Textual Engagement Research Articles

Emergent bilingual preschoolers’ verbal and embodied engagement behaviors in read aloud

Shared reading is a crucial site for children’s emerging reading skills when children engage affectively, behaviorally, and cognitively in the reading process. To inform a more holistic, collective, and inclusive view of observable engagement in read aloud (RA) behaviors, authors examined EB preschoolers’ micro-moment engagement behaviors to understand how they recruit their verbal and embodied modes to attend to RAs and how these behaviors align with prior engagement typologies. A phenomenological approach was implemented to examine EB preschool students’ moment-to-moment, multimodal forms of engagement across three video recorded RAs that consisted of 258 units of analysis. Findings reveal that EB preschoolers’ attentiveness and attention divergence during RA activities were showcased across a multimodal continuum but did not necessarily indicate disengagement or inattention. Opportunities for children’s contemplation were constrained by social and behavioral expectations of their compliance, and within less dialogic RAs, these expectations undermined children’s multimodal means of textual engagement in favor of their quiet, undivided display of attention. Findings have implications for recognizing the role of young children’s multimodal expression in supporting their engagement and interactions in RA in ways that may contribute to their developing reading skills and outcomes.

Rhetorical Analysis of Engagement in Discussion Section of Doctoral Dissertations Written by Kurdish Native Speakers

Academic writing is commonly regarded as a means to facilitate communication between authors and readers. As a result, scholars are expected not only to present information about the external world through their texts but also to employ language to acknowledge, construct, and foster social connections. Textual engagement requires significant linguistic and cognitive effort, regardless of the writers’ backgrounds. It involves complex knowledge, skills, and familiarity with social practices, which require explicit teaching and time. Even native English speakers find it challenging to acquire the necessary academic skills and social practices of the academic setting due to the discursive nature of higher education. This study aimed to explore the level of engagement in the discussion sections of applied doctoral dissertations written by Kurdish native speakers. To achieve this objective, the researcher analyzed eight randomly selected doctoral dissertations in applied linguistics authored by Kurdish native speakers, employing Martin and White’s (2005) framework. The study identified each dialogic engagement resource’s frequency of occurrence and functions, providing explanations and examples. The findings indicated that the writers being studied utilized different dialogic resources for engaging in conversation with their potential audience. Additionally, they preferred to employ resources that fostered expansive dialogue more often than those that limited it, possibly to reduce the chances of encountering rejection or opposition.

Notes on Dialectics: C. L. R. James's Hegel

AbstractHegel's philosophy has been a fundamental reference point for a broad network of mid-twentieth century anticolonial thinkers and activists, a major inspiration for figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Martin Luther King Jr. and Angela Davis, among others. James's Notes on Dialectics (1948) constitutes one of the most significant textual engagements with Hegel from within that internationalist tradition. Even though James considered Notes to be his most important work and one of his lasting contributions to Marxist theory, it remains the least read and studied of his books. In comparison to the abovementioned thinkers, all of whom drew inspiration from Hegel's social and political philosophy, in his monograph, James turns instead to Hegel's most difficult text, the Science of Logic, as the true locus of Hegel's critical theory. Situating James's study within the Marxist philosophical tradition, this essay explores how James interprets, appropriates and makes use of Hegel's dialectic.

On Listening and Failure: Roger Laporte with Marcel Proust

Abstract: This essay reads Roger Laporte’s Une voix de fin silence (A voice of fine silence), the second volume of his idiosyncratic work Une vie (A life), in dialogue with the early volumes of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu ( In Search of Lost Time ). A constellation emerges from the analysis that allows us to consider the interrelations and interdependence of Laporte’s text, his work as a critic on Proust, and the Recherche itself. The essay argues that Laporte’s textual engagement with Proust allows us to re-evaluate notions of literary failure so as to redefine what counts as the success of a literary project conceived as a writing about writing and becoming a writer. Both Proust and Laporte practice a literary writing that evokes mental experience while never being synonymous with it because, as their texts demonstrate, mental and literary experience can never coincide perfectly. Laporte labels the writer’s search a “listening,” a precarious activity which, like failure, is impossible to summon on command and which can only be recognized as such in retrospect as a motor of literary creation.

Exploiting Ishiguro’s 'The Remains of the Day' as a Language Reinforcement Platform

Literature taught through different genres in any language provides authentic material for language acquisition by ESL/EFL learners. It offers a range of linguistic choices and multiple levels of textual engagement. It also caters to (Krashen 1985) Input Hypothesis of i+1 in which acquisition is presumably maximized if input is positioned at one level higher than a learner’s existing level of language ability. For this research, the novel, ‘The Remains of the Day’ (TROD) (Ishiguro 1989) has been used to stimulate language learning. It may be noted that Ishiguro is a Nobel Laureate who depicts the harrowing struggle of the central characters resorting to memory assistance to reconcile with their past. The theoretical framework is informed by (Johns and Davies’s 1983) ideas of Text as a Vehicle of Information (TAVI), Text as a Linguistic Object (TALO) and Clandfield’s 2005 construct of Text as a Springboard of Production (TASP). Ishiguro’s style may also be compared to Hemingway in terms of producing episodic long sentences marked by conjunctions and the associations to his Ice berg metaphor. A single textual extract, guided by TAVI, TALO and TASP will be used to answer these research questions. How can TROD be used to teach the ESL/EFL learners’ reading skills? How can TROD be exploited to improve the vocabulary and grammar of ESL/EFL learners? How can selective paragraphs of the novel be used by ESL/EFL learners to develop their writing and critical thinking ability? The results of the research will probably highlight some of the ways in which literary texts can be exploited for language learning in an EFL/ESL context. The research may perhaps be restricted by its focus on a single literary text and its theoretical basis, but it will significantly contribute towards creative reimagining of the immense literary possibilities for language use.

When Your Job Is to Read After Work

ABSTRACT This article reports on a pilot study into the reading practices of students and faculty in history, philosophy, and literature in Denmark and the UK. The qualitative interviews with thirty people, each of whom kept a log of their reading activity over one term-time week in Fall 2022, suggests that most people in the study see themselves not having time to read as closely, deeply, or widely as their work ideally demands—even though on other counts they are reading all the time. This phenomenon may have less to do with changing patterns of ‘work’ than with the slimmer margins of time given to summers, sabbaticals, and times of rest. Ironically, the real crisis of these professions may have more to do with the extension of textual engagement into all times of life than with any measurable decline in reading practices.

The Shakespeare Multiverse: Fandom as Literary Praxis. By Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes

Is canon really fanon? This is one of the many provocative questions posed by Louise Geddes and Valerie M. Fazel in their co-written book, pop-topically entitled The Shakespeare Multiverse (2021). As its title suggests, the work ranges across a great variety of cultural discourses and landscapes: from the Detective Comics “52” series (which presents 52 different worlds its characters inhabit simultaneously), to the instability of the 1623 Folio as a “core text,” to the hair extensions David Tennant used when he played Richard II and the fanfic erotica that that hair inspired. It always helps to read Shakespearean scholarship with a dictionary close by, but this is the first time I recall repeatedly having to consult urbandictionary.com. Geddes and Fazel argue that fandom is a necessary non-hierarchical force, one that decentralizes authority, absorbs marginal or outsider voices, and conceives of “Shakespeare” as a multiverse of floating, shifting fragments, bits, and debris in an ever-expanding space that accommodates a more sustaining democratic field of creativity and investigation, unmoored from the governing fantasy of a central core text. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Geddes and Fazel argue that invested fans participate in a kind of “cyborg reading”: “a process of textual engagement that pre-consciously accommodates affective pleasure and the materialist conditions of a text’s production and dissemination, and defines this hybridization as meaning” (11). Crucial as well to their argument is the recognition of the power of the object or paratext as—to use Jane Bennett’s term from her book of the same title—“vibrant matter” whose meanings shift over time and space depending on the user’s or fan’s perspective. In the multiverse then, these paratexts proliferate, creating an “archontic,” non-hierarchical multiverse, “where all Shakespeares—all adaptations, all archives, all bits and pieces of Shakespeare data—circulate” (9).

Exploring the Role of Productive Audiences in Promoting Intercultural Understanding: A Study of Chinese YouTube Influencer Liziqi's Channel

This exploratory study on YouTube videos investigates the role of Chinese YouTube channels created by influential individuals in facilitating intercultural communication and understanding. Specifically, it explores how YouTube viewers respond, interact, and express their views on Chinese culture. The nature of audience engagement with intercultural communication was explored through the lens of creative textual engagement using a qualitative research approach and textual analysis of five hundred video comments on one of the most subscribed Chinese YouTube channel (i.e., Liziqi). Audience's interpretation goes through a logic of consumption from cognition to emotion to attitudinal change and behavioural intention; the process by an audience promotes intercultural understanding and acquires an identity. Additionally, the interactive relationship between the text and the audience is reciprocal and democratic. Audiences can incorporate and form interpretive communities, regardless of their cultural composition, and cooperate to produce a common meaning regardless of varying interpretations. This study contributes to extending the concept of Fiske's productive audience to intercultural communication and broadens the path for an audience to negotiate and understand Chinese culture.

Defamiliarizing assessment and feedback: exploring the potential of ‘moments of engagement’ to throw light on the marking of undergraduate assignments

Assessors’ perspectives on their evaluative practices remain relatively under-researched. Given evidence that higher education assessment and feedback continue to be problematic, this paper proposes a specific methodological innovation with potential to contribute both to research and practice in this area. It explores the potential of a micro-analysis of textual engagement, nested within an ethnographic approach, to defamiliarize the often taken-for-granted practice of marking. The study on which the paper is based used screen capture combined with audio-recorded, concurrent talk-around-text to throw light on the processes, strategies and perspectives of eight teachers within one university as they assessed undergraduates’ work. This close-up focus was nested within broader ethnographic data generation incorporating interviews, marked assignments and other assessment-related texts. The paper presents selected ‘moments of engagement’ to show how this methodology can offer a renewed understanding of evaluative literacies as complex, ‘messy’ and shot through with influences invisible in the final assessed text but which may nevertheless be highly consequential. The paper concludes by reflecting on the potential for this type of data and analysis to contribute to assessor development and inform debate about the future of higher education assessment.

“Rede hit sofft”: John Audelay's Practice of Care

“Rede hit sofft”: John Audelay's Practice of Care

“A Positive Statement of a Negative Thing”: Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence as Dramatic Form in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Much has been written in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries about the pessimistic tenor of Samuel Beckett’s middle-period plays. With specific reference to Waiting for Godot, however, this essay draws a distinction between the pessimistic appearance of the content that partially constitutes this text and the nature of the formal medium through which it is realized. In short, I argue that there is a critical disjunction between what this play says and what this play does. Conceptually speaking, this essay is primarily concerned with Beckett’s textual engagement with the theory of eternal recurrence, that is, the idea that all occurrences have happened innumerable times before, and will happen again, and again, in an infinitely recurring cycle. Focusing on how Waiting for Godot developed, both in translation and as a performance piece under the direction of its author, I demonstrate that Beckett’s metatheatrical dramatization of eternal recurrence explores this theory’s capacity to function as an ethical imperative in the morally nihilistic atmosphere of post-Holocaust Europe. In doing so, Beckett’s play implicates the viewer in a dramatization that is aligned with the axiological iteration of eternal recurrence that modern and contemporary scholars associate with Friedrich Nietzsche. Indeed, it is in this sense that Waiting for Godot is, as Beckett himself puts it, “a positive statement of a negative thing.”

공거의 생태

Objects, nonhumans, and worlds are keywords by and on which literary studies in the Anthropocene assert themselves. From these vantage points, this essay analyzes the main issues relating to the idea of “lively” matter to investigate how the collective of humans and nonhumans becomes the necessary elements of worlding. Reviewing Correlationism and Object Oriented Ontology, this essay attempts to find clues to the possibility of ecological cohabitation through textual engagement with Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and English Romantic authors. The discussion of the symbiotic economy between humans and nonhumans gives itself to searching for an alternative to the concept of the world built upon human-world correlationism. Object Oriented Ontology exemplifies a realism that works beyond subject-object division and human-world correlation. The three keywords provided here consolidate the framework of fundamental ecology, which supports and works behind all cultural phenomena in the age of men.

‘Impossibly erotic things’: On men’s underwear in Brief Encounters by Suzanne Forster

Romance novels are known for their sexy heroes who grace the covers and pages. This article concerns itself with how heroes are dressed; in particular, I consider the role of men’s underwear in Brief Encounters by Suzanne Forster. Brief Encounters is a Harlequin Romance novel and, more specifically, a Harlequin Blaze. By way of close textual engagement, I show that men’s underwear plays a significant role in the narrative, especially with respect to the construction and representation of sexuality and masculinity. To these ends, I argue that Brief Encounters imagines men’s underwear as being more than functional, but as desirable and erotic. This article thus contributes to scholarship at the intersection of popular culture studies and critical studies of men’s fashion.

IGBO VERBS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TRANSLATION

Far from being an entirely textual engagement, translation is a completely intellectual enterprise. Some translation practitioners and theorists have perhaps erroneously tended to postulate that translation involves the mere replacement of lexicons in one language with lexicons in another language. This position has led to the concept of source language text (SLT) and target language (TLT). In this article, we are not in any way condemning the idea of translation constituting a linguistic movement from one culture to another. All we intend to demonstrate is that our research so far shows that translating between languages of little or no cultural affinity is not as simple as people may think. The Igbo language has no cultural affinity with English and French. This singular fact translates them to an uphill task. The Igbo verb presents a difficult problem to translators working between Igbo and foreign languages, especially English.

The woman reader in Rebecca Mead’s My life in Middlemarch

ABSTRACT Before the entry of feminist scholars into the field, literary theory either had no interest in the woman reader or used her to represent the type of reading that favours identification, escape and pleasure over engagement with the aesthetic and formal aspects of a text. According to feminist cultural and literary theorists such as Charlotte Brunsdon and Rita Felski, the woman reader has typically been defined as passive and uncreative, her interests as trivial and sentimental, her reading as consequently apolitical. Feminist literary theory and feminist cultural studies have long challenged the sharp divide between feminist and ‘ordinary’ women readers, academic and non-academic readers, creative and uncreative readers, pointing out that they are more alike than we are led to believe because they share certain affective and cognitive attributes. This artificial dichotomy is also called into question by popular memoirs on books and reading, which showcase the creativity of non-academic reading. One example is the 2014 book My Life in Middlemarch, journalist Rebecca Mead’s account of her lifelong relationship with George Eliot’s novel. Mead’s book, which combines literary criticism, biography and memoir, highlights the impact literature can have on its readers. I read Mead’s book as an example of Rita Felski’s theoretical concept of a ‘positive aesthetics’, a framework for reading texts that blends criticism and analysis with attachment and love. Using Felski’s categories of textual engagement, such as recognition, enchantment and knowledge, I argue that Mead’s project, by giving equal weight to emotional and intellectual aspects of reading, represents an important step in bridging the divide between academic and non-academic readers.

Hypochondriacal Reading: Phantom Illness and Literature

An essay about hypochondria, past and present. Beginning with the observation that for centuries hypochondria has been blamed upon various forms of reading, I attempt to take seriously this venerable relationship between hypochondria and literature. By bracketing the medical and moral concerns that encumber most treatments of hypochondria, I instead seek to understand the condition as a method of reading, a close textual engagement that is at once anxious and oddly clear-sighted about its own limits, and which bears some similarities to other, more familiar hermeneutic methods such as paranoid reading and ‘too-close reading’. In the second half of the essay, I draw upon the lives and writings of Maurice Blanchot and Franz Kafka, two writers who were themselves plagued by mysterious and unexplained symptoms, and attempt to show how the imperatives of literature as understood by each writer could meaningfully be described as hypochondriacal. Above all, then, this essay looks more closely at a figure whom it is difficult to take seriously, and asks whether, viewed from a certain angle, the hypochondriac might in fact be said to be endowed with a perspicuous if discomfiting form of insight.

On Being a Thomist: Cornelius Ernst's Meta-Theology

AbstractThomism is a contested category that exhibits considerable plasticity in its application. An examination of the role played by such invocations of proper names in contemporary theological discourse indicates the importance of textual accessibility and engagement. The role played by texts is examined in terms of an often-elided distinction between ‘intelligibility’ and ‘readability’, with the former aligned with propositional contents and the latter a more expansive attentiveness to the text's performative operations. The historical remoteness of Aquinas coupled with the importation into theology of secularised reading strategies is seen to have alienated the full readability of Aquinas's texts. Acting against Cartesian modes of reading, Cornelius Ernst's re-performance of Thomistic pedagogy as ‘engaged contemplation’ is concerned to enact a horizon of meaning within which Aquinas's texts retain enduring readability. This article develops Ernst's Thomistic meta-theology into an account of Thomism as ‘meta-reading’. On this account, authentic Thomism involves the intentional cultivation of a total human culture, within which the inherently theological discipline of textual engagement exercises a quasi-liturgical function.

‘Beware The Word'

This paper considers the potential of utilizing ethnotheatre methods to investigate the experiences of butoh artists and practitioners as they struggle to verbalize the dance of the ineffable. While an unlikely approach, ethnotheatre-based research may offer an alternative methodology for grappling with the ineffable and the inarticulate in performance as an intermediary research process capable of not only attending to but foregrounding both language and the places where language fails through and of the body, utilizing language to foreground its limits. Through the labor of creating a script for performance, it offers a method of textual engagement within movement practice, one that gives data a body through which to ‘speak’ or express meaning. For the purposes of butoh research, its formal processes allow us to bring the silences and struggles with language into greater relief, spotlighting them, in a performance context. As an arts-based research methodological thought experiment, this paper seeks to demonstrate how taking an ethnotheatre approach to butoh research may provide captivating insight into the art of butoh, as well as yield a different kind of evidence of or living testimony to the operative force of language and the creative possibilities of failure.

Characters as Works and Versions

The editorial conception of works — as immaterial entities emerging from encounters with material documents or other instantiations — parallels conceptions of characters in narrative studies, which similarly derive from particular textual engagements to produce more general understandings. After surveying a range of examples from 20th- and 21st-century fiction, this essay outlines the affordances of a more editorially informed approach to the concept of character within narratology.

The World of the Dying:’ John Mcgahern’s Memoir and the Thingness in Anticipatory Grief

My essay will aim to prove that John McGahern’s Memoir foregrounds the material dimension of anticipatory grief and its aftermath as a space in which different affective responses to the “Thing” can be explored. Firstly, I look at how the text edits together memories of anticipatory grief in order to dramatize the “apparatus of thinking” (Steven Connor) as an affective spatiality (Marta Figlerowicz) in relation to an irrupting thingness within the object world. Secondly, I look at how McGahern and his father are “timed by things” (Timothy Morton) in their effort to remember or objectify affect, and how mourning itself becomes a matter of accepting nonhuman temporality. As such, this textual engagement with memories and inscriptions enacts a writerly form of anticipatory-vicarious grief, a “moral emotion” arising from the “anticipated harm” (Somogy Varga and Shaun Gallagher) that the subject feels will affect those close to her after her death.