Search

Within the unstable sphere of the 1950s Cold War political tensions, American women became the ‘bastion of safety in an insecure world’ (Tyler May, 2008: p.9). For politicians such as Richard Nixon, women’s loyalty to the home served as a commitment to America, negotiating a settlement which secured women within the confinements of domestic duties. This ideal, advertised through compelling magazine articles, manipulatively enabled a universal identity for women based within the home. Pages packed with the latest consumer products and laced with ‘smooth artificiality… cool glamour, and the apple-pie happy domesticity’ (Bronfen, 2004: p.115) birthed a rich propaganda for domestic containment. Examining the political climate of Cold War America through the lens of domestic containment, this article argues that American poet Sylvia Plath tackled the illusions of consumerism to fuel her writing, challenging outright gender inequality which defined the nation.Using Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (2010) alongside genuine articles from the era, this article assesses the ideological conflict of the 1950s domesticated woman against Plath’s personal battle between writing and domestic life. Through her raw depictions of realism in literature and intense poetry, it becomes impossible to ‘contain’ Plath, not only within the domestic sphere, but also in her own writing

Almost all invented languages in science fiction have the same architecture as spoken human natural languages. The article discusses six exceptions: languages which appear to be unusable because of the way they handle figures of speech; speech or writing directly connected to thought; speech that is not linear; writing that is not linear and not a representation of speech; lexicon, syntax and writing but no speech; and impoverished languages. If these odd invented languages existed outside fiction, they would be untranslatable into a human natural language in much the same sense that pictures, or communications to us by non-human animals on Earth, are describable but interlingually untranslatable. The translations provided by science fiction authors to enable their plots to advance are better seen as intersemiotic renderings. The article concludes with some similarities between translation studies and science fiction studies and the benefits of considering architecturally odd languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both the theories coming out of the linguistic turn and those running away from it have placed special emphasis on human language (or human symbolic thinking) as a matter of convention and shared meanings. Yet there are other histories that link language and humanness through invention, deceit, and secrecy rather than through convention and publicness. These alternate models have been used as diagnostic of humanness in a range of contexts, from the colonial past into the technologized present. I examine here the ways in which the unshared, non-public symbol has stood at the center of two disparate contexts in which the humanness of speakers of novel languages are put in question. The first case examines the ways in which Christian missionaries started to see Tok Pisin, a novel pidginized language spoken by indentured laborers in colonial Papua New Guinea, as a possible language of evangelism when it became associated with deceit and moral dissolution. The second case examines a 2017 moral panic in the United States about two chatbots that were reported to have invented their own language and then used it to lie to one another. In contrast to the first case, one of the ways that bots get figured as beyond-human is in the fear that there is no way to impose a moral order, no colonial evangelism that could be used to encompass them. By taking on the symbolic while withholding public meanings, the speakers of these unshared symbols sit at the boundaries of humanness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cahiers de la Nouvelle: Journal of the Short Story in English is the property of Presses Universitaires de Rennes and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Outside the work of a small number of pioneering Slavic linguists and historians, the work of Nikolai Marr is little known today. In this essay I argue that Marr's writings are worth re-examining, particularly in the light of his critique of European linguistics as propagating the racist ideology of imperialism and the subjugation of colonized peoples – now characterized as Orientalism. The first part of the essay situates Marr's work within the wider context of the division since the nineteenth century between mainstream European comparative philology based in Germany, with its hierarchical model of family trees, and the more egalitarian tradition developed in Eastern Europe that emphasized the lateral interactions of speech in social contexts, with related languages operating in their own ecosystems of geographical proximity. In the second part of the essay I consider some of the elements of Marr's work that remain of interest: his critique of Orientalism in linguistics, of the relations between western knowledges and forms of colonial power, on language as something not to be studied in isolation but as a living part of the social ecosystem and its power relations, and his conceptual emphasis on lateral thinking through rhizomatic forms and hybridization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A narrative impulse and a scenic impulse: as Fredric Jameson persuasively argues in The Antinomies of Realism, the history of literary realism has been shaped by the dialectic between these two competing drives, each identified by a specific temporality. Yet realism's dialectic between a narrative and a scenic impulse omits something crucial if we are to understand European realist narrative, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. This article reassesses Jameson's dialectical view of realism in light of the speculative turn in the history of the European novel in 1860s Russian and 1880s French narrative. I will query Jameson's dialectic of realism and subsume it under a larger dialectical framework encompassing a further, temporally neuter impulse. This is the speculative impulse, which will help us reconsider some of the most important developments of nineteenth-century European realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on sibilant-stop onsets, this paper deals with syllabic complexity in Romance languages. At its core are two empirical studies that address the complex case of French: a type-level study is based on the Petit Robert, and a token-level study uses Parisian and Southern French corpus data elaborated in the framework of the PFC program (Phonologie du Français Contemporain). The paper identifies three factors behind the emergence of phonotactic complexity: (a) vowel elision, (b) borrowing, and (c) expressivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a growing body of literature in formal phonology has espoused the view that phonological knowledge is gradient and probabilistic, this perspective remains somewhat controversial. This paper provides further empirical support for this strand of work: it offers an analysis of the gradient deletion of word-final schwa in Southern French, using a corpus containing 7787 data points obtained from 45 subjects spread over three dialectal areas (the Basque Country, Languedoc and Provence). In addition to confirming or nuancing previous findings about the role of several phonological and non-phonological variables, the study demonstrates the influence of lexical frequency, grammatical category, sonority and the feature specification of the consonant before schwa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Articulatory studies have revealed cross-linguistic variation in the realization of cross-word nasal+stop sequences. Whereas languages such as Italian and Spanish show largely categorical regressive place assimilation (Kochetov & Colantoni 2011, Celata et al. 2013), English and German alveolar nasals are often characterized by gradient assimilation, modulated by the degree of overlap with the following gesture (Barry 1991, Ellis & Hardcastle 2002, Jaeger & Hoole 2011). The lack of comparable instrumental studies for French may be due to the common assumption that the language lacks nasal place assimilation in general. We investigate here the production of French /n/+/k ɡ/ sequences via electropalatography. Four female speakers of European and Quebecois French wearing custom 62-electrode acrylic palates read the sentences C'est une bonne casquette 'That's a good cap' and C'est une bonne galette 'That's a good tart/cookie' alongside comparable control sentences involving /n/+/t d/ sequences. For each sequence, assimilation type was determined both qualitatively via visual inspection of the linguopalatal profiles and quantitatively using two contact indices. None of the /n/-tokens exhibited either categorical assimilation (i.e. [ŋk]) or lack of assimilation (i.e. [n(ə)k]). Rather, an intermediate pattern was attested with the nasal involving overlapped coronal and velar gestures ([nn͡ŋ]) and continuous retraction of the constriction. The degree of overlap varied among speakers, extending up to half of the nasal interval. Overall, these French patterns are strikingly different from the categorical processes reported for other Romance languages, yet similar to the gradient assimilation attested in Germanic languages. We conclude by discussing possible sources of these differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In local optionality, an optional process may apply at some loci in a form but not at others. Some theories of optionality, such as Partial Orders Theory, produce optionality by making multiple strict constraint rankings available, and have been claimed to be incompatible with local optionality: if the process-triggering constraint outranks faithfulness, the process applies exhaustively; under the opposite ranking, it applies nowhere. On this view, candidates in which the process applies at some loci but not others are harmonically bounded. This paper argues against that position by showing that for a variety of locally optional processes each locus can be independently manipulated if the theory makes use of constraints that target particular prosodic or morphosyntactic units – constraints that are motivated independently of their utility in local optionality. The result is that, contrary to the harmonic-bounding argument, Partial Orders Theory can provide plausible accounts of local optionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with French philosopher Jacques Rancière is presented. When asked about his writing about film director Béla Tarr and his filmmaking style, he replied that it was commissioned by a publisher and he wrote it based on the emotions he feel when watching his films. Other topics include his work on 19th century French working classes, influence on the art world, and book "Aisthesis."

San Duanmu's Syllable Structure: The Limits of Variation raises a number of questions that are of general interest for phonological theory. Of special interest here are: the genesis and management of linearity in complex segments, the place of analogy (or paradigm uniformity) in grammar, the role of morphology in accounting for phonological patterns, the balance of static (distributional patterns) and dynamic (phonological processes) evidence for syllable structure, the role of stress in syllabification, and the import of corpus-based data for phonological analysis. In each case, Duanmu's proposals are evaluated according to their intrinsic consistency, the empirical record and the relevant body of literature. Alternative ways of handling the phenomena are offered, and these are fairly traditional in most cases. Duanmu's book is particularly relevant in the current constitution of the field where the see-saw movement between computation and representations seems to swing back in direction of the latter after having long been immobilised on the computational end. Standing clearly on the representational side, the theory exposed in the book aims to show that all surface strings may be reduced to a fixed and invariant syllable template, C(onsonant)V(owel)X. This enterprise is interesting especially in presence of another representationally-oriented theory, CVCV (Lowenstamm 1996, Scheer 2004), which also aims at reducing surface variation to an invariant syllabic skeleton, made of a monotonic sequence of CV units. However, the CVX and the CVCV templates are quite distinct, and the strategies that are used in order to accommodate the surface string are opposite (shrinking in the former case, expanding in the latter). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the sister of author Charles Dickens named Letitia Austin, who was omitted from his will and condemned to poverty. It relates that the writer destroyed all the letters by Letitia to him. It examines the blank in the statement of Dickens and concludes that he desired to punish the woman who managed to retain a connection with his wife after he departed from her.

This article challenges the received view that geolinguistic variation in France is both imminent and inevitable. It is certainly true that France's ancestral dialects and regional languages are in terminal decline, and that a combination of late industrialization and the dominance of an oversized capital conurbation has engendered regional dialect leveling of a particularly extreme kind. But we will argue that new varieties are emerging, and that these represent independent vernacular norms rather than an ephemeral dialect residue as is generally assumed. While these regional French varieties are often embryonic, they are distinguishing themselves via a number of processes, including notably the creation of interdialect forms, differential adoption of urban variants and/or divergent norms for supralocal variables, the retention of archaisms, and local phonological divergence. Francophone Europe is seeing profound changes to the nature of geolinguistic variation, not the end of diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2004 the government in England decided to undertake a review of social marketing to assess its potential to guide the development and implementation of its future health promotion efforts. This decision was taken despite the fact that England does not have a strong tradition or a well-developed social marketing infrastructure. Moreover, there is skepticism about the value and principles of social marketing in some segments of the public health workforce. In June 2006 the government accepted the recommendation of the review that social marketing should be used to guide all future health promotion efforts directed at achieving behavioral goals, and it has begun to adopt a national approach to systematically applying social marketing principles to guide its efforts. This article sets out the history and policy-drivers for this dramatic change. The article also sets out the findings and a summary of the recommendations. It also discusses some of the key lessons learned about developing a national strategic approach to the application of social marketing and some of the tactics employed to ensure social marketing is adopted. The article ends with a prediction about why social marketing will be increasingly adopted by governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the role of photographic images of the hero in the legitimization of the French Army and World War I itself in the eyes of the French public. It examines the reasons why photography was such a significant medium for conveying information about the war and its heroes and discusses how photographs legitimized the war through the process of cognitive dissonance, a concept of social psychology that is defined as a defense mechanism of the psyche.

The First World War polarised British society. The British 'nation' needed a definition of the external enemy to generate internal cohesion as much as the production of modern hostility presupposed the existence of nationalism. Apparently, hostility which is nationalistically motivated is of functional importance for the cohesion of a society in war. But the construction of the nation along the lines of the dialectic structure of exclusion and inclusion implies that even its founding act encourages national splits. The manner in which nationalism generates social cohesion by excluding non-members at the same time always turns it into the expression of and the reason for internal conflicts. First and foremost, however, it was the co-existence of a whole host of concepts of the nation competing with each other for supremacy which turned nationalism into a disintegrative power in society. The co-existing national concepts by and large reflected the political factions and camps in the belligerent society. This article tries to outline the various ways in which the borderlines between the internal and the external enemy, between the hostile part of one's own society and a hostile foreign society converged under the circumstances of the exceptional burden of the First World War. At the end the hostility which was motivated and legitimised nationalistically both split and integrated British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]