MUSEMagazine for UNIL Students of English Spring 2015 – n° 10 Image: © Merelize - stockvault.net MUSE 10 • Spring 2015 Editorial Index Elizabeth Leemann Anita Auer: From Musician to Medievalist to Linguist 3 iterary tradition has always had mixed feelings about April. If Chaucer started his famous Canterbury Tales by speaking Alexandra Ecclesia Lof “Aprill[‘s] shoures soote,” T.S. Eliot did not hesitate to label Rethinking Montréal 6 it as “the cruellest month.” As for us, well, even though we are no medieval literate character embarking on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, we pretty much agree with Chaucer, and would Juliette Loesch like to dismiss Eliot’s pessimistic view of Lausanne (because, Meet four musicians of the English remember, he wrote The Waste Land here!). April is the time of Section 8 Spring and renewal for the campus: the sheep and their lambs come out again, the sun is here, and the Plage de Dorigny has Yannick Weber never seemed so close to us. American Sniper: a Short Critical Review 9 April is also a time of renewal for MUSE Magazine. As you all know, the new MUSE has marked an expansion of the Sandrine Spycher magazine on the internet, with two web issues being published Person of Interest: Tragic Interracial during the Fall semester. We could however not make up our Relationships 10 minds to totally let go of a print issue, so we decided to keep it for the Spring term. And here it is, with all its novelty! Not Antoine Willemin only did we take exactly everything that made the first MUSE so great, we also added a bit of ourselves and our vision in The Post-Structuralist’s Opera 11 it: we decided to have a colour cover that would illustrate the campus and the English department. Very naturally, our Jonathan Afonso attention focused on this Spring theme that we are pretty Vulnicura: Documentary of a Broken much running through, and we could not help ourselves but Heart 12 include a lovely little lamb in this issue. We hope you’ll love it as much as we do! Steven Tamburini J.R.R. Tolkien’s Translation and Content-wise, this issue of MUSE is, as it has become usual, Commentary of Beowulf 13 excellent. We are extremely proud to present to you all these various articles, which illustrate the vivacity, open-mindedness Silvia Monti and critical spirit of the English department. So, delay no more Beautiful Words 14 and wander through the magazine if you want to know more about our new linguist, Anita Auer, if you have always been Kit Schofield interested in knowing Montréal or if you want to read some exciting music, book and TV reviews, amongst others! To those who leave before their time ’ 15 Cheers, Miljan Micakovic The MUSE Committee The Second Labor 16 For more infos on the magazine, contact us at Corinne Morey [email protected] The Forest of Athens: Interview with Chloé Brechbühl 17 Visit our website for past web and print issues: unil.ch/musemagazine Rebecca Frey English Department Events 18 And don’t forget to like our Facebook page: facebook.com/museunil Elvis Coimbra Gomes Cartoon 19 2 Interview MUSE 10 • Spring 2015 Anita Auer: From Musician to Medievalist to Linguist Elizabeth Leemann nita Auer is an active linguistics professor in English and German) is a stylistics person. She the English department and has travelled a lot works on the language of literature from a historical Athroughout her career, learned various languages point of view, so I was always interested in literary by moving to different countries, and is a proficient language. I saw lots of connections with my own flutist. Interestingly, her linguistics career was not research and teaching and research interests in planned and her professional ambitions changed Lausanne. It starts already with the medievalists quite a bit over the years. Now a well-established because I am myself originally a medievalist. Then member of the UNIL English department, she there are also Kirsten and Roelof who work on has several interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary Early Modern English. I am very much interested projects going on. Here is my interview with her in in the language of Early Modern plays. So it’s which she tells us more about it! very much this aspect that interested me. I’m also interested in gender, so working with Valérie was Tell me a bit about your background. Before very appealing. I’m a sociolinguist essentially and working at UNIL you were in Holland this linguistic approach but you are originally studied in can be applied very nicely Austria correct? to literature. I’m native Austrian and I did my BA What were your first and MA at the University of Vienna. impressions of Lausanne? I studied English, Psychology and Philosophy. I thought I was going to I didn’t see much of the be a high school teacher. That was city in the first semester the aim. I wrote my MA thesis on because I was commuting Old English. It was about how Old between the Netherlands English sound changes modified and Lausanne. I was only the grammatical system. During here two or three days the last year of my studies, my a week but lived in the supervisor asked me if I wanted to Netherlands and I flew in go on exchange to Manchester. So and out every week. I liked I went there for a year to write my what I did see of the city, MA thesis and I met a professor who particularly the medieval asked me if I wanted to work on the parts of it. language of Jane Austen. When I said I was interested, they created And the University? a PhD position for me. So I finished my Masters and returned to Manchester as a I really liked the campus although the buildings graduate teaching assistant. Then I applied for could do with some color! But I do really like jobs and got a post-doc position in philology at the the campus. What I like about Lausanne is that University of Leiden in the Netherlands . After that teaching is rated very highly, and not only that the I got a permanent position at Utrecht University students have an opinion but also that they are and I was there for several years. Finally, I came encouraged to have an opinion. In a lot of other to Lausanne almost exactly a year ago. I started in places they are not given this opportunity. February 2014. It’s very interesting because you think that you’re going one way with your life but What about the students? Are Swiss students then you meet people and everything changes. more difficult/easy to work with? What attracted you to Lausanne? Well, I am going to compare here. In Austria I was a student myself but I feel that Austrian students As I said earlier, I am interested in the language were very good at remembering facts. That was of Jane Austen. One of my PhD supervisors (I had also a sign of the times though. English students, two because I did comparative historical linguistics however, didn’t know facts so well but they were 3 MUSE 10 • Spring 2015 Interview very critical and had an opinion on everything. They were asked to debate a lot, which I quite What are you most interested in linguistics? liked. Dutch students are interesting, they have a very good level of proficiency in English. There It’s very much sociolinguistics, so language and seems to be a general cultural understanding that society, how it forms our identity and how we the aim is to pass and not necessarily to achieve adapt our language in specific situations. the best grade, which is too bad. What I can see is that I have some very enthusiastic students who What are your current and future research speak a lot and then I have very quiet students. interests? I haven’t found out what the reason for this is. I think that it possibly depends on the students’ I’m currently working on a project with my backgrounds, where they come from and how Lausanne PhD student Tino and two Utrecht they were taught English. Some are very confident PhD students Moragh and Mike, and Femke, speaking English but others are less so.You live our research assistant. It’s called “Emerging in the Gros-de-Vaud, what do you think of it and Standards: Urbanisation and Development its reputation? Were you surprised by it? of Standard English”. We are looking at how language was used in different urban centres I’m currently relearning French so I don’t feel in England, centres other than London. We are the stigma yet. I don’t say “adieu” yet instead interested in the migration patterns of people of “hello”, so I think I’m ok! (Laughs). It’s really and how that affected their language use. And nice living there actually. When I leave university ultimately, how did the language use affect the and go back into the Gros-de-Vaud, it’s kind of development of standard English as we know it like going on a holiday because you’re away from today. We know for instance that the third person everything. singular –s, when you say “he goes”, is a Northern I did have a student who said she would never date dialect feature whereas people always say that anyone from that area of the canton because the the standard came out of London and thus the accent was so awful.