Linguistically Speaking

So that was Chris and her reading and schooling, two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her.
You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you’d waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you’d cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies. You saw their faces in firelight, father’s and mother’s and the neighbours’, before the lamps lit up, tired and kind, faces dear and close to you, you wanted the words they’d known and used, forgotten in the far-off youngness of their lives, Scots words to tell to your heart how they wrung it and held it, the toil of their days and unendingly their fight. And the next minute that passed from you, you were English, back to the English words so sharp and clean and true – for a while, for a while, till they slid so smooth from your throat you knew they could never say anything that was worth the saying at all.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon: Sunset Song

I’m struggling a bit with the narrative technique of Sunset Song – maybe you know of a narrative theory/concept that could accommodate it?

The focalizer seems to shift frequently – we sometimes have insight into the main character, Chris, though sometimes she’s also viewed from what seems to be the perspective of the village people. It is hard to say whether it is a heterodiegetic or homodiegetic narrator (cf. the following extract – the speaker has insight into the community gossip, though there is no indication of that s/he is one of the characters that appear in the story).

While the narrator is usually an “Er (resp. Sie)-Erzähler”, it sometimes shifts to a “self-referring you”. Also, it is neither thoroughly “personal” (although some of the protagonist’s emotions, e.g. during childbirth, seem so genuine that many women still do not believe that a male author could have written it) nor thoroughly “auktorial” (e.g. the narrator is not always reliable and does not have insight in characters other than Chris).

The following extract illustrates what I interpret as a sort of “communal voice”. It sets in after Mr Coulquohoun, a new Minister, has come to the village after the war.

You couldn’t well call [the new Minister] pro-German, like, for he’d been a plain soldier all through the War. Folk felt clean lost without a bit name to hit at him with, till Ellison said that he was a Bolshevik, one of those awful creatures, coarse tinks, that had made such a spleiter in Russa. They’d shot their king-creature, the Tsar they called him, and they bedded all over the place, folk said, a man would go home and find his wife commandeered any bit night and Lenin and Trotsky lying with her. And Ellison said that the same would come in Kinraddie if Mr Coulquohoun had his way; maybe he was feared for his mistress, was Ellison, though God knows there’d be little danger of her being commandeered, even Lenin and Trotsky would fair be desperate before they would go to that length.

From: Lewis Grassic Gibbon: Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 2003.

Musolff's study on Metaphor and Political Discourse (the book I've referred to in the comments to my last metaphor post) manages to operationalize Lakoff/Johnson's theory quite nicely. He investigates the metaphors referring to Europe/the European Union in the British and German print media from 1989-2001, using a two-step method:

First, he collects all the relevant metaphors in a small specialized corpus of news coverage about Europe. He then sorts them into domains/lexical fields, and finally into more specific scenarios with role slots, story lines etc (e.g. Having a child - two partners have a child and care/provide for it --> the euro as a child of the union; can be sickly or strong and healthy etc.). Thus, the conceptual structures he works with are based on corpus-based evidence, they are not just interpretations of salient examples like those of L/J.

He then uses the findings from the pilot corpus to analyze a larger and more representative corpus drawn from standard linguistic corpora (COSMAS for Germany and BoE for Britain). To tackle such a huge amount of data, he uses the results from the pilot corpus to formulate search criteria: He simply searches for all the lexical items that occurred in the metaphors about Europe in the first corpus (supplementing them with more from the same lexical fields) in connection with 'euro', 'europe' etc. (In other words, he searches for terms from the source domains of the metaphors he's already found and from the target domain 'euro').
This apparently worked out well and yielded a large number of relevant metaphors, showing which source domains and scenarios occur more frequently than others. (The obvious drawback is that any source domains that didn't occur in the pilot corpus would not be taken into account - Musolff does admit this and the limitation of statistical significance it entails. However, as the corpora used are not entirely comparable anyway - different size, different composition - this would have been difficult to achieve in any case. Also, the book does not draw more than cautious conclusions - the focus is mostly on the role metaphors play in political discourse and how this can be investigated empirically).

---all in all, Musolff provides good empirical backup for L/J's theory, showing that the print-media discourse about the European Union in Britain and Germany is indeed largely structured by metaphors - and also that in almost all cases, the same metaphors are used in both Germany and Britain, which can therefore be said to belong to the same 'metaphor community'. Among the most frequent ones are EUROPE AS BUILDING, AS A BODY POLITIC (e.g. health/illness, birth/death), AS A JOURNEY, or AS A FAMILY/LOVE RELATIONSHIP. Thus, the metaphors occurring most frequently can be shown to have experiential grounding, which again would support L/J's observations.

Even though the same metaphors are used, they don't have to lead to the same conclusions; different aspects and entailments can be highlighted, and as is to be expected, the British media are overall more sceptical of the EU than their German counterparts. One of the most striking examples Musolff cites is not directly relevant to the German-British discourse, but a great illustration because it's a direct dialogue, between Gorbatchev and Weizsäcker (then president of the German Federal Republic). They implicitly used the EUROPE AS A COMMON HOUSE-metaphor to discuss border issues between the two Germanies - Weizsäcker saying that neighbours should be able to visit each other, Gorbatchev explaining that not everybody liked to be visited in the middle of the night and thereby implying that at least some restrictions should remain. Thus, the metaphor served as a "conceptual basis for negotiation of differing but not incompatible interpretations of the ... political situation" (147).

Reference: Musolff, Andreas (2004): Metaphor and Political Discourse. Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CW geht davon aus, dass die griechischen Mythen (vor allem ihre Frauenfiguren wie Kassandra oder Medea) Spuren eines grossen Gesellschaftlichen Umbruchs tragen:

"Eine tiefgreifende Umwälzung der Produktions, Lebens-, Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse hatte stattgefunden, über hunderte, vielleicht tausende von Jahren, die Frauen, einst gleichgestellt, waren in eine untergeordnete Stellung geraten [...]
Eine Jahrtausendzeit, in der die ehrfuchtgebietenden Erd- und Fruchtbarkeitsgöttinnen von männlichen Göttern, schliesslich vom Götterhimmel des griechischen Olymp abgelöst wurden; aber diese oft gewaltsame Ablösung geistert in und hinter den Geschichten des Mythos weiter" (13/14).

Ich finde diese Sichtweise faszinierend, war aber immer auch skeptisch - steckt dahinter nicht auch ein Wunschdenken nach einer Ur-Zeit, in der alles besser war? Der Kampf für Gleichberechtigung wird damit auch zu einem Zurückgewinnen der ursprünglichen Gleichberechtigung zwischen den Geschlechtern.

Jetzt habe ich aber heute Aischylos' Orestie gelesen - und deren Schluss macht CWs Punkt für mich sehr viel plausibler. Kurzfassung der Geschichte: vor dem trojanischen Krieg opfert Agamemnon seine Tochter Iphigenie, um günstige Winde für die Fahrt nach Troja zu erbitten. Seine Frau Klytemnestra ist darüber so empört, dass sie ihn nach seiner Rückkehr zehn Jahre später ermordet; sie selbst wird dafür von ihrem Sohn Orest umgebracht. Im Schlussteil der Trilogie wird Orest der Prozess gemacht. Parteien sind der angeklagte Orest und der Gott Apollo, der ihn (unter Androhung von wüsten Strafen) zur Rache seines Vaters aufgefordert hat; auf der Anklageseite sind es die Erinnyen, alte, dunkle Frauen, Rachegöttinnen, die darauf beharren, dass der Muttermord schwerer wiegt als der Gattenmord, weil es ein Mord an Blutsverwandten war.
Das Gericht spricht Orest frei; die Begründung:
"Die Mutter bringt, was uns ihr Kind heisst, nicht hervor.
Sie ist nur frisch gesäten Keimes Nährerin,
Der sie befruchtet, zeugt. ...
Es gibt auch ohne Mutter Vaterschaft" (658ff.)
--und zwar ist die Göttin Athene (die Schiedsrichterin) direkt aus ihrem Vater Zeus entstanden.

Folglich sind Mütter nicht so wichtig, und sie umzubringen ist nicht so schlimm.

Die Erynien kommentieren diesen Schiedsspruch wie folgt:
"Ihr spätgeborenen Götter [i.e., Apollo und Athene], weh!
Altes Gesetz
Reitet ihr nieder, entwindet es meiner Hand" (777ff.)

Da passt CWs Interpretation sehr genau drauf - der Zeitenwechsel ist nicht mal nur im Hintergrund des Mythos zu finden, sondern direkt dramatisiert.

Und ausserdem noch CWs Antwort auf die Frage, ob eine Rückkehr ins Matriarchat wünschenswert wäre:

"Wahrscheinlich hat es ein vollkommen ausgebildetes Matriarchat als 'Frauenherrschaft' nie gegeben, und ein Zurück in so frühe undifferenzierte Verhältnisse gibt es sowieso nicht. Wir können nur versuchen, die Erfahrung der Jahrtausende beachtend, weiterzugehen. Es muss also immer selbstverständlich werden, dass der männliche und der weibliche Blick gemeinsam ein vollständiges Bild von der Welt vermitteln." (52)

(CW-Zitate aus Christa Wolfs Medea. Voraussetzungen zu einem Text. 1998: Gerhard Wolf Janus Press, Berlin.)

Have a look at this article!

http://www.unipublic.unizh.ch/magazin/wirtschaft/2006/2011.html

"A subject is at least a thousand people.
This is why I never ask myself 'who am I?', I ask myself 'who are I?'. [...] Who can say who I are, how many I are, which I is the most I of my I's?"

Hélène Cixous, Preface to The Hélène Cixous Reader, 1994.

Getting the dates of the oral exams came as a little shock to me - I'm running out of time! But then, I've also done most of the work, and it's good panic-treatment and motivation to actually visualize that!

These are the books that I have already read:






And these are the ones that I still need to read:



(However, I've read some of the books on the 'read' pictures some time ago... It'll still take time to remember what they were about. Also, there are seven linguistics-articles to be added to the 'not yet read' category. But the articles I have already read aren't on the pictures, either, so that's ok.)

Wer wie die Biene wäre,
die die Sonne auch durch den Wolkenhimmel fühlt,
die den Weg zur Blüte findet und nie die Richtung verliert,
dem lägen die Felder in ewigem Glanz;
wie kurz er auch lebte,
er würde selten
weinen.

Hilde Domin (diese Woche verstorben)