Double Voice Research Articles

AMBIGUITIES AND DOUBLE VOICES IN BARRAVENTO

Barravento was directed by Glauber Rocha in Brazil in 1962. It constitutes a very significant example of Cinema Novo, an awareness-raising movement in the film industry. It presents a truthful account of cavalla fishermen living on the coast of Bahia. In Barravento, Rocha has tried to convey the real face of Brazilian impoverishment, which formerly was veiled behind the technological facilities in Hollywood-like Brazilian productions. In contrast to these Hollywood-like movies that satisfy the western world’s nostalgia for primitivism and veil the wretchedness of so-called “uncivilized” men, Rocha depicts the sufferings and hunger of the cavalla fishermen while creating a revolutionary message. How-ever, the way he conveys his message leads to controversy, since he presentsCandomblé as both an impediment and a significant cultural value in the cavalla fishing community. Candomblé is an integrated religious tradition that comes from interaction with African Yoruba traditions, Roman Catholicism, and indigenous American traditions. It exerts considerable power and influence over its believers. In Barravento, Candomblé provides the cultural wisdom that de-termines the fate and future of the fishermen. Through his Marxist discourse, Rocha criticizes religion as a drug that discourages the fishermen from facing their real problems. At the same time, he presents Candomblé with respect and dignity. As a result, Barravento offers two contradictory perspectives about Candomblé, producing ambiguities and the coexistence of double voices in the film. This paper deals with the contradicting perspectives of Glauber Rocha and the original scriptwriter, Luiz Paulino Dos Santos, and discusses their aesthetic objectives under the subtitles “Hunger as Aesthetic” and “Religion as Aesthetic”.

African American Haiku: Cultural Visions by John Zheng

238 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews Zheng, John, ed. African American Haiku: Cultural Visions. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. 192pp. ISBN: 978-1496803030. $65.00 Hardcover. In the canon of African American literature, perhaps no form other than the novel is more studied and revered than African American poetry. The dynamic and varied poetry of Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Lucille Clifton are frequently anthologized, however, the haiku is one particular poetic form that is relatively understudied. African American Haiku: Cultural Visions, edited by John Zheng, brings together a diverse collection of previously-published essays on several African American writers who were most prolific and enamored with this form: Richard Wright, James Emanuel, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, and Lenard D. Moore. In his introduction, Zheng acknowledges that this collection is not comprehensive in its scope, but is one of the first volumes devoted to an exploration of the unique contributions these poets have made to reimagining the Japanese poetic form. African American Haiku: Cultural Visions organizes each article in groups based on the author, and Zheng smartly places the more historical articles on each author first, allowing a reader who is unfamiliar with the authors to gain important cultural and literary context. Though the organization aims to introduce the reader to each author’s larger literary legacies and their reasons for embracing and reinventing the haiku form, some of the articles tread similar ground, especially in terms of biographical information.However,the efficacy of the authors’arguments and explorations is not diminished by these redundancies. For example, in the opening section on Richard Wright, both John Zheng’s “The Japanese Influence on Richard Wright’s Haiku” and Sachi Nakachi’s “Richard Wright’s Haiku, or the Poetry of Double Voice” spend the first several pages noting similar biographical information. While Zheng argues for an understanding of Wright’s haikus as “a universal search for an expression of oneness with nature,” Nakachi takes an entirely different approach, instead arguing that Wright’s fascination with haiku is “steeped in emotion and thought” and that Wright “encod[es] his social criticism between the lines,” providing a particularly illuminative discussion of the imagery of lynching in Wright’s haikus (18, 25, 33). As the collection progresses, the articles move from an exploration of each individual author’s fascination with haiku to an understanding of how all of these authors have created their own unique forms inspired by and borrowing from Japanese literature and Eastern philosophy. Yoshinobu Hakutani’s “James Emanuel’s Jazz Haiku and African American Individualism” lays the groundwork for a discussion of the confluence of haiku with African American jazz and blues—a theme revisited throughout the collection—arguing that James Emanuel, as a foundational figure in the creation of the jazz haiku form, translates both the haiku’s and jazz’s emphasis on the “effac[ing] of identity” into an exploration CLA JOURNAL 239 Book Reviews of human desire, a nontraditional subject for haiku (36). Following Hakutani’s article is Virginia Whatley Smith’s “Afro-Asian Syncretism in James Emanuel’s Postmodernist Jazz Haiku”; and, though her article in its opening paragraphs seems to be a reiteration of Hakutani’s, in her recognition of Emanuel as creator of the jazz haiku, she broadens her argument, asking her readers to understand Emanuel’s influence in a larger context of “Afro-Orientalism,” a confluence of cultural literary influences that create an elevated, cross-cultural art form (85). A particularly compelling argument presented in the volume is Claude Wilkinson’s “‘No Square Poet’s Job’: Improvisation in Etheridge Knight’s Haiku,” in which he continues the thematic exploration of jazz and blues influences in Etheridge Knight’s prison haikus and argues that Knight, through a reimagining of his incarcerated environment with natural imagery and metaphors, reinvents the haiku form’s emphasis on an understanding of oneness with nature and thus develops a“populist aesthetic”that made the haiku accessible to a broader audience (92). Wilkinson’s discussion of Knight’s work is so engaging that it does leave the reader questioning why Knight is the only author included in the volume who has only one article examining his work, especially considering the...

Double Voicing and Personhood in Collaborative Life Writing about Autism: the Transformative Narrative of Carly's Voice.

Collaborative memoirs by co-writers with and without autism can enable the productive interaction of the voices of the writers in ways that can empower rather than exploit the disabled subject. Carly's Voice, co-written by Arthur Fleischmann and his autistic daughter Carly, demonstrates the capacity for such life narratives to facilitate the relational interaction between writers in the negotiation of understandings of disability. Though the text begins by focusing on the limitations of life with autism, it develops into a collaboration which helps both writers move toward new ways of understanding disability and their own and one another's life stories.

\u2018La Beaut\xe9\u2019: Art and Dialogism in the Poetry of Baudelaire

Studies of Baudelaire’s poem ‘La Beauté’ have generally agreed that it has a key role to play in our understanding of his aesthetic theories, but have differed wildly in how this role is interpreted. The present study brings together arguments that see the speaker of the poem, Beauty, as a statue, along with those that understand the poem as being fundamentally ironic. Situating ‘La Beauté’ in the context of Baudelaire’s art criticism allows us to understand it as part of his engagement in debates within the visual arts. This gives us a new reading of Beauty’s claims as voicing the positions of neo-classical idealism, and specifically those of nineteenth-century academic theorists influenced by the eighteenth-century German inventor of art history, Winckelmann. Recognizing the importance of Winckelmann in approaching this poem sheds light on the rejection of movement and emotion that is pronounced by Beauty, and which contradict Baudelaire’s theoretical positions expressed elsewhere. The sonnet is thus incorporating the language of a speaker who is distinct from the lyric ‘je’ and cannot be reduced to a mask for him or a part of his divided self. This language and the position it expresses are framed within the sonnet, whose implicit irony leads to what Bakhtin calls double voicing. This approach offers a new reading of ‘La Beauté’ in formal terms as an example of Bakhtinian dialogism within lyric poetry.

‘Gregory Dry’: Parody and the morality of brand

AbstractWhile Bakhtin's (1981) notions of voicing, double voicing, and ventriloquation have been applied extensively in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, only a few scholars have engaged with his related notion of parody. This article examines how a Sardinian manager uses parody in an oral narrative to construct and contest moralities surrounding personal and corporate identities. Through an analysis of both the story and the storytelling event, I show how this manager uses parody to better align himself with the ideals of his company and to frame his relationships with his employers and with the market more generally. In particular, my analysis focuses on how managers discursively create moral hierarchies of value that become key resources for understanding their stance in relation to the competitive dynamics of their industries. Parody in storytelling thus proves to be a crucial analytical tool for understanding brand and branding strategies. (Parody, narrative, brand, Italy, discourse analysis)*

Chicano Signifyin': Appropriating Space and Culture in El Henry

Chicano Signifyin':Appropriating Space and Culture in El Henry Matthieu Chapman (bio) In 2011 the Tony Award–winning La Jolla Playhouse created the "Without Walls Festival," with the mission of expanding beyond the boundaries of the traditional four-walled theatre space. Since its induction, the program, which focuses on site-specific theatre, has produced two festivals and seven stand-alone productions. One of these productions took place in June 2014, when the La Jolla Playhouse joined forces with San Diego Repertory Theatre, another resident theatre in San Diego, to produce El Henry, the largest "Without Walls" production to date. An adaption of William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, Herbert Siguenza's El Henry is site-specific to downtown San Diego. El Henry takes Shakespeare's story and infuses it with a blend of post-apocalyptic, Mad Max aesthetics, and Chicana/o attitude.1 Set in San Diego in the year 2045, every aspect of the production, from the casting to the design elements, is heavily intertwined with the aesthetics, history, and identity of the Chicano movement. Shakespeare's iambic pentameter has been replaced with Caló, a poetic blend of urban Spanish and English slang. The characters are no longer English, but are now Chicana/o: King Henry IV and Henry Percy have been replaced by El Hank (played by John Padilla) and El Tomas (played by Victor Contreras). The comic relief is now provided by Fausto (played by Herbert Siguenza) instead of Falstaff. The actors appear as Chicano vatos, who roam the space wearing the remnants of creased khakis, shell-toe Adidas, and flannels buttoned only at the top. When battle begins, football pads, repurposed tires, and steel-toe boots serve as their armor; the swords and shields of Shakespeare's play are joined by makeshift firearms and hubcaps; the horses are replaced by pristine lowrider cars. The play's climactic battle between Prince Hal and Hotspur now is between El Henry of Barrio Eastcheap and El Bravo of Barrio Hotspur, who are played by Lakin and Kinan Valdez, the sons of world-renowned Chicano playwright Luis Valdez. The set reimagines San Diego after the gringo exodus. In this world the gangs no longer run guns and drugs, but rather push water that, as Sir Blunt (played by Leandro Cano) explains, "is more valuable than gold" (Siguenza 8). The billboards advertising San Diego as "America's Finest City" are covered in Chicana/o graffiti: the tags of Fausto, El Hank, and others dominate the scenery. The post-apocalyptic setting and aesthetic, however, do not signal an ending but, within the Chicana/o context of the play, a new beginning. The play begins with two vato scavengers clad in costumes that could best be described as Chicana/o steampunk: a mix of cloth and metal scraps, old athletic equipment, bandanas, and goggles. They are digging through the garbage of the set looking for valuables. What they uncover, however, is Fausto, who has been sleeping off the previous night's drinking. After a brief scene in which the vatos and Fausto engage in name-calling, Fausto uses his staff to chase off the vato scavengers. Fausto then does the unexpected: he turns to the audience, breaks the fourth wall, and proclaims, "Welcome to Aztlán!" From this moment on Siguenza speaks in two voices throughout the play: in the action of the play as Fausto, and breaking the fourth wall to speak to the audience as the creator of the piece. El Henry's aesthetics position the play within Siguenza's larger history of Latina/o performance as a member of the theatre group Culture Clash, whose works have long engaged with notions of the Chicana/o identity that were established during the Chicano movement of the 1960s. El Henry, [End Page 61] however, does not just engage with contemporary Chicana/o performance practices, but advances the art form by presenting new contexts for Chicana/o aesthetics and new ideations of the Chicana/o identity. Through its use of downtown San Diego as a site-specific location, a futuristic setting, and Siguenza's use of a double voice, El Henry advances Chicana/o performance by creating new ways of thinking about...

The novel as therapy: Ministrations of voice in an age of risk.

Examining relations between 'therapy culture' and the 'risk society', this essay suggests that the novel developed to offer a powerful workout for the kinds of socio-cognitive capacities and gratifications required by the complex and 'emergent' cultures of modernity: recursive skills of mindreading and mental time-travelling, the negotiation of plural ontologies. Its development of a unique mode of 'double voicing' allowed readers to situate the interior life in a complex and dynamic relation to the social. Reading novels challenges the default, making 'safe', capacities of the probabilistic or Bayesian brain. In its self-referentiality and invention of the idea of fictionality, the novel provides an education into awareness of the limits of models and their dangerous fetishisation. The novel therefore answers Wittgenstein's search for a discourse that might provide a therapy for errors in thinking, embedded deep in structural and analogical functions of language and especially those perceptual metaphors of vision that carry the epistemological beliefs that looking in is the route to self-transparency.

Brer Rabbit and the Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem: The Double Voice in Literatures of Exile

Abstract The connection between Brer Rabbit and the story of the Jewish community after 70 CE is that both are recorded in literatures of exile. As a result, they share a significant quality—the double voice—deployed as one of many literary strategies for survival under oppression. Using passages from Brer Rabbit and Lamentations Rabba, this article focuses on riddles and trickster tales because they present an especially striking witness of the double voice as expounded within African-American literary theory. These genres appear in the folklore of most cultures, but their encoding enables a unique inversion of cultural meaning for subaltern and dispersed peoples, which gives the tales remarkable power to fashion and sustain identities, and to articulate the complexity of their experience. They absorb the imagery and language of the dominant culture, yet re-signify their meaning in the process of assimilation. Both elements of this voice—the adoption and the inversion—are essential representations of the authors or redactors. Separated by time, space, language, culture, and context, the tales of Brer Rabbit and the Palestinian rabbinic midrash speak to each other through this strategic polyphony.

Imitation of the Self: Jiang Yan and Chinese Poetics by Nick Williams

Reviewed by: Imitation of the Self: Jiang Yan and Chinese Poetics by Nick Williams Fusheng Wu (bio) Nick Williams. Imitation of the Self: Jiang Yan and Chinese Poetics. The Netherlands: Brill, 2017. ix, 302 pp. Hardcover $144.00, ISBN 978-90-04-28223-0. One of the most enduring legacies of structuralism and post-structuralism is that we, or at least those of us who have been influenced by their perspectives and insights, no longer regard a good poem merely as a Wordsworthian "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," or a natural, transparent linguistic embodiment of a personal intent, as stipulated by the "Great Preface" to the Book of Poetry. A poem is now regarded as an integral part of a literary convention; its meaning production is possible only through complex interactions with other poems, just as a linguistic sign acquires meaning only when it is placed in relation with other signs in a particular language system. As a result, the meaning and significance of a particular poem, just as a linguistic sign, is crisscrossed by echoes and references to other poems. This intertextual nature of a literary text calls into question claims of autonomy in literary production and interpretation. In writing a poem, a poet inevitably invokes earlier poems, if only because his medium has already been used or implicated by other poets. In this broad intertextual perspective, all writings imitate each other, although most of the times this is not the intention of the author. In traditional Chinese poetics, though, the presumed aim of a poetic composition is to convey an experience informed by the personal, historical experience and vision of the poet; the originality, or the lack thereof, of this personal experience is often taken to be the determining factor in its evaluation.1 This is perhaps why Nick Williams calls Jiang Yan's (444–505) imitation poems an "exceptional, somewhat marginal form of writing" (p. 177). Williams' book aims to shift our perspective away from this traditional view, so we may view imitation poetry as "a way of reading that divorces composition and experience, splitting the poetic experience into separate levels of abstraction." As such, according to Williams, "imitation poems themselves are after all one way of reading poetry in the Chinese tradition" (p. 19). Under this mode of reading, what we discover in imitation poetry is no longer a unified authorial voice, but a "double voice," that of "borrowed and original." While this double voice may be a liability in traditional criticism because it is derivative and less original, in Williams' view it is significant because it is "not only a feature of imitation poetry, but a phenomenon of literature itself" (p. 2). Here, the echoes, intentional or not, to structuralism and poststructuralism are hard to miss. Williams' study covers nearly the entire poetic works of Jiang Yan, including both shi and fu, but its focus is the thirty "Poems in Diverse Forms" 雜體詩三十首, which were included in Xiao Tong's 蕭統 Wen xuan 文選. In his preface to these poems, Jiang Yan proudly announces that he wrote them [End Page 411] "to imitate the styles" (斆其文體) of various well-known pentasyllabic poems at his time. He also states that his goal is to "evaluate the source and current" of these poems (品藻淵流). Jiang Yan thus makes clear the intertextuality of these poems at two levels: first, they share stylistics features of the poems that they imitate; second, they are his critical evaluations of these poems. This double intertextuality, at the levels of composition and criticism, leads to Williams' following statement, which sums up his main argument in the book: "Imitation poetry are not just a poetic object of study but also critical interpretations of poetry, identifying genres, styles, and modes of self-presentation for future readers." For this reason, Williams argues, "this study of imitation poetry has some significance for interpretations of Six Dynasties poetry in general" (p. 16). Williams' book consists of two main parts. Part one, "The Development of Imitation Poetry," outlines the evolution of imitation poetry in early medieval culture; part two, "Jiang Yan between Poetry and Life," "examines the paradoxical way in which Jiang Yan's works present a self...

Sociolinguistics of Style and Social Class in Contemporary Athens by Irene Theodoropoulou (review)

Reviewed by: Sociolinguistics of Style and Social Class in Contemporary Athens by Irene Theodoropoulou Panayiotis A. Pappas (bio) Irene Theodoropoulou, Sociolinguistics of Style and Social Class in Contemporary Athens. Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 57. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 2014. Pp. xiv + 240. 13 tables, 7 figures, 4 appendices, 1 diagram, 1 map. Cloth $149. There are so few in-depth studies of Greek sociolinguistics that almost any new work would constitute a positive contribution. A new arrival that combines theoretical clarity, methodological creativity, and thorough analysis, as does the volume under review, is most enthusiastically welcome. In this monograph, based on her 2010 PhD thesis, the author provides an insightful account of how young Athenians from two socioculturally different areas of the metropolis construct their identities in discourse by using specific speech styles. The study is ethnographic in its methodology, while its analytic framework is constructed by combining Coupland’s (2007) resource and contextualization model with Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) identities in interaction model in order to understand the mechanics of identity construction through style. It utilizes two different types of data sources: works of popular culture (five books, three TV shows, and hip-hop lyrics from three songs based on a common theme) and ethnographic interviews (with four participants from each area, supplemented by comments posted on Facebook). After a thorough presentation of the theoretical framework and methodology employed in the study, the results from each data source are discussed separately in each of the two ensuing chapters. In chapter 3, the author presents several excerpts from her pop culture files, aiming to demonstrate the stereotypical stylization of characters from the richer/upper class northern suburbs (NS), in contrast with that of characters from the poorer/lower class western suburbs (WS). For the NS characters, these range along the expected lines of code-switching between English and Greek, using direct politeness devices (“please” and “thank you”) and irony, and striving for correct pronunciation. On the other hand, the WS characters are portrayed as using vulgar and slang language, indirect politeness devices (or avoiding them altogether), and stigmatized linguistic features. The chapter culminates with a detailed and quite entertaining description of how these elements can be used in the representation of specific TV characters that fit the sociocultural bill. Chapter 4 examines how these stereotypes are employed in the ethnographic interviews in the service of identity work. As the author clearly shows in a series of excerpts, the main mechanism is that of double voicing in the classic Bakhtinian sense of a speaker appropriating elements from the linguistic behavior of others in order to do his or her own social work. In particular, the speakers appear to employ stylization in the services of “denaturalization,” “irony,” “alazony” (in which the alazon, the victim of [End Page 422] irony, exhibits confident unawareness), and parody in order to “mock.” In one excerpt, we see a NS speaker using “creaky voice” (in linguistics, a very low type of voicing) and Determiner Phrases (DPs) (instead of Prepositional Phrases, PPs) as complements of verbs of motion while portraying her university acquaintances from the WS. She does this in order to show the contrast between their fancy clothes—which she sees as attempts to project a more prestigious NS image—and their working class linguistic behavior, in an overt attempt to denaturalize the identity construction of her classmates. For “mocking,” we are presented with an extended example of WS speakers reminiscing about a high school teacher who, in their own words, constructed a NS identity, even though she was originally from a smaller, rural city. Through an astute analysis of the linguistic (direct imperatives, elongated final vowels) and metalinguistic (laughter, overt comments) features employed by both speaker and audience, Theodoropoulou adeptly shows how mocking is constructed, and how it differs from denaturalization, even though their effects overlap. Chapter 5 brings together the results of the previous chapters with an analysis of the metalanguage used in popular literature, ethnographic interviews, as well as Facebook posts in order to determine how intragroup distinctions of social class are understood. Through a detailed examination of several excerpts, the author shows that the distinction is made on...

Layers of Discourse in Preschool Block Play: An Examination of Children’s Social Interactions

Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophical orientation concerning dialogism offers a challenge to contemporary play theory. This study demonstrates the benefits of a Bakhtinian analysis of double voicing in early childhood programs. Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, specifically Bakhtin’s ideas on genre and utterance, has received less attention in the analysis of play. Bakhtin’s conceptualization extends the notion of genre to all spoken utterances in play activities. The purpose of the present study was to examine the existence of Bakhtin’s typology of double voicing with preschool children as they talked and built structures with unit blocks. Bakhtin identified three basic varieties of double voice discourse: (a) unidirectional, (b) vari-directional, and (c) active discourse. The investigation took place in a preschool classroom that encourages a playful curriculum. Drawing on videotaped preschool classroom examples, preschoolers’ use of double voicing in the context of block play was analyzed. The data found the two types of passive double voicing: (a) unidirectional and (b) vari-directional, as well as active categories of hidden dialogicality, parody, and skaz. Bakhtin’s view of language acquisition is discussed by only a handful of early childhood play scholars, and this article suggests early childhood professionals use Mikhail Bakhtin’s double voicing typologies in classroom as a contemporary view for framing early childhood socialization and discourse.

Professors on the Run: How Marcos’s Narratives of Zapatismo Refashion North American Cold War Anxiety

This article examines the communiqués issued by Subcomandante Marcos during the early years of the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico (1992–1998). It addresses a double voice, and a double mission, of these internet pronouncements: first, as a tool for a local Indigenous uprising in the state of Chiapas; second, as a part of a much broader anti-neoliberal and anti-neo-imperialist struggle. The article argues that the unusual interlacing of a local, almost intimate struggle with a much broader ideological struggle has its sources, models and origins, paradoxically, in U.S. Cold War anti-communist discourse of the 1950s. Both discourses featured almost priestly, technocratic, master-explainers of an unseen enemy; both resorted to normative narratives of domesticity and infantilization; both relied on masked anti-heroes.

Monumental Cleopatra: Hollywood’s Epic Film as Historical Re-imagination

Taking Nietzsche’s discussion of monumental and critical history writing as its theoretical point of departure, this article discusses the double voicing and self-reflexivity of the Hollywood epic film. Even as Scott’s Gladiator (2005), DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934) and Mankiewicz’ Cleopatra (1963) bring grand events of the ancient world to the screen, they appropriate the past for the present. The excessive visual style typical for Hollywood’s monumentalism, furthermore, explicitly foregrounds the cinematic medium, exceeding and transcending any verifiable past so as to produce an affective, visceral historical re-imagination. At issue is a re-appraisal of the past through its subsequent cinematic recyclings.

Book Review: Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (Revised) by Robert Burgoyne

Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (Revised). Robert Burgoyne. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 176 pp. $67.50 hbk. $22.50 pbk.Robert Burgoyne's Film Nation may be regarded as companion to his related work, The Hollywood Historical Film (2008), even though this 2010 volume is a revised version of a 1997 original and may be usefully studied after Historical Film. There is some overlap in the films analyzed-notably, JFK, United 93, and World Trade Center. Burgoyne is professor and chair of film studies at the University of St. Andrews. In the more introductory Historical Film, he discusses different categories of the genre, war, epic, biographical, metahistorical, and topical, focusing on their relationships to understandings of national identity, organized remembering, artistic ambition, and studio prestige. There is some overlap with Film Nation in application of key concepts, such as Bakhtin's memory, and both books invite consideration of the relationship between film and public sphere.In Film Nation, Burgoyne's more specialized purpose is the interrogation of contemporary films that both provide a counternarrative to Ranciere's 1977 concept of the of American history, yet ultimately reinforce social belief by validating the cultural hybridity of American life, binding it to images of nation. These films rearticulate social identities as shaped as much by opposition, antagonism, fear, and hatred of the other, as by more positive traits. They address the fundamental contradiction that fractures notions of nation as social unisonance from race.Foregrounding the fissures and fault lines between national myths and the experiences of those who have been excluded from dominant accounts, they induce an emotional rediscovery of America, drawing on official history as factual discourse while employing fiction to challenge it. Yet these critical films revivify basic tropes such as the image of mystic nationhood that is revealed only on the battlefield, adapting the rhetoric, imagery, and patterning of genre memory and double voicing, whereby genres shape and carry social experience across generations. Burgoyne applies Ignatieff's 1993 distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism, or between inherited, genealogical passions of attachment and attachments to shared sets of political practices and values. He proposes that contemporary films define a new, polycentric nationalism, crystallized through blood argument to be sure, in preference to ethnocentric nationalism. In acknowledging an inclusive multitude of sometimes conflicting, openended histories in any given historical moment, these serve as counterarguments to ideas of globalization based on the presumption of the fading of nation.Burgoyne analyzes the Civil War film Glory from the competing perspectives of national construction and race, recalling West's 1992 identity from above and identity from below, and playing up the failure of social movements to cut across racial identities. Thunderheart illustrates how contemporary film rearticulates Native Americans as the bearers of alternative historical and national consciousness in opposition to the nation state. Born on the Fourth of July links the symbols of nationalism to an iconography of gender that transitions from an ideal of masculinity based on punitive agency to one acquired by the rescue of the nation, figured as a woman. …

Repressive desublimation and the great refusal in Bret Easton Ellis's fiction

In 1968, Herbert Marcuse believed that a Great Refusal was possible, one that would ‘deny the exploitative power of corporate capitalism’. Marcuse's vision was never realised. This essay argues that society today is in an advanced state of that which the Frankfurt School termed ‘repressive desublimation’ and questions whether a liberationary praxis is still possible. It claims that Bret Easton Ellis's fiction choreographs an internalising of the forms of critique that marked 1968 and about which Marcuse writes. It is Ellis's act of double voicing that allows him to develop a duplicitous recalcitrant voice within the state of assimilation and it is double voicing which emerges as the key technique in Ellis's work that effects an ongoing critique in commodity society. Looking at Slavoj Žižek's recent revisionism of the notion of repressive desublimation, which connects Marxism and psychoanalysis, the essay considers how Ellis's novels, American Psycho, Glamorama and Lunar Park, function to address and reconfigure the relationship between the status of the Marxist fetishised object and the psychoanalytic phobic object in the present-day era of late capitalism. This essay seeks to illuminate how Ellis's fiction, through an involution of Marcuse's political theories, enacts a contemporary refusal from within the state of reification.

Code-switching in Art: From Semiotics to Sociolinguistics

Both language and art can be considered as media for expressing meanings. This paper explores some suggestive parallels between meanings expressed through linguistic code-switching and meanings expressed in certain works of art. In particular, recent research on CS makes use of various notions which can be applied in the visual field: (1) heteroglossia/intertextuality: code-switching researchers such as Stroud have adopted this concept from literary studies to describe the exploitation by code-switchers of a ‘double voice’, i.e. the fact that much of what we say involves an implicit reference to the (real or imagined) words of others. (2) Contextualization : this refers to the strategic variations which speakers employ to create meaning within an agreed matrix of conventions. Gumperz developed the idea of contextualization cues, i.e. features of the form of the message which point to how the semantic content is to be understood. (3) Rational Choice v. Conversation Analytic approaches: Myers-Scotton’s ‘Rational Choice’ model suggests that bilingual individuals’ language choices are largely to do with the indexing of varieties to particular sets of ‘rights and obligations’. Auer and Li Wei have shown that this only provides a partial explanation, and that linguistic choices provide a means of structuring conversation independently of such associations. Artistic examples taken from Roman Art, Renaissance Cretan icons and Picasso illustrate how, like code-switched utterances, works of art can derive meaning from (a) duality of reference, (b) the incorporation of an older tradition within a new work, and (c) from their vertical relationship with the context of their production and with their audience. Parallels identified here suggest that some areas of CS research are touching on universal semiotic patterns.

Innovation and Reflection in the New Millennium: The "Double Voice" in Carol Shields's Short Fiction

Innovation and Reflection in the New Millennium: The "Double Voice" in Carol Shields's Short Fiction

Double-Consciousness: The Du Boisian Hermeneutic

W. E. B. Du Bois was among the first scholars to understand the role that double-consciousness plays in the formation of a hermeneutical process interpreting and shaping worldviews among people of color. When interpreting biblical texts, Du Boisian interpreters, informed by double-consciousness, understand the tensions between how the text looks through the eyes of the dominant community (whether in biblical times or today) and how it looks through the eyes of the community that has been marginalized by the dominant group. Double-consciousness, or “listening against our hearing,” when mobilized in biblical interpretation by persons of color or those interpreting from positions of social dominance, can help the interpreter to read texts as instruments of liberation and in ways that have the potential to re-humanize biblical interpretation. Several elements of a Du Boisian hermeneutic are identified: double voice, psychospiritual awareness, dialectical tension, and extended metaphor.

Terms of engagement: On the differential effects of metaphoric utterances in relational stories of organization

This paper approaches the nexus of metaphor and story from a novel angle, one that underlines the varying dynamics of metaphoric utterances (metaphors in segments of speech) within stories on organization. Drawing on Bakhtin's theoretical contribution, it examines the dialogism in metaphor, illustrating it with material from different stories that discuss the same inter-organizational relationship. The paper sets out simultaneous contradictions inherent in four metaphorical utterances (‘cash cow’, ‘dragging a child kicking and screaming’, ‘big brother/Big Brother’ and ‘family’). It illustrates how the same metaphoric utterance can be used in different stories to generate different effects (the double voice and intonation in metaphor) or to yield different meanings altogether (the polysemy in metaphor). The paper forwards an ongoing interrelationship between story and metaphor: metaphoric utterances serve as a means of surfacing value judgments and illustrating both resonance and dissonance in organizational stories, while stories define the meaning and the significance of a metaphoric utterance.

Humor in Interaction

1. Introduction: Humor and interaction (by Norrick, Neal R.) 2. Part I: Conversation among friends and family 3. The occasioning of self-disclosure humor (by Ervin-Tripp, Susan M.) 4. Direct address as a resource for humor (by Norrick, Neal R.) 5. An interactional approach to irony development (by Kotthoff, Helga) 6. Multimodal and intertextual humor in the media reception situation: The case of watching football on TV (by Gerhardt, Cornelia) 7. Part II: Doing gender with humor in talk at work 8. Using humor to do masculinity at work (by Schnurr, Stephanie) 9. Boundary-marking humor: Institutional, gender and ethnic demarcation in the workplace (by Vine, Bernadette) 10. Part III: Failed humor and its interactional effects 11. Impolite responses to failed humor (by Bell, Nancy) 12. Failed humor in conversation: A double voicing analysis (by Priego-Valverde, Beatrice) 13. Part IV: Humor in bilingual interactions 14. Humor and interlanguage in a bilingual elementary school setting (by Kersten, Kristin) 15. Cultural divide or unifying factor?: Humorous talk in the interaction of bilingual, cross-cultural couples (by Chiaro, Delia) 16. Name index 17. Subject index