frauke Reitemeier Umschlaggestaltung: Franziska Lorenz © 2013 Universitätsverlag Göttingen http://univerlag.uni-goettingen.de ISBN: 978-3-86395-129-0 ISSN: 1868-3878 Table of Contents Introduction: “Culture is Ordinary” (FRAUKE REITEMEIER) 9 Who Was “Shakespeare”? Ideas of Authorship, Conspiracy Theories, Personality Cult, and a Debate Under Scrutiny (TONIA KRÜGER) 15 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 15 2 The Authorship Debate As a Question of Personal Ideals......................... 18 3 The Authorship Debate As a Question of (Religious) Belief...................... 27 4 The Authorship Debate As a Question of Authorship................................ 36 5 Meeting “Shakespeare”-As-Himself................................................................ 47 6 Conclusions ......................................................................................................... 52 Bibliography.................................................................................................................. 54 Vietnam Goes Intermedia – Reconsidering Media Boundaries in Michael Herr’s Dispatches (MADITA OEMING) 59 1 Introduction: The Vietnam War In- and Outside Plato’s Cave.................. 59 2 Theory in the Making – The Concept(s) of Intermediality ......................... 61 3 The Intermedial Potential of Dispatches........................................................... 65 4 A Mass Media Sensitive Close-Reading of Dispatches.................................... 68 5 Conclusion: We’ve All Been There.................................................................. 84 Works Cited.................................................................................................................. 87 The ‘War on Terror’ in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema: Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies and Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s Traitor (DENNIS EDELMANN) 93 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 93 2 The American Self-Image After 9/11............................................................. 94 3 Rethinking the Image......................................................................................... 98 4 Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies.................................................................................100 5 Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s Traitor...........................................................................110 6 Conclusion.........................................................................................................120 7 Bibliography ......................................................................................................123 8 The Construction of Identity and Identification in Tim Minchin’s Storm (LENNART BRIEGER) 131 1 Introduction ...................................................................................................... 131 2 An Applicable Theory of Identity Construction......................................... 133 3 How the Narrative and Narrative Techniques Elicit Identification......... 143 4 How Poetry Invites Identification through Pleasure.................................. 160 5 Conclusion......................................................................................................... 165 6 Transcript: Tim Minchin’s Storm the Animated Movie ................................... 167 Works Cited................................................................................................................ 174 „Göttinger Schriften zur Englischen Philologie“: Zum Konzept der Reihe (FRAUKE REITEMEIER) 177 Introduction: “Culture is Ordinary” Frauke Reitemeier Students new to English Studies at Göttingen University are often surprised to notice that their course of study does not only refer to Literature (with a capital L) but also takes other kinds of cultural production and all sorts of cultural and liter- ary theories into consideration. “Culture is ordinary”: In 1958, when Raymond Williams made his program- matic statement in an essay of the same title, the relations between culture, society, and class were being renegotiated and redefined, and Williams had some impact on the direction in which the discussion would move. Williams’s thinking was influ- enced by Marxist theory. To him, the system of production in any given society was the key to understanding the culture – or cultures – that exist in that society. Thus, economic changes affect the social organisation that he perceived art to be an element of (93). Williams, however, did not believe that to bring about social changes a particular approach to the arts should be taken; culture, he insisted, “is common meanings, the product of a whole people, and offered individual mean- ings, the product of a man’s whole committed personal and social experience” (96). His 1958 essay discusses Marxist theory and Williams’s responses to it, but it also looks at the standpoint of F. R. Leavis, perhaps the most important English author on culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Leavis rejected the con- sequences the growing industrialisation had on what he considered culture, some- thing that “has always been in minority keeping” (1930, 3), and that contains the “power of profiting by the finest human experiences from the past” (1930, 5). He made a distinction between high culture and low culture, and for him the advent of mass media marked a sharp decline in cultural products. To Williams, this made 10 Frauke Reitemeier little sense. He believed that ordinary people should not, and indeed cannot, be equated with the mindless masses that Leavis envisioned. Nor did Williams believe in the stipulated downfall of culture as a whole; culture expands, he contended, and all elements of culture are also expanding, so it quite logically follows that more ‘bad’ culture would be noticed (100). F. R. Leavis’s ideas about the necessity of preserving the continuity of English (high) culture date from the early 1930s, a time when the relationship between culture and national heritage

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