Drawing on their experience publishing two editions of Keywords for American Cultural Studies (published by New York University Press in 2007 and 2014), as well as developing an online supplement to the second edition, Burgett and Hendler will discuss what makes a keyword volume and a keyword essay different from other forms of writing about language and culture. As a hybrid print-digital publication, Keywords aims not to codify the state of an ostensibly stable field called either American studies or cultural studies, but to catalyze interdisciplinary and global conversations about field formation across the critical humanities and social sciences. In contrast to an encyclopedia entry, a literature review, or a dictionary definition, a keyword essay provides genealogies and futurologies of terms and concepts. The distinctiveness of “thinking through keywords” is best exemplified in the forms of pedagogy and collaborative digital composition enabled and fostered by the Keywords Collaboratory, a wiki-based writing space that has been used by thousands of undergraduate and graduate students. Burgett and Hendler will discuss the presumptions about writing, thinking, and reading that are upended when students compose collaborative online keyword essays in the Collaboratory, and explore the implications of these practices for the study of language and culture.
Bruce Burgett is the Dean of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, and graduate faculty in the Department of English at the University of Washington Seattle. He serves on the board of the UW Graduate Certificate in Public Scholarship and is a core faculty member in the community-based Master of Arts in Cultural Studies at UW Bothell. He is the author of Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic, and co-editor of the first and second editions of Keywords for American Cultural Studies (with Glenn Hendler). He has taught, researched, and published widely in the fields of American studies, cultural studies, and queer studies. He serves or has served on the editorial and advisory boards of American Quarterly, American Literary History, Lateral: A Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and Public: A Journal of Imagining America. He is the former Chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life and Past President of the Cultural Studies Association. He recently served on the Board of Trustees of Humanities Washington, the humanities council for the state of Washington.
Glenn Hendler is Professor of English and American Studies and Chair of the English department at Fordham University, where he has also directed the American Studies Program. He's the author of the book Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in 19th-Century American Literature; co-editor of Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture; and co-editor of an edition of Walt Whitman's novel Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate. With Bruce Burgett, he edited Keywords for American Cultural Studies. His current project is a book about David Bowie's 1974 album Diamond Dogs, which will be published in Bloomsbury Press's "33 1/3" series.
Staging Cultural Identity through Language Markers. Observations on Tourist Advertising
As one of the most influential branches of global economy, tourism is established and maintained by a continuously growing network of communication. Spread all over the world and through all sorts of media, tourist communication is concerned with promoting whatever insignificant place, viz. territories, countries, regions, locations etc., as a desirable holiday destination. In order to be profitably ‘consumed’ according to the common ideologies of leisure, sight-seeing and mobility – adequately termed as the ‘tourist gaze’ by Urry 1990 – places have thus to be turned into competitive marketing products that sell their cultural identity in discourse. This goal is achieved through the establishment of a distinctive image that is discursively proposed and upheld by a thoughtfully elaborated multimodal textuality, engaging visual and language simultaneously. As advertising, in all its mediatized forms, is the most successful means of not only representing the built image, but also expanding it cross-culturally, I will focus on this diversified genre and discuss the relationship between “language and culture” referring to a large collection of selected destination-ads from the last 50 years. According to the assumption that tourist communication is all at once space communication, image communication and (inter)cultural communication, language use, together with other semiotic resources, aims at building a particular, but especially appealing corporate identity. By charging the physical, social and cultural qualities of a place with both, specific cognitive knowledge and emotional values, advertisers attempt to create a unique destination proposition which should not only capture different tourist targets, but also unconsciously influence their decision making process: viz. the touristic choice (pre-trip), the ‘lived’ tourist experience (in-trip) and what is later kept in memory (post-trip). For this aim it is not sufficient to represent topographic surroundings and cultural conditions, but to draw effectively on what I call identity markers (or, with Lugrin 2004, icônes identitaires du lieu), i.e. a group of discursively conveyed emblematic characteristics (such as a genius loci, specific artefacts, costumes, habits, beliefs, and others, hence turned into symbols, clichés or even stereotyped devices) that are representative for the respective places and stand for what is since long supposed to be their particular culture. Among these, language plays a fundamental role in depicting the identity of places between local, regional, national or even global shaping. That is why destination ads intentionally exploit the structural properties of language, its stylistic varieties and pragmatic qualities within a specific text-design, mostly by creating a particular, but ‘auto-referential’ relation with the picture which, in tourist promotion, is of primordial importance. Referring to selected examples and based on a Multimodal Discourse Analysis I will show how language items turn into special identity markers, and how this is textually triggered between signifiant (form) and signifié (meaning) so that the promoted place turns into an attractive, but authentic must-see sight. By comparing different periods of tourist advertising, it can further be demonstrated that language cues are equally responsible for the semiotic turn that tourism discourse has recently made reflecting the destination not anymore as a static locus amoenus, but rather as a dynamic space of embodied performances. Tourism ads thus do not only coin the tourist gaze, but they literally enact it as a multisensory lived consumption of cultures. Quoted literature: LUGRIN, GILLES (2004) : La construction des icônes identitaires des lieux touristiques: Chypre dans les publicités touristiques de langue française. In: Baider, F./ Burger, M./ Goutsos, D. (eds.), La communication touristique. Approches discursives de l‘identité et de l‘alterité. Paris, Harmattan, 235 – 257. URRY, JOHN (1990): The Tourist Gaze. London –Thousand Oaks – New Dehli, SAGE.
Gudrun Held is Professor at the Department of Romance Languages, University of Salzburg. Apart from teaching Italian and French linguistics and history of Romance languages her research interests are on pragmatics, communication and interaction theory, media textology, advertising language and tourist communication. More particularly, she has published a monograph on linguistic politeness in French and Italian (“Verbale Höflichkeit”, Tübingen 1995); she has further edited a lot of collected papers and written many articles in International Journals.
Local Language – Local Identity? Reflections on Authentic, Ludic and Lucrative Language Use in Tourism
Tourists are on the move searching for something that is different from “at home” – climate, landscape, leisure and sport possibilities, food, traditions, languages and dialects – nature and culture in general. Many of these special features of the targeted place are (still) part of everyday life of the tourees, but they become commodities to the tourists, they are “advertised” and “sold”. It makes them even more precious when they are rare, unique, archaic or at least authentic. In my presentation Tyrol will serve as a lab for demonstrating different forms of language use for interacting with tourists. Based on a corpus of interviews with owners of hotels and private accommodations as well as service providers, I will deal with the question, how hosts see “their language” in contact with the languages of the tourists? How do they treat their usage of local dialect, standard language and foreign languages in relation to their local identity? Which role does dialect use play for signalling authenticity?
Monika Dannerer is professor at the department of German Language and Literature at the University of Innsbruck since 2014. She studied in Salzburg, Graz and Vienna and did her PhD at the University of Bielefeld/Germany. For many years she worked at the University of Salzburg in a pre-doc and post-doc position. Her fields of research are sociolinguistics, first and second language acquisition and language variation. She dealt with workplace communication, acquisition of narrative competences in late childhood as well as with languages and varieties at the university and in tourism.
Touristic Patriotism: From Ethnicization to Marketization of Nation
This lecture will address the changes in collective imaginary of the nation in the post-millenium culture of marketization of identity. It will be argued that the neoliberal turn to the entrepreneurial self, and, concurrently, the entrepreneurial state, has affected the ways the national collectives are being culturally reproduced. Modern cultural production of the nation, as argued by scholars of nationalism, was borne on projects of ethnic homogenization, achieved via school, media and other state apparati by means of language and hegemonic curricula on history and identity. The neoliberal nation has adopted modern legacies, but appropriated them to the needs of cultural industries, including tourism and “nation branding”. “Internationalization” of the language by English as lingua franca has been legitimized by the idea of the entrepreneurial state whereby promotional strategies aimed at attracting foreign investments and visitors have been classified by state ideologies as “patriotic duty” and active entrepreneurial citizenship. The aim of the lecture is to look into theoretical, conceptual and cultural consequences of the turn as concerns the symbolic and real aspects of national belonging.
Ksenija Vidmar Horvat is full professor of sociology of culture at the University of Ljubljana. Her research interests include questions of cultural identity, gender, Europeanization and post-socialism. Her latest publications address gender and nationalism, cosmopolitan patriotism and post-colonial/post-socialist analysis of peripheries.
Multilingualism in the Mother Tongue Classroom – Between Theory and Practice
Due to the increase of migrations, there is a growing number of teachers who, apart from the language and the culture of national minorities, teach the students with insufficient knowledge of the mother tongue, which is both the language of their social environment and the education. Student's multilingualism and multiculturalism are the contemporary educational reality that cannot be ignored nor neglected in the teaching of majority's mother tongue. The teacher needs to know the skills required for developing multilingualism of the student while, at the same time, developing its psychophysical and social characteristics in the multicultural classroom. The presentation will show the results of the research conducted in Croatia within the bilateral Croatian-Slovenian project Linguistic and cultural identity of the students regarding the languages of education in Croatia and Slovenia. Collected results show the capacity of the lecturers regarding their geographical (multi) lingual environment and the experience in work with the multilingual students. The results show theoretical and practical knowledge of the lecturers on multilingualism as well as the relationship between these two sets of knowledge. Based on the collected results, discussion about the methodical competence of the lecturers is developed. Main principals and the activities that could help in developing the multilingualism and multiculturalism in the teaching of majority's mother tongue are offered.
Tamara Turza-Bogdan, PhD works as an associate professor at the Faculty of Teacher Education, University of Zagreb, Department in Čakovec. She worked at elementary and secondary schools. She is conducting research of Kajkavian literature and dialect in teaching, influence of idioms in development of communicational competences of children, methodology of teaching standard language using idioms and Croatian as foreign language.
What Mother-Tongue Language Teachers Think about Multilingualism: an example from Croatia
Studies on multilingualism in educational system predominantly deal with the questions of multilingualism and intercultural competence in a foreign language classroom (e.g. Petravic, 2016, Goebbel, Helmke 2011, Byram & Feng 2006), while the studies on development of multilingualism and intercultural competence in the majority language classroom are still seldom investigated topics. Thus, current global trends and mobility of people made multilingualism one of the central features of a modern educational system, even in countries that are predominantly monolingual, such as Croatia. The Republic of Croatia is perceived as a monolingual country with over 95% of its inhabitants being the native speakers of the Croatian language. However, that perception is rather deceptive for three reasons: 1) language diversity and the ratio of the speakers of majority and minority language at the local administrative level, i.e. in counties, municipalities and cities (see Cvikić 2014,2016, Jelaska & Cvikić 2012), 2) the increasing number of Croatian L2 speakers integrated in Croatian educational system (Jelaska & Cvikić 2012, Turza Bogdan & Ciglar 2013, Cvikić 2014, Cesi, Cvikić & Milovic, 2012) and 3) the fact that a foreign language is a mandatory course from the first grade of primary education. Therefore, the educational system in Croatia should be considered as a multilingual and multicultural environment (Cvikić 2014, Cvikić, Novak Milic, 2015). This paper deals with the topic of preparedness of mother-tongue teachers for teaching in a multilingual and intercultural classroom. On the basis on research conducted at the bilateral Croatian-Slovenian project Linguistic and Cultural Identity of the Students Regarding the Languages of Education this paper will focus on following questions: How well are Croatian language teachers prepared to work in multilingual settings? What are teachers' believes and attitudes toward multiculturalism? What are the main factors that influence teachers’ attitudes and believes? Lidija Cvikić, PhD is an associate professor at Faculty for Teacher Education, University of Zagreb. Her research interest focuses on the acquisition of Croatian as L1 and L2, especially vocabulary and morphology acquisition, L2 language teaching and e-learning of languages.
… ko se še v meni dva jaza zbudita. Ma cosa vuoi – così è la vita! O literarni dvojezičnosti slovenskih leposlovcev v Italiji
Kje, pri kom, kdaj in v kolikšni meri vznika v sodobni slovenski književnosti v Italiji pojav literarne dvojezičnosti? Gre zgolj za osebno umetniško izbiro jezikovno nadizobraženih in večkulturno kompetentnih piscev ali tudi za splošnejši literarni odsev socialno napredujoče narodnostne asimilacije Slovencev v Italiji? Kaj sproža in podžiga tovrstni literarni „code switching“: identitetni, kulturni, izobrazbeni, tržni vzgibi? So tudi ali pretežno v italijanščini pišoči slovenski pesniki in pisatelji iz Furlanije Julijske krajine literarno povsem enakovredno dvojezični? Takšna in podobna vprašanja si bo zastavljal prispevek, ki naslovno izhaja iz citata pesnika Miroslava Košute, da bi na besednem korpusu odbranih, v italijanščini pišočih slovenskih leposlovcev v Italiji iz tržaške, goriške in videmske pokrajine detektiral čedalje pogostejšo literarno dvojezičnost med Slovenci v Italiji.
...when a double me awakens. Ma cosa vuoi – così è la vita! Literary bilingualism of Slovenian writers in Italy Where, by whom, when, and to what extent does the emergence of literary bilingualism arise in modern Slovene literature in Italy? Is it only a personal artistic choice of language-educated and multicultural competent writers, or a more general literary reflection due to the social phenomenon of the national assimilation of Slovenes in Italy? What triggers and fakes this kind of literary code switching: identity, cultural, educational, market motivation? Is the literary bilingualism of Slovene poets and writers from Friuli Venezia Giulia writing both or mainly in the Italian language of the same value? Such and similar questions will be posed by the contribution (the title is based on a quotation from the poet Miroslav Kosut), in order to detect and reveal at the word corpus of the selected literary pieces of Slovene writers from the Trieste, Gorizia and Udine provinces who write also in Italian language, the increasing frequency of literary bilingualism among Slovenes in Italy.
Miran Košuta, assistant professor of Slovene Language and Literature at the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Trieste and member of its Department for the Philosophy, Languages and Literatures, was born 6. 11. 1960 in Trieste (Italy). In the years 1998-2001 was professor of Slovene Language and Literature at the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. President of the Slavistic society of Slovenia in the years 2006-2008, currently is member of the Slovene Writers' Association and Slovene PEN Club. Selected publications: Krpanova sol (Ljubljana, Cankarjeva založba, 1996), Scritture parallele (Trieste, Edizioni Lint, 1997), Slovenica (Reggio Emilia-Trieste, Diabasis-Editoriale Stampa Triestina, 2005), E-mejli (Maribor, Litera, 2008), Mikrofonije (Trst, Založništvo tržaškega tiska, 2010). Translations: Fulvio Tomizza, Frančiška (Celovec-Ljubljana-Dunaj, Mohorjeva založba, 2002); Fulvio Tomizza, Obiskovalka (Celovec-Ljubljana-Dunaj, Mohorjeva založba, 2005).
Literature and culture: What can we learn through literature about the culture of a country?
Talking about the relationship of literature and culture in general, we can make three detections: 1. literature is, together with music, film, theatre etc., a part of culture which is understood in a very broad sense as civilization and the historical development of a political and geographic large formation as a nation. In a more closer way, culture is a specific combination of common issues of a society which are more or less visible, but realized and strengthened through practices—symbols, heroes and rituals (Hofstede 2009: 8). 2. In this context one of the characteristics of literature is the fact, that she receives their motives, figures and cultural images from the reality. 3. Being part of the culture, literature has also a formative power, creating, confirming and changing values. Based primarily on the second aspect, the presentation will analyze the relationship between literature and societal values. Examples from different literary epochs as the early Ivo Andrić, works of Slobodan Šnajder, Isak Samokovlija and Nenad Veličković etc. will serve to examine this special relationship. Special attention will be given to questions of the handling with historical facts, life conditions, rituals and atmosphere, of presenting aspects of identity-generating (self image and the image of Europe) and the role of memory in the creating of literary fictions.
Renate Hansen-Kokoruš is Professor of Slavic literatures and cultures at the Department of Slavic Studies at the University of Graz in Austria. She studies at the University of Mannheim, the University of Sarajevo, and the State University of Moscow, and completed her PhD and post-doctoral degrees in Slavic Studies at the University of Mannheim. She worked for the German department at the University of Sarajevo and the Slavic department in Mannheim. As a visiting professor, she has taught at universities as the Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of Waterloo in Canada, the University of Zadar in Coratia, the State University of Tomsk in Russia, the University of Frankfurt/M. in Germany as well as the Universities of Innsbruck in Austria. She is currently Head of the Department of Slavic Studies in Graz and co-editor of the Anzeiger für Slavische Philologie.
Towards Plurilingualism: Can Bilingual Primary Programmes Offer the First Steps?
Janet Enever University of Reading and Umeå University, Sweden [email protected]
This paper discusses the recent spread of bilingual practices in European primary schools, including the development of partial bilingual systems which have come to be known as CLIL programmes (Content and Language Integrated Learning) The paper adopts a socio-historical paradigm developed by Cox (1981, 2010), facilitating a critical examination of both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of power evident in the context of a European capital city (Madrid), illustrating how dialectical possibilities for change have been accommodated, within the context of a changing world order. Significantly, a critical approach is valuable in revealing both the origins of power relations, and the processes of change that may have occurred. Drawing on interview data from policy makers, teacher educators and teachers I discuss the implementation process since 2004, when the regional education authorities of Madrid initiated a rapid expansion of the programme in a new phase of development that has now resulted in 46 per cent of all primary schools in the Madrid region establishing bilingual programmes. The paper critically examines the strengths and weaknesses of the current programme, correlating interview evidence with data from classroom observations and exam results. The findings may have implications for contexts beyond Spain, where European institutions such as the EU Policy Unit, European Commission and the European Centre for Modern Languages have strongly promoted the construct of CLIL in secondary and primary schools as a mechanism for developing a plurilingual citizenry over the past twenty-five years.
Until June 2017 Janet Enever was Professor of Language Teaching and Learning at Umeå University, Sweden specialising in the fields of early foreign language learning, language globalisation and language policy. She holds a doctoral degree from Bristol University, UK in Primary Foreign Languages Policy and has worked at Universities in London, Krakov, Budapest and Umeå. She has advised on language policy, early language learning and teacher education for ministries in a number of Asian, Latin American and European countries. She now convenes the MA module in teaching English for Young Learners at Reading University, UK and is the series editor for the Multilingual Matters research series ‘Early Language Learning in School Contexts’.