Anschubförderung für Projekte

(Re)Mapping the Victorian Household: Locating Liminal Spaces and ldentities

Early career researcher online conference
29 April 2022, University of Hildesheim
Organisers: Lisa Kalkowski and Maria Neuber (University of Hildesheim)

Since the nineteenth century witnessed the shift from a mere distinction between the private and the public to a separation of the two spatial and social divisions in the form of gendered public and domestic spheres formed Victorian society. The domestic woman served as a moral exemplar of femininity and devotion to the household along the lines of Coventry Patmore’s „The Angel in the House.“ The Victorian household seemed a sacred retreat which remained private and focused on the image of the respectable middle- class family. These seemingly strict divisions, however, were not unbreachable. In that regard, some places within the Victorian home have acquired an almost archetypal literary quality. The attic, to name just one example, represents both the material and the psychological space of the repressed, a space which allows representations of self and ot her to enter into layered conversation with each other until the lines between them begin to blur.

Rather than reinforcing the idea of separable spheres within the Victorian household, this conference aims to interrogate the spaces of the in-between. To analyse the in-between dimensions of Victorian households, we turn to the concept of liminality. Liminality refers to both periods of transition and the ambiguity of „betwixt and between, [… ] neither here nor there“-positions [Turner 95] of subjects or objects in a variety of cultural contexts. By understanding liminality as both a temporal and spatial concept, the aim of this conference is to discuss representations of liminal experience and subjectivity in the domestic realm of Victorian and neo-Victorian literature.

Forum Junge Englische Linguistik in Bayern (FJUEL)

30.09. bis 01.10.2022 an der Universität Augsburg
Organisator: Dr. Matthias Klumm (Universität Augsburg)

FJUEL ist das jährlich stattfindende Nachwuchsforum für englische Linguistik in Bayern. Es soll Doktorand:innen und Habilitand:innen in diesem Fach die Möglichkeit geben, ihre Projekte, egal in welchem Arbeitsstadium, vorzustellen, darüber zu diskutieren und so den fachlichen Austausch und das gegenseitige Kennenlernen fördern. Eine weitere Zielgruppe sind Studierende, die am Ende ihres Studiums stehen und über eine Promotion nachdenken.

Am ersten Konferenztag werden Vorträge und Poster Sessions stattfinden, während es am Samstagvormittag eine abschließende Diskussionsrunde geben wird, in der in einem informellen Rahmen Erfahrungen zu diversen Themen in Bezug auf Qualifikationsarbeiten (insbesondere Promotionen und Habilitationen) ausgetauscht werden sollen, wie beispielsweise Berufsperspektiven mit abgeschlossener Promotion (sowohl innerhalb als auch außerhalb der Wissenschaft), Probleme im Betreuungsverhältnis, Einwerbung von Drittmitteln etc. Neben den Teilnehmenden der Tagung werden an der Diskussionsrunde noch weitere von uns eingeladene Personen teilnehmen, die nach ihrer Promotion unterschiedliche Karrierewege (sowohl innerhalb als auch außerhalb der Wissenschaft) eingeschlagen haben.

Digital Workshop on Methods in Historical Pragmatics

8 December 2022
Organisers: Theresa Neumaier (TU Dortmund), Sofia Rüdiger (Universität Bayreuth)

Pragmatic researchers have typically investigated ‘acting through speaking’ on the basis of face-to- face conversation (Levinson 2017:202). However, while this is relatively unproblematic when looking at Modern English, analyses of pragmatic phenomena in other periods of English are faced with a lack of comparable data. In order to solve this problem, historical pragmatics has produced a significant body of research drawing on text types considered ‘speech-like’, ‘speech-based’, or ‘speech-purposed’ (Culpeper & Kytö 2010:17): letters (e.g. Fludernik 2007), plays (e.g. Culpeper & Archer 2008), dialogue in other fictional texts (e.g. Fitzmaurice 2007), and court proceedings (e.g. Claridge & Kytö 2014). Still, despite this great interest, many questions remain unanswered in the field of historical pragmatics, particularly at the level of politeness and impoliteness (Jucker 2020:3).

This workshop offers an introduction to the methodologies and data of historical pragmatic research. It is primarily aimed at early career researchers but is also open to BA and MA students as well as anyone with an interest in historical pragmatic research. The program includes an overview lecture and a roundtable, where discussants respond to the roundtable prompts and discuss these with the audience.

International Conference Sociolinguistics of Pop Culture

29–30 March 2023, University of Bamberg

Organizers: PD Dr. Valentin Werner (University of Bamberg), Prof. Cecelia Cutler (City University of New York), and Prof. Andrew Moody (University of Macau)

The conference Sociolinguistics of Pop Culture explicitly engages with pop culture, which in its diverse manifestations is a ubiquitous phenomenon where the linguistic sign and other modes of communication (e.g. text and image, text and music, etc.) interact. Pop culture can largely be viewed as a globalized (and commercial) entertainment-related phenomenon with a focus on “the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures within a social system” (Fiske 2011). Even though pop culture thus is commonly recognized as a major cultural and strongly globalized force in present-day societies, sociolinguistics, with its focus on “real” (i.e. unplanned, natural, and often, spoken) language as the locus of linguistic variation and change, has traditionally side-lined the study of performed (i.e. scripted, fictional and mediatized) language (Queen 2018; Werner 2021) as represented in pop culture artifacts such as songs, TV shows, movies, video clips, comics, various electronic registers, etc.

However, we seem to be witnessing a turning point. Performed language associated with pop culture and mass-medial distribution has been accepted as an important form of everyday language in society and its study has been increasingly normalized (Bell & Gibson 2011; Werner 2018), also recognizing the “socially transformative potential” (Coupland 2011) of pop culture in terms of determining people’s knowledge, opinions, and values. To map this development, the conference aims to showcase recent sociolinguistic approaches to the language of pop culture and how they serve to tackle core sociolinguistic concerns from novel perspectives.

DACH Victorianists: Ecocritical Perspectives

Online Workshop

9. Dezember 2022

Organisatorinnen: Stefanie John (TU Braunschweig) und Jennifer Leetsch (Universität Bonn)

Die DACH Victorianists sind ein seit 2021 bestehendes Netzwerk von Forschenden aller Karrierestufen aus Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz, die sich in ihrer Arbeit schwerpunktmäßig mit der Literatur und Kultur der viktorianischen Zeit befassen Die Veranstaltungen des Netzwerks werden im halbjährlichen Rhythmus und durch wechselnde Organisationsteams ausgerichtet.

Im Fokus der geplanten Veranstaltung steht die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit Umweltvorstellungen im ‚langen‘ neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Der Workshop wird unterschiedliche Forschungsperspektiven aus dem Victorian Ecocriticism zusammenbringen und den Beitrag der DACH-Regionen zu diesem mittlerweile vielbeachteten Forschungsfeld stärken. Das inhaltliche Spektrum des Call for Papers ist bewusst breit gefasst: Beiträge können beispielsweise Zusammenhänge von Naturkonzepten und literarischer Ästhetik in viktorianischen Texten untersuchen, thematische Konzepte wie Mobilität, Raum, koloniale Machtverhältnisse, Nachhaltigkeit oder Wissenschaft in den Fokus rücken, und theoretische Ansätze von eco-materialism, eco-feminism, animal studies bis critical plant studies einbeziehen.
Abschlussbericht