Recent ­Publications

Der Sammelband vereinigt Beiträge zum kulturellen Lernen aus theoretisch-konzeptioneller, empirischer und unterrichtspraktischer Perspektive. Es werden aktuelle kulturdidaktische Entwicklungen diskutiert, Konzepte reflektiert sowie Szenarien für einen kulturwissenschaftlich orientierten Fremdsprachenunterricht und die Lehrer*innenbildung entworfen, die für die Bereiche Englischdidaktik, Didaktik der Romanischen Sprachen und Deutsch als Fremd- und Zweitsprache ausgestaltet werden. Die Beiträge gehen aus einer sprachenübergreifenden, interdisziplinären Tagung hervor, die 2019 an der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen stattgefunden hat.

By delving into the complex, cross-generational exchanges that characterize any political project as rampant as empire, this thought-provoking study focuses on children and their ambivalent, intimate relationships with maps and practices of mapping at the dawn of the “American Century.” Considering children as students, map and puzzle makers, letter writers, and playmates, Mahshid Mayar interrogates the ways turn-of-the-century American children encountered, made sense of, and produced spatial narratives and cognitive maps of the United States and the world. Mayar further probes how children’s diverse patterns of consuming, relating to, and appropriating the “truths” that maps represent turned cartography into a site of personal and political contention. 

To investigate where in the world the United States imagined itself at the end of the nineteenth century, this book calls for new modes of mapping the United States as it studies the nation on regional, hemispheric, and global scales. By examining the multilayered liaison between imperial pedagogy and geopolitical literacy across a wide range of archival evidence, Mayar delivers a careful microhistorical study of U.S. empire.

Across the globe, a growing number of social movements, such as demonstrations in support of equal civil status or reproductive freedom and against sexualized violence, show that women's and gender rights are highly contested. Against the backdrop of a long history of unequal rights implementation, the contributors to this volume deal with the questions of why and in which ways gender equality has become contested in various political contexts. Local case studies examine the relevant structural, institutional, and socio-cultural causes of the global challenges to equality. This book follows an interdisciplinary approach and unites scholars from law, linguistics, cultural studies, history, social sciences, and gender studies in diverse contexts.

Wie kann man Schüler*innen auch in der Fremdsprache für die digitalisierte Gesellschaft fit machen und wie können digitale Medien Lehrkräfte bei der Gestaltung eines kommunikativen, adaptiven und motivierenden Englischunterrichts unterstützen? In diesem Buch finden sich viele Anregungen für Englischunterricht in Zeiten der Digitalisierung, vom konkreten Einsatz von Apps und Games, über kollaboratives Schreiben und die Arbeit mit Film, bis hin zu Querschnittsthemen wie Mehrsprachigkeit oder Inklusion.

The English language as spoken in Namibia has virtually been overlooked in most textbooks, handbooks, and surveys of varieties of English around the world, or else has only been mentioned in passing. However, this variety of English has recently attracted the attention of several researchers and the present volume brings together most scholars actively involved in the research on English in Namibia from various linguistic fields to present their current research. It covers a wide range of linguistic issues, such as empirical analyses on various levels of linguistic description and use, as well as the application of diverse methodologies, from questionnaire surveys, sociolinguistic interviews and focus group discussions, to corpus linguistics, linguistic landscaping, and digital ethnography. This book represents the first comprehensive collection of articles and in-depth discussions of this emerging variety of World Englishes.

Ausgehend von den Befunden der New London Group, die tiefgreifende Veränderungen im Arbeitsleben, im Privatleben und im öffentlichen Leben in der westlichen Gesellschaft feststellte, widmet sich das Themenheft der Frage, wie Fremdsprachenunterricht im 21. Jahrhundert in den neuen und alten Sprachen gestaltet werden soll. Im Vordergrund stehen die Fragen, auf welche Weise Lernende auf die zunehmend komplexen kommunikativen Herausforderungen vorbereitet werden können, die eine kulturell diversifizierte Welt bietet, und wie gleichzeitig einer (wachsenden) Heterogenität von Lerngruppen Rechnung getragen werden kann. Die vierzehn Beiträge sind in sechs Sektionen untergliedert: Sprachbildung; Sprachliche Vielfalt; Mehrsprachigkeit und Interkulturalität; Rezeption von Literatur, Kultur und Medialität; Literatur, Religion und Musik in heterogenen Lerngruppen; Digitalität, Digitalisierung und digitaler Wandel. Die Themenfelder werden im Dialog zwischen Neu- und Altphilologien (v.a. Anglistik und Latein, aber auch Romanistik) sowie der Musikpädagogik behandelt.

Every place is a product of the stories we tell about it—stories that do not merely describe but in fact shape geographic, social, and cultural spaces. Lone Star Vistas analyzes travelogues that created the idea of Texas. Focusing on the forty-year period between Mexico’s independence from Spain (1821) and the beginning of the US Civil War, Astrid Haas explores accounts by Anglo-American, Mexican, and German authors - members of the region’s three major settler populations - who recorded their journeys through 

Texas. They were missionaries, scientists, journalists, emigrants, emigration agents, and military officers and their spouses. They all contributed to the public image of Texas and to debates about the future of the region during a time of political and social transformation. Drawing on sources and scholarship in English, Spanish, and German, Lone Star Vistas is the first comparative study of transnational travel writing on Texas. Astrid Haas illuminates continuities and differences across the global encounter with Texas, while 

also highlighting how individual writers’ particular backgrounds affected their views on nature, white settlement, military engagement, indigenous resistance, African American slavery, and Christian mission.

Halifax's Poet Laureate Afua Cooper and photographer Wilfried Raussert collaborate in this book of poems and photographs focused on everyday Black experiences. The result is a jambalaya - a dialogue between image and text. Cooper translates Raussert's photos into poetry, painting a profound image of what disembodied historical facts might look like when they are embodied in contemporary characters. This visual and textual conversation honours the multiple layers of Blackness in the African diaspora around North America and Europe. The result is a work that amplifies black beauty and offers audible resistance.

A Survey of Modern English covers a wide selection of aspects of the modern English language. Fully revised and updated, the major focus of the third edition lies in Standard American and British English individually and in comparison with each other. Over and beyond that, this volume treats other Englishes around the world, especially those of the southern hemisphere countries of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as well as numerous varieties spoken in southern, eastern and western Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Pacific. The main areas of investigation and interest include:

• pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary;
• multiple facets of English dialects and sociolects with an emphasis on gender and ethnicity;
• questions of pragmatics as well as a longer look at English-related pidgin and creole varieties.

This authoritative guide is a comprehensive, scholarly, and systematic review of modern English. In one volume, the book presents a description of both the linguistic structure of present-day English and its geographical, social, gender, and ethnic variations. This is complemented with an updated general bibliography and with exercises at the end of each chapter and their suggested solutions at the end of the volume, all intended to provide students and other interested readers with helpful resources.

How does academic writing work in English linguistics and in English literary and cultural studies? This book serves as a student guide to the conventions of writing in these disciplines. It introduces how linguistic and literary and cultural researchers think and write in their fields. Vivid examples and quotations from student papers show elegant solutions for approaching structure and formulation in academic writing. In this way, this volume makes the composition of university papers more accessible.

Travel writing is more than the simple account of a journey. It is a political act. There is an entire market of travel books about Cuba that emerged in the United States in the 1990s and that subscribe to a long tradition of narratives serving as a space of projection for U.S. political fantasies. The journey-based stories offer an intricate maze of perspectives and personal impressions, which translate history and politics with a considerable dose of sentimentality. Using an interdisciplinary approach anchored in the field of Inter-American Studies, this book investigates the relation between the Cuban cultural imaginary and U.S. American exceptionalism in a series of travel narratives about the island that conceive of Cuba as the Caribbean locus of a post-socialist exotic. The goal of this book is to raise awareness of the othering discourses at work in travel writing that foster hidden political agendas and that may easily be overlooked when reading travel literature for leisure. In reality, the cultural labels endorsed by travel writing shape our expectations, our interpersonal relations, and the way we see the world.

This edited collection poses crucial questions aout the relationship between gender and genre in travel writing, asking how gender shapes formal and thematic approaches to the various generic forms employed to represent and recreate travel. While the question of the genre of travel writing has often been debated (is it a genre, a hybrid genre, a sub-genre of autobiography?), and recent years have seen much attention to travel writing and gender, these have rarely been combined. This book sheds light on how the gendered nature of writing and reading about travel affects the genre choices and strategies of writers, as well as the way in which travel writing is received. It reconsiders traditional and frequently studied forms of travel writing, both European and non-European. In addition, it pursues questions about the connections between travel writing and other genres, such as the novel and films, minor forms including journalism and blogging, and new sub-genres such as the 'new nature writing', focusing in particularly on the political ramifications of genre in travel writing. The collection is international in focus with discussions of works by authors from Europe, Asia, Australia, and both North and South America.

Business is woven into the very fabric of American life, yet rarely surfaces in the nation's literary history. Even in novels about business, it proves an elusive motif that fails to mirror actual business organizations. This book argues that literary representations of business remain ineffable because business serves potential aesthetic functions, subtly yet meaningfully impacting readers. Exploring the complex representation of business in realist, naturalist and modernist works, Erhan Simsek reveals these functions by analyzing how the motif intertwines with social developments, literary movements and author biographies. He thus illuminates the motif itself while highlighting the utility of a focus on the changing functions of literature.

The History of English goes beyond the usual focus on English in the UK and the USA to include the wider global course of the language during and following the Early Modern English period. This perspective therefore also includes a historical review of English in its pidgin and creole varieties and as a native and/or second language in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Australasia. This new edition of The History of English has been thoroughly revised and updated throughout, and features:

chapter introductions and conclusions to assist in orientation;

• over 90 textual examples demonstrating linguistic change accompanied, as necessary, by translations and/or glosses;
• study questions on the social, cultural, and linguistic background of the periods and topics, as well as recommendations for further reading and topics for further study;
• over 100 figures, tables and maps to support and illuminate the text;
• 18 pages of colour plates depicting exemplary texts, relevant artifacts, and examples of language usage, including Germanic runes, the opening page of Beowulf, the New England Primer, and the Treaty of Waitangi;
• a brand-new companion website hosting further articles on linguistic, historical, and cultural phenomena which go beyond the scope of the book, additional sample texts, exercises, and audio clips.

The History of English is essential reading for any student of the English language, and will be of relevance to any course addressing the origins of the English language.

An essential overview of this blossoming field, The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies is the first collection to draw together the diverse approaches and perspectives on the field, highlighting the importance of Inter-American Studies as it is practiced today. Including contributions from canonical figures in the field as well as a younger generation of scholars, reflecting the foundation and emergence of the field and establishing links between older and newer methodologies, this Companion covers: - Theoretical reflections - Colonial and historical perspectives - Cultural and political intersections - Border discourses - Sites and mobilities - Literary and linguistic perspectives - Area studies, global studies, and postnational studies - Phenomena of transfer, interconnectedness, power asymmetry, and transversality within the Americas.

The articles gathered here closely examine a wide variety of cultural phenomena implicated in the "entanglements" which have defined the history of the Americas. From religious networks to music and dance, and across a range of literary and artistic works, the mobility of people, objects, and ideas in the Americas is expertly mapped. At the same time, the book represents a serious enterprise of theory building. Drawing on the histories of postcolonial thought, mobility studies, and work on human migration, Mobile and Entangled America(s) clearly establishes a new interdisciplinary field attentive both to the complexities of cultural form and the pervasiveness of power relations. Each article stands as a significant piece of scholarship on its own, but all are in dialogue with each other. The result is a richly satisfying and important volume of cultural scholarship.

This book is a key text for scholars and students that study the Americas in a multilingual and transdisciplinary fashion. Given the dialogical paradigm that underlies any sincere Inter-American scholarship, it is clear that no single scholarly positioning can capture the complexity of Inter-American connectivity. This is what Inter-American Studies share with Global Studies: A necessity to negotiate multiple and at times conflictive paradigms to tackle its objects of investigation. The volume introduces eight key tropes in Inter-American Studies as they have emerged from the work of the IAS web publication platform fiar forum for inter-american research since the latter's foundation in 2008. The editors have selected eight key tropes and regrouped essays from the period between 2008 and 2015 to highlight some of the most important paradigms for the pursuit of interdisciplinary Inter-American studies. The tropes include "colonial/decolonial," "independence," "religion," "border," "mobility," "race/indigeneity," "gender," and "decolonial reflections." The key tropes chosen should not be seen as separate entities, for in many respects they are related or overlap to some degree; nor are they meant to be an exclusive list of terms. They function more as a representative selection to illustrate recent paradigms and their application.

For every trope the editors have included one article in English and one in Spanish.

The book outlines a coherent genre history of the personal weblog from the perspective of media linguistics. An analysis of a diachronic corpus (1997?2012) suggests distinct phases in the history of the genre. In addition to media linguistics, the author draws on methods from textual and corpus linguistics as well as the social sciences. He traces the personal weblog?s various relations to different on- and offline genres and describes the blog communication form as well as the communicative situation, structural features and several posting genres characteristic of personal weblogs. The findings are embedded into theoretical considerations on genre change in general as well as stability and change of web-based genres in particular.

Trade schools, universities, and programs for international students have begun to experiment with Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) as a viable pedagogy for instruction, as CLIL increasingly gains recognition as a practical form of language and content education in Europe and beyond, and its application in instructional settings becomes more diverse. Corresponding with CLIL's growth, this book focuses on foreign language use during peer interactions in a new CLIL setting. It particularly concentrates on how to conduct research when the focus is on learner interactions The book includes a framework and ideas for investigating new CLIL contexts in a practical manner, allowing undergraduate and graduate students to conduct their own research in these settings.

This book presents a synchronic and diachronic investigation of two derivational English affixes. The suffixes -age and -ery are analysed on the basis of dictionary and corpus data and an adapted semantic map method is introduced as a new way of accounting for the semantic structure of derivatives. This study shows that the semantic structure of morphological categories can change signi ficantly over time, and that semantic maps can represent this change in a straightforward manner. The semantic maps visualise the relations and interdependencies of the readings expressed by derivatives, which leads to a new understanding of the semantic complexity of these categories.

Transnational and Transcultural American Studies are interested in dynamics that do not simply propel contact between geographical and cultural spaces but transcend conceptual boundaries and physical borders in a globalized world. Firmly positioned within these theoretical fields, this book suggests a reading of Chicana Narrative that goes beyond established scholarly particularizations such as 'ethnic minority writing.' Instead, in a creative application of Ken Plummer's vision of a 'Sociology of Stories', it makes a case for flexible, unfinalizable narrative chains that link human stories across genres, times and spaces. Narrowing this global scope to Chicana Narrative outlines a chain of narrative resistance that begins with Gloria Anzaldúa's seminal text Borderlands/La Frontera. This book contends that motifs introduced by Anzaldúa in 1987 continue to be featured in works by Chicana authors Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros and Michele Serros, and are ultimately addressed to communities of support worldwide.

This co-authored book is a critical reflection on African American photography and cultural production through the lens of current global mobility studies. Migrations,particularly in the Americas, embody the complexity of cultural experience. Cultural symbols are not just appropriated, but migrate as well. This brings new and different meanings that we see in dialog with the original cultural meanings. Media curation has to power to bring all of this into focus. It has greatly expanded the potential for the heuristic exploration of the meaning of everyday events. This process of exploration, known by names such as photo-elicitation, auto-driving and visual sociology, have been used since the invention of the photographic process. Today, media curation can be expanded to film, video-clips, podcast, blogs and other content-rich sources. In the book, the authors focus on photographic images tracing African American cultural presences around the globe.

Bret Easton Ellis's novels require a strong stomach, make the flesh crawl - and yet their fascination is undeniable. While some critics have condemned them, and not without reason, others have celebrated them. What, then, is the appeal of this scandalous author's novels? Sarina Schnatwinkel explores this question in her critical perusal of all six of Ellis's published novels. An emotion-oriented, hermeneutical text analysis coupled with a reader-response critical interpretation unveils textual strategies of an anti-emotional narrative aesthetic which makes the reading experience a painful - but thrilling - one.

"Occidental Readings, Decolonial Practices seeks to bring into dialogue a decolonial inter-American approach with an intersectional gender perspective. Drawing on a long legacy of images and discourses of colonization as en-gendering, this study examines the essays of Argentine author Victoria Ocampo, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo's painted Diary and Guatemalan human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú's Testimonio. Against the backdrop of the Occidentalist reception of the three authors' interventions, the analysis focuses on the entanglement of en-gendering, racialization and coloniality and of 'categories of difference' such as race, class and gender, along with the transnational power dynamics these examples reveal. The book also suggests new units of analysis with regard to interactions between different social positions and geopolitical locations, aiming for a transterritorial understanding of the Americas. Finally, tying back these findings to recent examples and current debates from the German context, this study suggests possible strategies for decolonizing occidental archives, museums, and national frames of analysis, asking what it requires to reverse the perspective on similarities and differences, interdependencies and processes of translation."

"The theory of Blending, or Conceptual Integration, proposed by Gilles Fauconnier and Marc Turner, is one of most promising cognitive theories of meaning production. It has been successfully applied to the analysis of poetic discourse and micro-textual elements, such as metaphor. Prose narrative has so far received significantly less attention. The present volume aims to remedy this situation. Following an introductory discussion of the connections between narrative and the processes of blending, the contributions demonstrate the range of applications of the theory to the study of narrative. They cover issues such as time and space, literary character and perspective, genre, story levels, and fictional minds; some chapters show how such phenomena as metalepsis, counterfactual narration, intermediality, extended metaphors, and suspense can be fruitfully studied from the vantage point of Conceptual Integration. Working within a theoretical framework situated at the intersection of narratology and the cognitive sciences, the book provides both fresh readings for individual literary and film narratives and new impulses for post-classical narratology."

"This collection of essays in English and in Spanish is concerned with the travels of a genre and related issues of artistic, national, and transnational identities. In recent decades there has been a reemergence of road movies on a global scale. This volume is especially interested in the expansion of the genre in the Americas - with a particular focus on what we like to label new and alternative road movies that have come out of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. As scholars and critics we intend to rediscover 'America' through the lens of a transnational, inter-American approach. While, cinematically speaking, we certainly can and have to trace the filmic origins of road movies to the U.S. and Hollywood, we want to emphasize the importance of revisiting the genre within a North-South perspective and to explore how the genre has changed through the cultural flows of globalization in recent decades."

"How do we internalize literary characters and their fictional consciousness when we are reading? How does multi-perspectivity function? Drawing on modern cognitive research, this study addresses how the perspectives of different characters interact, and demonstrates that this interaction plays a critical role in our understanding and interpretation of literary texts. Using the English novel as an example, the author develops a general theory of perspectival interaction and demonstrates its explanatory power through detailed illustrative analyses."

Edited by Professor Paul Lennon, Learner Autonomy in the English Classroom, a collection of classroom studies from primary to tertiary levels, has recently been published by Peter Lang. The volume offers insights from research as well as practical teaching ideas for teachers and EFL students, all firmly grounded in second language acquisition theory and established didactic principles. The volume includes studies on multi-media work with dictionaries, reading logs, peer correction, communication strategies, vocabulary learning strategies and oral proficiency, as well as work with literary texts and authentic news texts. Two studies focus specifically on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), the teaching of content subjects such as Sport or History in English. Many of the contributors are staff members here in the English section and former students of English at Bielefeld University.

"The History of English: An Introduction provides a chronological analysis of the linguistic, social, and cultural development of the English language from before its establishment in Britain around the year 450 to the present. Each chapter represents a new stage in the development of the language from Old English through Middle English to Modern Global English, all illustrated with a rich and diverse selection of primary texts showing changes in language resulting from contact, conquest and domination, and the expansion of English around the world. The History of English goes beyond the usual focus on English in the UK and the USA to include the wider global course of the language during and following the Early Modern English period. This perspective therefore also includes a historical review of English in its pidgin and creole varieties and as a native and/or second language in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Australasia".

"Latinas and Latinos/Hispanics constitute the largest and fastest-growing minority in the United States. Constructions of an illegal and disorderly latinidad are common in public discourse, but the difficulty in pigeonholing Latinos/Hispanics according to binary American racial categories and the allegedly low levels of race conflict in the otherwise politically and socioeconomically convoluted Latin American region have led some intellectuals to hail US latinidad as a revolutionary force that may change the way the United States talks and thinks about race. This volume engages with the idea of latinidad as a redemptive agent and proposes that liberatory latinidad, whether in the United States or Latin America, is not as inherently inclusive or democratic as some suggest. Deeply ingrained ideologies of race, religion, gender, sexuality, and limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) still linger and continue to have an impact on Latino/Hispanic as well as Latin American identities. Expanding Latinidad does not merely focus on the ambivalent impact of U.S. latinidad or Latin American mestizaje/mestiçagem on race and ethnic relations; it also addresses how south-to-north migration on the American continent has had positive effects on the way people perceive themselves in their new environment. This collection of essays illustrates how an expanded latinidad, a latinidad in the flesh, may hold great potential for reimagining the race and ethnic relations of the miscellaneous communities it embraces".