Textual Markers Research Articles

‘Just because it isn’t happening here, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening’: narrative, fictionality and reflexivity in humanitarian rhetoric

ABSTRACTNarratives that use experiments with paratexts, generic conventions and frames of understanding to challenge an audience’s ability to distinguish the fictionalised from the non-fictional have moved from postmodernist forms of literature and art into newer forms of so-called post-postmodernism and metamodernism. They have also, and this is the starting point for this article, moved into rhetorical discourse proper, aimed at moving real people about real issues. The article investigates such experiments as they appear in two cases of contemporary NGO campaign rhetoric: SavetheChildren’s ‘Most Shocking Second a Day Video’ (2014) and Unicef’s ‘Unfairy Tales’ (2016). The campaigns do not simply use fiction in their attempts to motivate – they challenge the ability to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction by employing strategies of what the article calls metanoic reflexivity, defined as a reading effect, produced when combinations of textual and paratextual markers defamiliarise the act of ascribing a rhetorical master trope (fiction or non-fiction) to a cultural artefact. The article draws on a pragmatic, rhetorical conceptualization of imaginative thinking and on rhetorical theory about metanoia in order to engage critically with aspects of the discourse on posthumanitarianism.

Salience Criteria of Indirect Non-Entrenched Textual Names in Russian: Corpus-Based Research

The article approaches textual foreground specifics of indirect non-entrenched names and nominal groups in the Russian language. These constructions reveal the results of particular focus shifts with both identifying and characterizing or classifying components as part of their referent representation. To foreground them, the author uses a group of linguistic markers or means of expression with the intention of bringing forward their relevant character and helping the reader recognize the referent. The research is corpus-based, featuring Russian narrative prose texts, which serve to define the linguistic (lexical and syntactic) means of expressing indirect non-entrenched textual names and nominal groups. The data help reveal the salience criteria where salience is defined through significantly higher frequency of expression means. It also uncovers some resonance dependencies of these salience criteria (with graphical criteria role considered as well), which are manifested to foreground indirect non-entrenched names. The work shows that apart from general salience markers (rhematic position of names, mononuclear syntactic phrase, featuring the author’s perspective, etc.), which have become the research issue in the works of T. Givon, B. Warwik, A. Siewierska, M. Ariel, O. Iriskhanova and some other linguists, there may be distinguished the salience criteria specific for the textual indirect non-entrenched names and nominal groups. Relative frequency analysis of 28 test parameters values revealed the group of these salience criteria, among which are the textual markers of embodied construal, the presence of a direct name in pre-position, a discreet or single referent marking, null propositional distance between direct and indirect names, coordinative chain of direct and indirect names, predicative position and position in mononuclear sentences, the presence of identifying attributes and rhematic markers in co-referent indirect names.

Retraction Notices: Who Authored Them?

Unlike other academic publications whose authorship is eagerly claimed, the provenance of retraction notices (RNs) is often obscured presumably because the retraction of published research is associated with undesirable behavior and consequently carries negative consequences for the individuals involved. The ambiguity of authorship, however, has serious ethical ramifications and creates methodological problems for research on RNs that requires clear authorship attribution. This article reports a study conducted to identify RN textual features that can be used to disambiguate obscured authorship, ascertain the extent of authorship evasion in RNs from two disciplinary clusters, and determine if the disciplines varied in the distributions of different types of RN authorship. Drawing on a corpus of 370 RNs archived in the Web of Science for the hard discipline of Cell Biology and the soft disciplines of Business, Finance, and Management, this study has identified 25 types of textual markers that can be used to disambiguate authorship, and revealed that only 25.68% of the RNs could be unambiguously attributed to authors of the retracted articles alone or jointly and that authorship could not be determined for 28.92% of the RNs. Furthermore, the study has found marked disciplinary differences in the different categories of RN authorship. These results point to the need for more explicit editorial requirements about RN authorship and their strict enforcement.

A Cross-disciplinary Investigation of Textual Metadiscourse Markers in Academic Writing

This paper is a cross-disciplinary investigation of textual metadiscourse markers (TMDMs) in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus. To this end, corpus analysis tools are utilized to investigate the density of each category of TMDMs and the distribution of these categories across BAWE academic divisions. The premise under the investigation in this study is that metadiscourse is a social interaction that facilitates knowledge communication between writers and their targeted readers. Within the framework of Hyland' s (2000, 2005) claim of disciplinary discourse, this study shows a correlational relation between the use and frequency of different TMDMs across academic disciplines. The quantitative results indicate that the use of transitions outnumbered all other TMDMs in the four BAWE academic divisions, accounting for almost 76.76% of the total occurrences of TMDMs. The results also indicate a greater tendency to use endophoric markers in the physical sciences whereas the social sciences and arts and humanities exhibit larger quantities of evidentials and code glosses. The results are interpreted in terms of the epistemological nature of the academic divisions as well as the target readership.

Failures and Successes

Failures and Successes Jonathan P. Lewis Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: Twenty-First-Century Approaches. Edited by Mae Miller Claxton and Julia Eichelberger. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2018. xiv, 224 pp. Softcover $30.00. Among physicians, morbidity and mortality conferences are essential learning tools. While I cannot imagine the terror of being questioned about medical choices that lead to the death of my patient, only through transparent discussions of errors, willful or not, can bad practices or judgments be driven out and successful paradigm shifts created. We teachers are perhaps too often loath to publicly admit failure, perhaps for fear of showing a lack of credibility or control in a political and social climate that leaps on any sign of weakness. Even when high school and college teachers get together, as I do each June for the Advanced Placement Literature and Composition Exam grading, there is often not enough of a focus on what doesn’t work in the literature and writing classrooms over what does. Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: Twenty-First-Century Approaches offers both failures and successes, both what led to student disengagement with Welty’s works and what led to stronger critical thinking and writing skills. The collection’s essays are lean and to the point, and the book is quite useful in this regard as it gives instructors a wide range of approaches to this important writer. The book is broken into seven sections, and each section contains four or five short essays, each about eight pages long. The initial section covers elements of Welty’s biography, but from there, each of the sections engages a different aspect of approaching her works: through region, race, the body, international perspectives, the First Year Writing Classroom, and then a concluding section on teaching Welty through broader contexts outside the literature classroom. The writers’ backgrounds skews largely towards professors from southern universities with some from the high school level and a few international [End Page 147] scholars and Welty biographers/curators. This regional imbalance is perhaps to be expected, and several contributors note that teaching Welty outside the South can be challenging as there is a perception that non-southern students cannot understand her contexts, and that the questions of race and the depictions of racism can be quite difficult for non-southern teachers to deal with. Such concerns are understandable, but the strength of the collection comes from the pedagogical discussions, particularly the approaches that did not work, often for trying to avoid these presumed difficulties. For example, in her essay “Teaching Welty’s Narrative Strategies in Delta Wedding,” Sarah Gilbreath Ford says, “One approach that did not work was discussing the scholarship detailing the dense allusions to other texts that occur on every page of the novel” as “the students felt left out of the conversation” (32). Ford writes that she “was not starting from [her] students’ own interests or expertise” (33). To bridge this gap, Ford says that she then assigned each student a character from the novel “to follow when reading the novel,” tracking “appearances, descriptions, and opinions” and building a visual reference to the character through sticky notes as textual markers (33). All students became invested in their characters, which Ford says “led the students to the intertextuality that I had wanted them to see,” including seeing allusions to the Persephone/Hades myth which in turn led Ford to recommending that students explore the extant scholarship (34). In another example of a failed strategy, Christin Marie Taylor describes how her students came to Welty through social movements—in this case the story “A Curtain of Green” through the Civil Rights Movement—and became comfortable with literature “about political rebellion, racial oppression, and social change” alongside Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy,” and Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” (72). But “Curtain” was met with “faint scowls and averted eyes” because Welty offers them no sure footing—no “champion, no victim” (72). Taylor says she abandoned lecture to employ a “jigsaw” method: students break into small groups, assigned “sets of questions, related images, background information, and instructions that will help them arrive at unique...

Book Review: The Fall Reconsidered: A Literary Synthesis of the Primeval Sin Narratives against the Backdrop of the History of Exegesis

The Fall Reconsidered: A Literary Synthesis of Primeval Sin Narratives against Backdrop of History of Exegesis. By Igal German. Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick Publications, 2016. xv + 135 pp. $36.00 (cloth); $21.00 (paper).The Christian theological tradition typically looks to Adam and Eve narrative for entrance of sin into story of scripture. This monograph, a revision of Igal German's doctoral dissertation, uncovers various exegetical currents in Jewish and Christian tradition that resist this theological tendency. Many ancient interpreters understood account of human failure before God introduced in Genesis 3 as extending to Cain and Abel narrative in Genesis 4. The connection between these two narratives is subject that The Fall Reconsidered explores.In this work, German seeks to demonstrate how Genesis 3 and 4 can be read as a unified family saga through a combination of literary analysis and recourse to history of interpretation. Three neatly organized chapters incorporate an introductory review of modem scholarship on Genesis (chapter 1), a survey of significant contributions from history of interpretation (chapter 2), and Germans own argument for literary cohesion of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel accounts (chapter 3).Chapter 1 presents complex character of modem scholarship on Genesis 3 and 4 from nineteenth century to present. Historicalcritical scholars, who are concerned with text's literary development and its historical background, tend to isolate accounts of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, whether assigning them to different literary sources (Christian Dillmann) or attributing their origins to different social situations, such as tribal conflict in case of Cain and Abel narrative (Hermann Gunkel).Although familiar with historical-critical approaches, German himself identifies with method of narrative criticism which looks to the world within text as primary hermeneutical locus of meaning (pp. 28, 32). Practitioners of this approach, such as Gordon Wenham and Michael Fishbane, attend closely to interweaving storyline that one encounters in present form of Genesis and underline textual markers of unity (p. 28) that connect narratives in Genesis 3 and 4.Grounding these textual markers of unity in Jewish and Christian tradition is concern of chapter 2, which incorporates texts from Second Temple Judaism, New Testament, and church fathers, in addition to a short section (four pages) on Martin Luther and John Calvin. …

Reframing the frame: a discursive frame analysis of textual markers in the Make in India Campaign

This study of textual markers in the Make in India Campaign examines how specific frames are activated by actors and texts. Using discursive frame analysis, we examine language units in the campaign as a micro (output) - meso (framework) - macro (context) strategy enabled by various acts of framing. We show how meaning-generation in this campaign is constitutive of the context that shapes it, as also the context that challenges it. We also examine how the MII campaign attempts an act of 'reframing' to replace the older restricting institutional frame (plateau) with a new field frame (forward movement) which may stabilise as a new institutional frame (continuous change) if the campaign achieves its short-term and long-term marketing and communication objectives. Finally, we discuss the implications of 'framing' as a useful construct and tool in management and organisational research and one that can enable effective marketing campaigns by bridging the mainstream-critical divide.

Reframing the frame: a discursive frame analysis of textual markers in the Make in India Campaign

This study of textual markers in the Make in India Campaign examines how specific frames are activated by actors and texts. Using discursive frame analysis, we examine language units in the campaign as a micro (output) - meso (framework) - macro (context) strategy enabled by various acts of framing. We show how meaning-generation in this campaign is constitutive of the context that shapes it, as also the context that challenges it. We also examine how the MII campaign attempts an act of 'reframing' to replace the older restricting institutional frame (plateau) with a new field frame (forward movement) which may stabilise as a new institutional frame (continuous change) if the campaign achieves its short-term and long-term marketing and communication objectives. Finally, we discuss the implications of 'framing' as a useful construct and tool in management and organisational research and one that can enable effective marketing campaigns by bridging the mainstream-critical divide.

Who said that? Textuality in eighteenth century kibyōshi

Modern presentations of kibyōshi, the ‘yellow cover’ comic books of the Edo period, present an illusion of textual orderliness that is not often present in the originals. Modern anthologies tend to use a playscript format with reduced pictures, and translators broadly follow this practice. However, the playscript format, with its convention that each utterance is labeled with the name of the character that utters it, creates an absolute attribution of lines to characters which is not necessarily evident in the original. Even when reproductions attempt faithfulness to the original and place text inline, they often indicate an authoritative textual perspective that is not found in the original by inserting textual markers for direct quotations. However, in the original text it is often difficult to figure out exactly who is saying what. This confused morass of undifferentiated text creates an interesting effect in the kibyōshi; all levels of discourse in the text are conflated. Denying distinction between different types of text also denies any privileging of one type of text over another. The effect of this seemingly confused textual presentation is precisely the destabilization of teleological dichotomies of fact and fiction, kyo and jitsu, past and present, and representer and represented.

Luego y después: uso discursivo y variación

This study concerning luego and despues considers their use as verb modifi ers, as temporary connectors and as information structurers. We have analyzed a sample of about 15 hours of recording taken from partially controlled surveys to educated speakers from Seville. The main aims are to know the discursive values that these units acquire in orality, to observe communicative performance presented in the analyzed texts and determine whether there are linguistic or social factors that constrain the variation between both. The results have allowed us to check that despues was the preferred variant in all contexts by Seville speakers, without appreciating conditions that influenced alternation. Both particles are preferably used as textual markers: as temporary connectors appeared more often in enumerative series and as information structurers acquired several nuances added to this basic sense.

Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning

Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning

On Shakespeare’s Playwriting: Opening Strategies

On Shakespeare’s Playwriting:Opening Strategies Joel Benabu (bio) Every speech has its meaning or effectiveness according to the circumstances in which it is spoken, how it is instigated, how heard or not heard, and whether it satisfies or frustrates the expectations that Shakespeare has raised by the plotting of his story.1 —John Russell Brown, William Shakespeare: Writing for Performance Theatre performance, which is subject to the limits of time and place, is largely dependent on the simultaneous response of spectators. In sixteenth-century open-air playhouses, the groundlings stood in close proximity to the players, from where they could wreak havoc with the progress of a performance. While little is known with any degree of certainty about the social composition and behavior of early modern spectators, and even less about their horizon of expectations or the ways they might have reacted to a play in performance, for instance, daily contact with spectators must have deepened a playwright’s understanding of the methods by which an effective plot could be designed and performed. This article explores the topic of opening strategies in plays and their relation to spectator immersion. By advancing theoretical observations about openings, I seek a broader understanding of how Shakespeare organized his plots with the aim to engage spectators at the opening and guide their expectations about the ensuing action. The result is a glimpse into Shakespeare’s complex playwriting strategies. With a view to unraveling these strategies, I explore the structures and functions of several well-known play openings. In so doing, I refer to narrative scholarship in order to support my theory of Shakespeare’s construction of openings.2 This theory offers an explanation as to why many Shakespearean plays, at the start, present actions that are only partly developed and remain unresolved until the main action unfolds. To elucidate this argument, I analyze Romeo and Juliet and The Merry Wives of Windsor, which illustrate in very different ways how opening strategies function. [End Page 65] Toward a Definition of Shakespeare’s Strategies of Play Opening An opening is a slippery term that has been used loosely, often interchangeably with beginning.3 Is it a prefatory device? Is it the first scene in the play-text? Or are there other viable categories of openings that are not explicitly demarcated on the page? Over the decades, Sprague, Willson, Greenfield, and most recently, Bruster and Weimann have presented interesting studies of certain components of early modern play-openings.4 However, critical interest in these studies has focused largely on describing the dramatic forms that typically set plays in motion (i.e., prologue and induction). Clearly, all plays must open regardless of whether they contain prefatory devices or not, and as I have demonstrated elsewhere, an opening may extend well beyond the first scene.5 Moreover, unlike earlier scholarship, the meaning given to an opening in this article refers not to any textual marker, such as the first few words, lines, or scenes in the play-text. Rather, it refers to playwriting strategies that leave a spectator curious about how the plot may develop, but then suspend the suggested development. Narrative scholarship contributes to this study of opening strategies by illuminating the “deep structures” of early modern plot construction. Barbara Hardy has argued, along similar lines to David M. Bevington’s argument, that Aristotle’s pronouncements on the elementary structure of “plot” are, in large part, incongruous with Elizabethan drama, finding a complex interplay between narrative forms that gives rise to the narrative whole.6 Hardy maintains that the sequences of early modern plays may relate to one another structurally, thematically, and rhetorically, even though these internal relations are often extremely difficult to decipher because of a diversity of forms.7 This idea has found favor with other Shakespearean scholars who have tested it in their respective analyses of Shakespeare’s plays. In “Echoes Inhabit a Garden: The Narratives of Romeo and Juliet,” Jill L. Levenson, for instance, has extended Hardy’s argument through an analysis of narrative forms in Romeo and Juliet. Referring to the deep structure of narrative in the second quarto of 1599, she writes: “structural repetitions of all kinds can interrupt a given...

Maria W. Stewart’s “The First Stage of Life”: Black Girlhood in theRepository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art

“The First Stage of Life” (1861) is a six-page short story by Maria W. Stewart, African American woman writer, orator, and activist. It is serialized in three parts in the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art in April, July, and October 1861. From 1858 to 1863, the Repository was a black magazine administered by black men and designed for black readers. It was based in Indianapolis, and in 1861 its chief editor was John Mifflin Brown. Published quarterly with each edition containing just over twenty bound pages of poems, parables, and essays, the magazine attracted black households with rising amounts of disposable income and leisure time. Today, the Repository is a non-circulating, non-digitized, rare black magazine on microfilm at the Indiana State Library with one extant issue housed in Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Stewart’s serialized story about a black girl’s coming-of-age published in an early black magazine broadens the contributions African American women have made to nineteenth-century print culture, and her early emphasis on black girlhood invites further study on the methodologies, frameworks, and emerging trends that continue to shape the canon of early African American literature and print culture. This article explores what we gain by examining the intersection of black girlhood and black print culture studies. To define black girlhood, nineteenth-century African American women writers distinguish between youthful and knowing girlhood, a demarcation that is represented by a black girl’s age and offers rhetorical advantages for race activists. Identifying black girls as youthful and therefore childlike removes sexual suggestion from their bodies. The growth from youthful to prematurely knowing girlhood occurs when black girls gain a deepened awareness of their precarious positions and seek methods for their survival. To emphasize a black girl’s age as a textual marker recognizes that, similar to all women, black women in the antebellum period experience a youthful period and undergo distinct stages of growth and maturity into

Trust Your Makers of Things!: The Metafictional Pact in Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity

This article argues that Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity invites the reader, via various textual markers, to enter into a “metafictional pact” with the author, through which the reader agrees to view the text as a writerly act, rather than as an object or event; through this pact, a new moral significance is granted to the text and to the relationship formed between author and reader.

New names, translational subjectivities: (Dis)location and (Re)naming in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names

NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names – shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Etisalat Prize for Literature in 2013 – is a novel in which the leitmotif of (re)naming associates the trope of migration to the (dis)location and translation of subjectivities. Based on the premise that the movement of subjects from one social context to another is analogous to the translation of text from one language to another, this paper proposes a transitional mode of subjectification. However, I argue against reading Darling's journey from Zimbabwean shanty dweller to illegal immigrant in America as a linear progression from an original (located) to a translated (dislocated) subjectivity. I further argue that the novel goes beyond the idea of ‘transparent translation' – a visible layering of a translated subjectivity over a discrete original subjectivity – by privileging their inter-permeability. Semantic and cognitive dissonance are read as textual markers of the psychic (dis)location experienced by displaced subjects. This analysis of Darling's childhood and adolescent subjectivities leads me to conclude that the novel's leitmotif of (re)naming as a call for a new hermeneutic code through which translational subjectivities can be understood.

Dos voces que parecen una: Idearios políticos e identidades étnicas en las memorias de Juan Bautista Túpac Amaru

Las Memorias de Juan Bautista Túpac Amaru (1825) es un texto singular, de corte autobiográfico, escrito por el hermano de José Gabriel Condorcanqui, Túpac Amaru II, quien fue hecho prisionero después de la derrota del líder andino y liberado décadas después, en tiempos de la emancipación americana. En él confluyen los recuerdos de la sublevación andina y los ideales de la independencia hispanoamericana liderada por criollos. Este artículo sugiere que las Memorias constituyen una “autobiografía en colaboración” (Lejeune1989) cuyas marcas textuales permiten identificar una voz andina y otra criolla. La dualidad de la voz narrativa revela la importancia del momento de la enunciación en la textualización de los recuerdos de Juan Bautista, particularmente en las construcciones textuales referidas a las ideas de la Ilustración y los conceptos sobre raza. A través de las fisuras producidas por la doble enunciación se hace posible una aproximación a las ideas políticas predominantes en el texto así como a las percepciones de las identidades étnicas manifestadas por los sujetos de la enunciación.

Bioregional Biography and the Geography of Affect: Spatialised Somnambulance in Alice Oswald's Sleepwalk on the Severn

At the centre of Oswald’s second book-length poem, Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009), lies a conflation of the feminine gendered moon and an elderly woman dressed in black, pictured against rainfall at night. Distinctions of kind and various senses of incongruence are evident markers in the text that denotes changeability of humans in the unfixed environment. It is with a sensitivity to our own understanding of the hydrologic cycle and our planet’s relation to its moon that Oswald deconstructs textual markers of subject positions; in Sleepwalk identity—individual and communal—is aligned to poetic voice, which in itself is impressionable and unfixed, subject to specific situations in which the text and space are imbricated, one with the other. This essay argues that environmentally emplaced affect can be located through an attention to Oswald’s concrete, spatialised ecopoetic ‘registers’ (voices) and an undulating, accumulative literary score that underpin Sleepwalk’s geographic imaginary.

Poetic Signs of Third Place: A Case Study of Studentdriven Imitation in a Shelter for Young Homeless People in Copenhagen

During a series of writing-workshops at a shelter for young homeless people in Copenhagen, I examined to what extent the literary practice of student-driven imitation with its emphasis on self-governance and a dialogical approach can engage marginalized learners in reading and writing. I found that student-driven imitation had the potential to engage different kinds of writers and that they adopted the practice with ease and confidence. In addition, I experienced, that the residents’ preferred genre was poetry and that they generally sought a neutral space with low attention to social status, characterized by dialogue and a homely feel. This space is comparable to Oldenburg’s third place, and I suggest that poetry is a textual marker of this space.

Poetic Signs of Third Place: A Case Study of Student-driven Imitation in a Shelter for Young Homeless People in Copenhagen

During a series of writing workshops at a shelter for young homeless people in Copenhagen, I examined to what extent the literary practice of student-driven imitation with its emphasis on self-governance and a dialogical approach can engage marginalized learners in reading and writing. I found that student-driven imitation had the potential to engage different kinds of writers and that they adopted the practice with ease and confidence. In addition, I experienced that the residents’ preferred genre was poetry and that they generally sought a neutral space with low attention to social status, characterized by dialogue and a homely feel. This space is comparable to Oldenburg’s third place, and I suggest that poetry is a textual marker of this space.

About Exile in a New Reception Grid

The paper approaches from a critical perspective a controversial study, Patria de hârtie/ The Paper Country, on the phenomenon of exile and on its reflection in the writing of three categories of exiles – ExPatriots, Expatriates and Ex-patriots, identifying textual markers of the symbolic position in regards to the imaginary country of origin and that of adoption. The project – innovative and meritorious in itself – raises, however, a series of questions regarding analysis perspectives – with an emotionally charged metalanguage as well as with positive/ negative reception choices that pre-determine the research and which are, as much as the strong points of the study, the object of this paper.