Minding the Gaps 2025
12th Brno Conference of English, American,
and Canadian Studies
Masaryk University
5th-7th February 2025
Conference Presentation Abstracts
All abstracts in the alphabetical order by the author' last name:
Ayman Almomani
aymane.momani@gmail.com
University of Pécs
Dystopia: A Troubled Definition
Lyman Tower Sargent, a leading scholar on utopia, notes that the term “dystopia” was first used in the eighteenth century by Henry Lewis Younge in Utopia: or, Apollo’s Golden Days. It has since been used in both political and literary contexts as a marker for an anti-utopia, a world of disorder, violence, strife, and manipulation. Indeed, our present-day political reality – characterised by a rise in far right values and coercion – parallels settings imagined by writers such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Suzanne Collins. Interestingly, while we readily apply the term “dystopia” to different contexts, we lack a common definition and application in literary scholarship. In this paper, I will discuss the relationship between the history of literary utopias and dystopias, and the ways the two genres might be related without being oppositional. Recent work on dystopia by Gregory Claeys, Jessica Norledge, and Patricia McManus demonstrate the importance of both historical context and stylistic devices, and of reading the genre on its own terms. This paper will continue discussions around how we read and categorise “dystopia” using Collins’ Hunger Games series as a case study. In the Hunger Games universe, President Snow's utopian aspiration for peace and order justifies the dystopian politics of coercive control established in the Capitol and inflicted on the districts. In many ways the ideal of utopia is bound to produce a dystopia, a narrative arc found in many texts, including Gulliver's Travels. Utopia and dystopia often work together and inform each other.
Maryna Aloshyna
m.aloshyna@kubg.edu.ua
Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University
Holly by Stephen King: Linguistic Aspects of the Novel
The research investigates the linguistic aspects of Stephen King's novel Holly, focusing on his unique narrative style, use of colloquial language, and thematic engagement with contemporary social issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic. By analyzing the linguistic techniques, such as the use of colloquialisms, vulgar lexicon, and emotional intensity through italics and syntactical choices, this research explores how these features contribute to character development and narrative tension. Through these linguistic strategies, King smoothens the gap between his characters and readers, creating authentic, emotionally resonant dialogue. The research shows that King’s use of fragmented syntax, contrast, and profane language is deliberate and enhances the novel’s tension and psychological depth.
Sally Anderson Boström
sally.anderson.bostrom@tul.cz
Technická univerzita v Liberci
Reading the Legacy of the Plantation in the Literature of Hawai’i
While much of the scholarship on plantation literature has focused on the American South, the islands of Hawai‘i have often been overlooked in this field, despite their long history of plantation labor. Operating from the mid-nineteenth century until the late twentieth century, plantations in Hawai‘i relied on indentured labor rather than slavery, with workers primarily drawn from indigenous Hawaiians, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Chinese populations. Though distinct from the system of slavery on the mainland, the conditions on these plantations were also oppressive, subjecting workers to dehumanizing systems of exploitation. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which the Hawai‘i-born author Milton Murayama illuminates the enduring trauma of this history. Using the theory of Eduard Glissant, especially his work on memory and nonhistory, I will show how Murayama's fiction is an example of the third-phase of plantation literature, by which authors attempt to “transcend” (Glissant) the trauma of the plantation. I will show how Murayama's characters negotiate the plantation’s legacy and attempt to claim a new identity in Hawai‘i’s rapidly changing landscape. Moreover, I will explain how contemporary writers from Hawai‘i contribute to a broader discourse on the long-lasting impacts of colonialism and labor exploitation in American fiction, challenging romanticized images of the islands and offering powerful counter-narratives to the myth of Hawai‘i as a tropical paradise.
Petr Anténe
petr.antene@upol.cz
Palacký University Olomouc
Rewriting Joyce’s Dubliners for the 21st century: Michèle Forbes’ “Clay” and Paul Murray’s “A Painful Case”
This paper aims to compare two of James Joyce’s stories of maturity, “Clay” and “A Painful Case,” from Dubliners (1914) with their rewritings by Michèle Forbes and Paul Murray in the collection Dubliners 100: Fifteen New Stories Inspired by the Original (2014). Besides setting their versions of the stories in the early twenty-first century, both Forbes and Murray change the gender of characters of the source texts. In Joyce’s “Clay,” the protagonist is an unmarried middle-aged woman named Maria, who is playing a Halloween game with children in the family of a man she used to bring up when he was a boy. Instead, Forbes’ version features a similarly lonely young overweight single man, Conor, whose Halloween night does not include any social events; only some teenage girls stop by his home when trick or treating. In Paul Murray’s version of “A Painful Case,” the gender of the protagonist, James Duffy, stays the same as in Joyce; however, instead of Duffy’s platonic affair with a married woman, the story focuses on his friendship with Bill, a monk who is eventually revealed to be a closeted gay. In turn, Forbes’ and Murray’s rewritings update the portrayal of diverse members of Irish society as presented by Joyce – namely solitary women and men of various ages, including those of other than heterosexual orientation.
Hend Ayari
ayari.hend@arts.unideb.hu
University of Debrecen
“Bring her Home:” Rematriating Women’s Subjectivities in Native American Tribalography
This paper explores Native American women’s self-referential texts as a potent tool for promoting cultural resurgence and healing from intergenerational trauma. Situated within the rematriation movement, it examines how the selected “tribalographic” narratives, referencing Choctaw scholar and writer Leanne Howe, serve as powerful tools for re-storying both personal and communal experiences of historical and ongoing trauma. Through the lens of survivance, Native American women-authored texts, including Poet Warrior, Gichigami Hearts, Carry, and A Mind Spread out on the Ground, are analyzed not only as testimonials of suffering but as dynamic acts of cultural resurgence and reclamation of subjectivity. The study highlights how “tribalography” becomes a strategy of expressing cultural continuity, resisting erasure, and recovering identity by highlighting the dynamic interplay between self, community, and story by illustrating how Indigenous women’s rematriation of subjectivity, as manifested in the selected texts, challenges dominant narratives through enacting survivance, restoring connections across generations and with land, and actively engaging in resurgence.
Key words: life writing, tribalography, survivance, relational, resurgence, healing
Magdalena Bator
magdalena.bator@tul.cz
Technical University of Liberec
Interpersonal Strategies in the Culinary Recipes of the Early Modern English Period
Historical culinary recipes have been widely examined in terms of their structure, text type features or language. However, little has been done in terms of the interpersonal strategies applied by their authors. The available studies have shown that the changes in structure correlate with the changing function of the recipes and their audience. It is not clear whether the earliest cooking instructions were written by or for the chef; however, scholars agree that the target audience has shifted in the Early Modern English period from professional to private as the instructions were no longer aimed at a professional cook, but at the middle class mistress.
The proposed paper aims at examining various interpersonal strategies employed by the cookbook writers, which might reveal who the author of these recipes was, as well as their attitude towards the reader and the text. We will apply Hyland’s (2005) framework for analysing the linguistic resources used by writers. The preliminary research has shown a variety of attitudinal stance markers, such as value-laden lexis; or epistemic stance markers, which, for instance, refer to the source of the acquired knowledge. On the other hand, direct reader mentions seem to be less frequent. It is expected that a detailed analysis of the strategies employed in the recipes will not only illustrate the writer- and reader-oriented features of the instructions, but it may also shed some light on the role of the Early Modern cook.
The corpus selected for the analysis contains over 700 recipes published in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Dominika Beneš Kováčová
dominika.kovacova@osu.cz
University of Ostrava
‘Only 90s Kids Remember…’: Nostalgic Narratives and Their Role in the Construction of Virtual Communities in YouTube Comments
The present paper explores the role of nostalgic narratives in the performance and construction of virtual communities. More specifically, it examines the audience perception of a ‘90s Eurodance parody song called The Planet of the Bass – a viral phenomenon of summer 2023 – on YouTube. To do this, a subset of comments reacting to the video clip is collected and analysed from a social semiotic perspective (van Leeuwen 2005); in this way, the analysis explores the topic of these comments at the level of discourse, the activities they enact at the level of genre, the identities they construct at the level of style and the truth value of their representations at the level of modality. The preliminary findings reveal two divergent types of comments in the dataset: 1. authentic affective responses of the commenters to the contents and lyrics of the song; and 2. fictional tellings of nostalgic narratives about post-Soviet life in the 90s. Importantly, the analysis shows that nostalgic narratives – albeit fictional and parodic – allow the commenters not only to construct a virtual community of post-Soviet nostalgics through the performance of collective nostalgia but also produce a humorous effect in the given context. The study thus complements previous linguistic research into the (in)authenticity of online nostalgic discourse by analysing parodic nostalgic narratives shared by commenters on YouTube and revealing their potential entertainment value.
References:
van Leeuwen, T. (2005). Introducing social semiotics. Routledge.
Kryštof Beták
kbetak@ff.jcu.cz
Institute of English Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice
The Influence of Discipline on the Usage of It-clefts in Academic Research Papers
It-clefts are reported to be more frequently used in academic English compared to other registers, such as fiction, newspaper reporting, and spoken conversations. This prevalence is attributed to their persuasive nature, as the information in the subordinate clause of an it-cleft is marked as logically presupposed, thereby presenting it as fact. This study aims to examine the frequency of it-clefts across three sub-registers of academic research papers: natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The findings reveal that it-clefts are generally avoided in natural sciences, while they are most frequently employed in humanities, with social sciences in the middle. Because of that, this research further investigates the frequency of it-clefts across specific disciplines in humanities, viz. philosophy, literary criticism, art and music, linguistics, history, and archaeology. Significant differences in the frequency of it-clefts are observed among humanities disciplines as well with the highest frequency attested in literary criticism, philosophy and art and music. I will argue that there are three key factors that influence this variation: (1) the grammatical complexity, (2) the research methodologies employed, and (3) the range of functional contexts in which it-clefts are used within individual disciplines. The results not only reinforce the notion that it-clefts are well-suited to persuasive discourse, but also demonstrate that the claim regarding their high frequency in academic English requires refinement, as it-clefts are not attested in all disciplines evenly.
Lucie Betáková
(With Monika Černá)
betakova@pf.jcu.cz
University of South Bohemia, Faculty of Education
Critical Issues in Teaching English as a Foreign Language - Teachers’ Perspective
The study replicates a previous study of the critical issues in the English language curriculum at lower secondary school level carried out at the University of South Bohemia. The current study shares both the understanding of the concept of critical issues and the research design with the earlier study. Critical issues are defined as components of the educational content that can be considered difficult, problematic, demanding or even failing for a variety of reasons. In the current study, a modified version of the original questionnaire survey was used, and a larger number of primary and lower secondary teachers were questioned compared to the original study. The research instrument was distributed online; 67 respondents took part in the survey and identified 180 critical issues. The paper presents the results of a detailed analysis of these critical issues using the concept of language skills and language elements as a framework for analysis. Within the language elements, grammar was seen as critical, compared to developing speaking which was defined as critical within the language skills. The paper will look at reasons why teachers see these two areas of language curriculum problematic and will present their ideas about how to overcome difficulties in teaching grammar and speaking. The presented study confirmed the results of the previous study in that grammar and speaking seem to be the critical areas of the EFL curriculum, on the other hand they consider the critical issues related to speaking as more important for their learners in comparison with grammar.
Jason Blake
blakej@ff.uni-lj.si
University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)
“nothing was safe, nothing was certain” – Nino Ricci’s Sleep
Reading literature offers many pleasures and far fewer quantifiable utilities. One useful aspect of literature, however, lies in helping us mind a gap that inevitably exists between self and other. We can walk safely walk in another’s shoes, wander around inside their heads. Philosophers Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martha Nussbaum agree that reading literature helps us come to know and empathize with individuals who may differ from us. Appiah compares the “imaginative engagement” we get when a work “speaks from some place other than our own” to real-life “conversations across boundaries of identity.” Nussbaum, meanwhile, argues that “narrative art has the power to make us see the lives of the different with more than a casual tourist’s interest.” Each implies that empathy and betterment can grow from such encounters. Canadian author Nino Ricci’s 2015 novel Sleep serves as a hard case for such enthusiastic views of literature. Ricci’s protagonist, David Pace, is a professor who specializes in ancient Rome and masculinity studies. He is also suffering from a “brain disorder” that deprives him of sleep and judgement; further, Pace is a seducing, plagiarizing, gun-slinging “narcissist” (155) who lacks any sort of moral core and seems intent on ruining himself. The aim of my paper is to show how Sleep invites readings that run counter to the virtue-signalling and morality-cop-playing that reign in current critical assessments of literature. Finishing Sleep means having spent hours in a novelistic space where “nothing was safe, nothing was certain” (5).
Monika Černá
(With Lucie Betáková)
monika.cerna@upce.cz
University of Pardubice
Critical Issues in Teaching English as a Foreign Language – Teachers’ Perspective
The study replicates a previous study of the critical issues in the English language curriculum at lower secondary school level carried out at the University of South Bohemia. The current study shares both the understanding of the concept of critical issues and the research design with the earlier study. Critical issues are defined as components of the educational content that can be considered difficult, problematic, demanding or even failing for a variety of reasons. In the current study, a modified version of the original questionnaire survey was used, and a larger number of primary and lower secondary teachers were questioned compared to the original study. The research instrument was distributed online; 67 respondents took part in the survey and identified 180 critical issues. The paper presents the results of a detailed analysis of these critical issues using the concept of language skills and language elements as a framework for analysis. Within the language elements, grammar was seen as critical, compared to developing speaking which was defined as critical within the language skills. The paper will look at reasons why teachers see these two areas of language curriculum problematic and will present their ideas about how to overcome difficulties in teaching grammar and speaking. The presented study confirmed the results of the previous study in that grammar and speaking seem to be the critical areas of the EFL curriculum, on the other hand they consider the critical issues related to speaking as more important for their learners in comparison with grammar.
Petr Chalupský
petr.chalupsky@pedf.cuni.cz
Charles University, Prague
Post-Pastoral Spatiality in Sarah Hall’s Haweswater and Jim Crace’s Harvest
Though written by authors of different generations and in different phases of their careers, Sarah Hall’s Haweswater (2002) and Jim Crace’s Harvest (2013) bear several thematic as well as stylistic parallels, particularly in their treatment of space, as both writers profess heightened landscape sensibility. By interlinking the dwellers’ mental states with their physical surroundings, emphasising an ethical stance towards nature without sentiment and false consciousness, and the disruptive use of pastoral elements for an investigation of the current world’s crises, these novels meet the defining features of the “post-pastoral”. They also depict communities in a transitional moment of their existence, caught in the liminal position between the disappearing old world and its not yet fully established modern version, which makes them reassess the essentials of their identity face to face larger socio-economic forces. However, the novels differ in their approach to historicity – while Haweswater is situated into a precise historical and geographical context of the 1930s construction of the Haweswater dam in the valley of Mardale in Cumbria, Harvest lacks any such specification, being set somewhere in the English countryside sometime around the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using geocritical approaches as its theoretical framework, this paper argues that, in spite of their generic and methodological divergence, Haweswater and Harvest, due to the affinity in their employment of the post-pastoral mode and their potent spatial representation, not only articulate similar ideas, but also effectively address related acute concerns relevant for present-day readers.
Adel Cheong
xian.cheong@dcu.ie
Dublin City University
Affect, Alienation and Polyphony in Max Porter's Lanny
The dynamics of the English village in Max Porter’s Lanny (2019) turns on the novel’s evocation of polyphony. Dead Papa Toothwort, who revels in voices, overhears snatches of dialogue from the English village in Lanny: “he swims in it, he gobbles it up and wraps himself in it, he rubs it all over himself, he pushes it into his holes, he gargles, plays, punctuates and grazes, licks and slurps at the sound of it, wanting it fizzing on his tongue” (7, emphasis mine). Evoking a sense of musicality and resonance, these voices and utterances float across the page in curved, weaving, trailing, or overlapping lines in chapter one. The aesthetic focus of Lanny is seemingly rooted in its representation of voice: one might imagine the timbres and intonations of these voices rising from these lines. But the novel’s polyphony also heightens the “nasty gossip” between village residents, revealing the prejudices and ignorance that inform one’s perception of others, where the novel revolves around the issue of who is seen to belong and who does not (Lanny 125). When a young boy goes missing, the circulation of affect, as part of emotional contagion, explains the widespread experience of emotions such as fear and paranoia, that although shared by these villagers also alienate them from each other. Focusing on what Sianne Ngai terms “ugly feelings”, this paper discusses the intersections between affect and alienation in the novel by paying attention to its polyphonic structure (3).
Jana Chocholatá
chocholata@ped.muni.cz
Masaryk University
Preservice Teachers’ Views on Their Readiness to Teach Advanced English to Junior High School Students
The conference paper focuses on an increasingly common phenomenon, namely pupils at junior high schools with advanced knowledge of English. Teaching them is for many teachers a challenge, for which they do not feel fully prepared. At the same time, there is a strongly perceived lack of teaching materials for these learners, namely coursebooks, and so the selection of relevant content and the design of content representations becomes the teacher’s full responsibility.
The paper looks into the aspects which the pre-service teachers find challenging especially in terms of planning and which methods of teaching they find most effective for learners whose L1 is Czech, but who thanks to an early exposure to English have a high level of proficiency in all language skills so that they can be viewed as bilingual.
Jan Chovanec
chovanec@phil.muni.cz
Masaryk University
Synthetic Self-presentation in YouTube Reaction Videos
One of the central requirements of communication in split communicative contexts, characteristic of many digital media, is the establishment and maintenance of contact between the interlocutors. Influencers and other producers of digital content need to connect to their followers, employing multiple rapport-enhancing strategies to boost their relatability. Such behaviour is crucial within the context of the ‘attention economy’ (Abidin 2021) that currently permeates much digital content that ultimately serves the purpose of monetising the influencers’ digital existence.
The presentation analyses a set of YouTube reaction videos (RVs) in order to identify some of the ways in which influencers establish, maintain and enhance rapport with their anonymous audiences. The data indicate that the three structural segments of reaction videos employ different strategies of what constitutes ‘synthetic personalization’ (Fairclough 2001): while the intro and the outro segments provide the core spaces for negotiating a joint ingroup identity with the followers, the main video segment operates differently, essentially offering two distinct ways of relating. First, in RVs characterized by simultaneous watching, the co-presence is realized mostly through heightened emotional performances that sustain the focus of the viewers on the content producers (rather than the video watched). Second, in RVs with commentary provided in stopped time or during replays, the format is more complex since the influencers shift between attending to the video and explaining it to the audience.
Such interpersonal quasi-interactions, which draw on multiple semiotic means and rapport-enhancing strategies, are interpreted as a form of synthetic discursive and affective performance that is carried out as a part of the influencers’ self-branding (Chovanec 2024).
References
Abidin, Crystal (2020) Mapping Internet Celebrity on TikTok: Exploring Attention Economies and Visibility Labours. Cultural Science 12 (1).
Chovanec, J. (2024) Performing branded affect in micro-celebrity YouTube reaction videos. In: Blitvich, P. Garcés-Conejos and A. Georgakopoulou (eds.) Influencer Discourse. Affective relations and identities. Amstredam: John Benjamins, 200-226.
Fairclough, Norman (2001) Language and Power. 2nd ed. Essex: Longman.
Madeleine Danova
mdanova@vice-rector.uni-sofia.bg
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski
“Border Gnosis”: The Ethnic Occult in M. G. Vassanji’s The Magic of Saida
The paper offers an analysis of M. G. Vassanji’s novel The Magic of Saida from the perspective of Walter Mignolo’s concept of the “border gnosis”, a concept coined based on Valentin Y. Mudimbe’s concept of “African gnosis” as developed in his The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Since "border gnosis" designates a way of thinking about knowledge conflicts typical of borderlands, be they epistemological, ethical, secular, or religious, the paper connects these ideas to the existence of a particular cultural discourse in twentieth-century North American literature, a discourse I call the ethnic occult. M. G. Vassanji’s novel The Magic of Saida is discussed from the perspective of these two discourses as opening significant gaps in the canonical treatment of works of writers who come from two or three different cultural backgrounds as the Canadian writer of Indian descent who was born in East Africa, M. G. Vassanji.
Celestino Deleyto
cdeleyto@unizar.es
University of Zaragoza
Indiana Jones, Archimedes and the Palimpsest: The Uses of Cinematic Space
An unexpected turn of the plot near the end of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) evokes the importance of space in film theory and analysis, and its relationship to real places and their history. It is as if the film, through its beloved hero in what was announced as his (or at least Harrison Ford’s) last appearance on the screens, were interpellating spectators to ponder on the workings of space in films. This paper explores what an apparently silly, CGI-laden, critically disparaged adventure blockbuster can teach us about the power of cinematic space.
One of the consequences of the “spatial turn” in film studies has been a return to early theories of cinematic realism (Bazin 1971, Kracauer 997) and the intense illusion of reality of the medium. In this paper, recent theories by Mark Shiel (2001), Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (2001), Rhodes and Gorfinkel (2011), Antoine Gaudin (2015) and others are employed as part of a methodological approach consisting in describing mise en scène as an open door to real places and their history.
Using geographer Doreen Massey’s description of space as “a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (2005, 24, 123), I argue that films contain, palimpsest-like, a multiplicity of stories about places that can be accessed through spatial analysis. Dial of Destiny anticipates critical work and, after placing spectators in the island of Sicily, proceeds to lead us to deeper layers of the palimpsest.
Judit Dombi
dombi.judit@pte.hu
University of Pécs
Unveiling Differences in Human and AI-Generated Narratives: Lexical and Stylistic Insights
Studies tend to find that state-of-the-art AI models can produce “human-like” texts (e.g., Rudolph et al., 2023, Sardinha, 2024), with some evidence that human and AI-generated texts differ in certain aspects, for example in terms of lexicogrammatical features (Sardinha, 2024), or referencing via pronouns (AlAfnan & MohdZuki, 2023). Our study was conceived as part of our quest to look for features that set human and AI-generated texts apart. To this end, two datasets of 20 stories each were collected: the first comprises stories written by human participants and the second stories generated by a state-of-the-art AI model prompted to create similar narratives. First, we provide basic quantitative features of the texts: we explore overall length, paragraph number, paragraph length and sentence length. As a second step, a multi-dimensional lexical analysis was conducted, focusing on three key areas: lexical diversity and complexity, stylistic features including emotional tone, and the use of non-literal language such as metaphors and idioms. Results reveal surprising similarities in overall narrative structure and coherence between the two datasets. However, AI-generated texts exhibited greater lexical diversity, characterized by a broader range of vocabulary and a higher frequency of rare words. Despite this, the human-written stories conveyed a richer array of ideas and themes, leveraging more nuanced emotional tones and employing figurative language with greater subtlety. The findings suggest that while AI can mimic surface-level linguistic patterns effectively, it lags behind in producing the depth of meaning and conceptual variety characteristic of human storytelling. This study offers insights into the evolving capabilities of AI in narrative construction and its implications for creative writing and natural language understanding, while adding to our understanding of what features are indicative of human-authored texts.
Katalin Doró
dorokati@lit.u-szeged.hu
University of Szeged
Assessing Student-Written Vs. Generated Texts: Instructor Perceptions and AI Detection Tools
The growing use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) by students has created an urgent need to understand its utilization and detection. Prior research has indicated that both human evaluators and AI detection systems frequently misidentify AI-generated content. Although this topic is becoming increasingly relevant, there is a scarcity of studies focusing on higher education settings. This presentation addresses this research gap by a) assessing the effectiveness of human raters and AI detectors in recognizing student-written versus ChatGPT-generated brief reflective texts and b) identifying the underlying reasons for reviewers' decisions. This mixed-methods study examined short reflective passages from regular assignments completed by fifth-year teacher education students and comparable AI-generated texts. Instructors served as blind reviewers, who were given the task of determining authorship, expressing their confidence levels in their decisions, and explaining the reasons for their judgments. Follow-up interviews with some of the participants aided in understanding the evaluations and instructors' experiences with student writing. Additionally, three commonly available free AI content detection tools were used to evaluate the eight passages. The results indicate that the AI detectors consistently classified student-written texts as 100% human-authored, but misclassified some AI-generated texts as either human or partially human. Instructors demonstrated varying levels of accuracy in their identification and gave diverse language-, editing-, and content-related justifications for their choices. The results could inform future strategies for monitoring students' AI usage in academic contexts.
Markéta Dudová
dudova.marketa@sci.muni.cz
Masaryk University
Gamified Reading: A Library Quest in an ESP Course
Reading has long been a crucial skill for English language teaching (ELT). It supports vocabulary acquisition by allowing learners to see language patterns and vocabulary in context. The importance of reading has grown even further with the rise of 21st-century skills, which emphasize critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. However, traditional reading tasks might feel tedious, as they often fail to reflect the diverse interests of ESP learners (English for Specific Purposes). Gamification, a growing trend in language teaching, offers creative ways to engage learners in reading. This presentation introduces a library game designed for and used in an ESP course for students at the Faculty of Science. The game takes place partly in the university library and partly in the classroom, where students complete tasks based on the books they are assigned to find in the library. This playful approach to reading improves comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, communication skills as well as the ability to analyze and process information. It also encourages reading for pleasure. Consequently, the library game aims to build a habit of reading that strengthens critical and creative thinking — 21st-century skills essential for success in both academic and professional settings.
Radosław Dylewski
(With Bartosz Suchecki)
dradek@amu.edu.pl
Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz Univerisity in Poznań
Is the Modal Preterite Phenomenon Truly an American Phenomenon? A Study Based on the News on the Web Corpus
Greblick (2000: I) identifies the Modal Preterite Phenomenon (MPP) as a feature of colloquial North American English, exemplified by sentences like “I should’a went to Miami when I had the chance.” MPP involves a modal verb (would, could, should, must, might, or occasionally may), followed by an abbreviated form of the auxiliary have (’a or ’ve, pronounced like of), and concluding with a preterite form of the verb instead of the expected past participle. While Greblick describes MPP as distinctly North American, Chatten et al. (2024: 13–14) document its presence in both American and British English, suggesting it may have originated in the United States before spreading globally.
Using the Corpus of News on the Web (NOW), we investigated whether MPP is uniquely American or a broader linguistic phenomenon. Our analysis examined MPP usage patterns, adopting a broader definition that included fully rendered instances of auxiliary have. We analyzed sub-corpora from the United States, Great Britain, and also from Ireland (given the historical transoceanic links).
Surprisingly, the Irish sub-corpus showed the highest normalized frequency of MPP, with 0.84 cases per million words (956 instances in 1.14 billion words). In contrast, the American sub-corpus yielded 0.51 cases per million words (2,890 instances in 5.63 billion words). British English exhibited much lower frequencies – 0.21 cases per million words (451 instances in 2.15 billion words). These findings challenge the notion of MPP as predominantly American, highlighting its prominence in Irish English instead.
References:
Chatten, Alicia, Kimberley Baxter, Erwanne Mas, Jailyn Peña, Guy Tabachnick, Daniel Duncan and Laurel MacKenzie. 2024. “‘I’ve always spoke like this, you see’: preterite-to-participle leveling in American and British Englishes.” <a href="https://www.english-corpora.org/now/">American Speech</a> 99, 1: 3–46.
Greblick III, Anthony J. 2000. The Modal Preterite Phenomenon (MPP) in Colloquial American English: A Diachronic and Synchronic Analysis. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of Southern California [University of Southern California Digital Library].
Corpus of News on the Web (NOW): https://www.english-corpora.org/now/.
Gabriella T. Espák
gespak@unideb.hu
University of Debrecen, Hungary
Pragmatic Australian Studies: Integrating the Marginal
The traditional philological approach to English as a language in its diverse cultural formations has been competing, throughout the past decades, with more pragmatic area studies and postcolonial ethnic studies. Introduced by a few dedicated scholars in the early 1990s as a new discipline, Australian Studies in European tertiary education found administrative placement as an extension of the classic academic field of literature—world literature, comparative literature, foreign languages and cultures, new literatures/cultures—hence this study highlights the literary aspect of an otherwise multidisciplinary field in English. “Australian literature has been constitutive, rather than merely reflective, of the history of social relations in Australia, and [...] this constitutive role is perhaps most visible in the discourse it has produced, and continues to produce, about race, both within the national context and beyond,” observes Graham Huggan in his 2007 survey of Australian literature, establishing postcolonialism, race and transnationalism as contemporary keywords that literary and cultural studies revolve around (Australian Literature, Oxford UP, vi). Sharing Huggan’s understanding of the historical reality of literature and following the legacy of the pragmatism of a series of Australian Studies conferences since 1992, I present a research-led approach to Australian culture that is teaching-oriented at the same time. I also propose literary nationalism as an adjustable masternarrative for a broad spectrum of literature related to multiple aspects of Australian society. This approach is both a manifestation of and a reflection on the unceasing challenge to keep Australian Studies in the curriculum.
Keywords: Australian Studies, curriculum development, literary nationalism
Pavlína Flajšarová
pavlina.flajsarova@upol.cz
Palacky University
Utopian Visions and Harsh Realities: The Garden City Movement in Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier
The Garden City Movement, initiated by Ebenezer Howard in the late 19th century, aimed to create self-sufficient urban communities surrounded by greenbelts. In George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, this movement's ideals contrast sharply with the grim realities of industrial towns in northern England during the 1930s. This paper proposes to explore how Orwell's depiction of working-class life serves as a critique of the Garden City Movement's utopian vision. Orwell's narrative reveals the harsh conditions faced by the proletariat, illustrating a world marred by poverty, inadequate housing, and social injustice. His firsthand observations of miners and their families expose the limitations of idealistic urban planning, suggesting that such movements often overlook the lived experiences of marginalized communities. For instance, Orwell's vivid descriptions of squalid living conditions challenge the notion that planned communities can solve systemic issues like class disparity and economic exploitation. This analysis will draw on Orwell's contrasting perspectives: while he acknowledges the potential benefits of reformist movements like the Garden City Movement, he ultimately argues that they fail to address the underlying socio-economic structures perpetuating inequality. By examining Orwell's work through this lens, we can better understand the complexities of urban development and its implications for social justice in contemporary society.
András Fodor
fod.andras@gmail.com
Independent
The Laughter of the Gothic Goof: an Analysis of the Role of Community in Atlanta’s “The Goof Who Sat by the Door”
Donald Glover’s series Atlanta provides an in-depth analysis of contemporary hip-hop, African American culture and life in Atlanta through the perspectives of three black men and one black woman. The show develops a credo to specifically present subjects such as social and economic issues, racial topics, relationships, poverty, and parenthood. The focus of this paper is to scrutinise the show’s episode, “The Goof Who Sat by the Door”. It tells an alternative, haunted tale about the creation of A Goofy Movie (1995). The viewpoint suggests a gothic visitation of the oppressed, concealed as a communal story. The episode narrates the story of Thomas “Tom” Washington, a young, aspiring, African American animator, who becomes the CEO of Disney at the beginning of the 1990s. In the episode, the reinterpretation of the framework provides Glover with the tools to investigate the African American community in the 1990s and the present. It offers to draw parallels between the history of the African American community and the story of A Goofy Movie. The community the episode builds on is packed with unveiled issues, however, all of them remain oppressed and only expressed through the character of Goofy as an epitome, who is, according to Art Babbitt, a “composite of an everlasting optimist, a gullible Good Samaritan, a half-wit, a shiftless, good-natured colored boy, and a hick”. My paper focuses on the connections of the African American gothic aspect of the episode with the concept of community in the context of majority-minority opposition.
Kenneth Froehling
froehlin@vutbr.cz
Brno University of Technology
The Canadian Cultural Debate over Poutine
In Canada there is a tendency, especially among its politicians, journalists and academics, to find some cultural and political controversy in the country to argue and write about, and any issue involving Quebec and the rest of Canada often provides readily available fodder, even if it comes in form of a food recipe called poutine. This greasy spoon delicacy of French fries, white curd cheese and brown gravy, which originated in rural Quebec in the 1960s, has risen to become the top Canadian cultural and food icon since the 2010s, and some Quebecois nationalists are arguing that the rest of Canada has culturally appropriated a Quebecois national food. But did they?
Therefore, my paper will examine the origins of poutine in Quebec and assess whether it really should be considered a traditional Quebecois dish in the real sense, like tourtière and Pâté Chinois are. Then, I will discuss how poutine spread to the rest of Canada, including being changed and adapted by different Canadian groups, and the way it quickly rose to being one of Canada's top delicacies worldwide. I will also draw from my personal experience in savouring and researching poutine here.
Michelle Gadpaille
mgadpaille@gmail.com
Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor
Decoding Ducks: Deep Rhetoric in Kate Beaton’s Memoir of the Oil Sands
Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022) contains a page that shows ducks flying. The ducks are grouped gracefully against a white background. The portions of the memoir that reference the ducks (specifically their gruesome deaths) occupy less than 20 pages in a 430-page novel. Ducks, however, populate the deep rhetorical structure of the text, becoming a meta-pictorial form of hypostasis and earning their privileged place in the title. The paper will explore the linguistic structures that recurrently, though subliminally, connect ducks to human experience through the readers’ memory of connotative language. The web of connotations persists beneath the memoir’s chronicling of workplace harassment and forms part of the dialogic effect of its visually monochrome panels.
Alexandra Ganser
alexandra.ganser@univie.ac.at
University of Vienna
Sentimental Journeys? Astronaut Mothers on Screen
Since the so-called Sputnik shock and the beginning of the Space Race in 1957, in the context of the Cold War, US developments in space technology have been heavily co-constructed by popular culture, with Hollywood as a main site of this astrofuturist construction work. Hollywood's factory of dreams appears as a privileged site to construct and circulate transnationally a deeply nationalist project, which comes laden with a gendered legacy of frontierism in which men move and women follow. Glimpsing at a few examples from the second space age, I am asking how female figures on screen have been mobilized as followers in colonial and masculinist territorialization attempts. From the vantage point of studying gendered im/mobilities, I investigate how astrofuturist film and television has functioned as an imaginary that presents women as both mobile and immobile at the same time in various ways. I examine how gendered ideas of im/mobility are articulated in Hollywood astrofuturisms, in which environmental downfall, anti-Black violence, and an invigorated white supremacism form a new discursive environment for imagining America's relation to outer space.
Ecological crisis has led to Science Fiction hits envisioning America leading an apocalyptic interplanetary exo-dus (most famously perhaps Christopher Nolan's blockbuster Interstellar, 2014); #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo have fostered the symbolic inclusion of African American women in outer space patriotism in Hidden Figures (2016). I read these representations as sites in which dominant ideas of mobility, heavily gendered and racialized, are projected onto future outer space, harking back to the past of New World conquest and the Western frontier.
Ines Glanznig
glanznigi80@univie.ac.at
University of Vienna
Banning Books on “Sexual Grounds”: The Problem with Language, Words, Meaning, and US Law,
In the USA, books targeted for censorship surged 65% from 2022 to 2023, the highest number in 20 years.1 In public libraries, that number increased by 92%.2 The ten most challenged and banned books of 2023 were all challenged on sexual grounds, although none of them were published under the ‘erotica’ or ‘pornography’ helm.3
Pornography and erotica are provocative and thrilling and often about sexual and social power over others.4 One could argue a case for pornography and erotica to be banned, and many people have over the years, but why is non-erotic literature suddenly challenged on sexual grounds? This new trend of banning non-sexual books on sexual grounds raises critical questions about how ambiguous language, moral judgments, and legal interpretations intersect to drive contemporary censorship. In this talk, I delve into the complexities surrounding the censorship of sexual content in literature, analyzing the interplay of language, words, meanings, and US law. I discuss the US legal system's approach towards pornography and obscenity, highlighting the dichotomy of formalist and functionalist logics that shape the interpretation of the law. By examining these various dimensions, I seek to provide a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted issues surrounding book censorship on sexual grounds and the implications for freedom of expression.
I argue for a legal paradigm that separates subjective moral judgments from democratic rights, safeguarding intellectual freedom and diverse voices in literature. By addressing definitional ambiguities and embracing empirical insights, we can advance equitable, transparent approaches to book censorship, ensuring that legal principles align with democratic values and artistic expression.
[1] Censorship by Numbers, American Library Association, <https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/by-the-numbers>
[2] “Book Ban Data.” Banned and Challenged Books, Americal Library Association, 2024. <https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data>
[3] “Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023.” Banned and Challenged Books, American Library association, 2024. <https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10>
[4] Glanznig, Ines. “Gendered Representational Strategies in Erotic Literature and Screen Adaptations: Marquis De Sade and Pauline Réage.” 2022, <https://unbc.arcabc.ca/islandora/object/unbc%3A59311>
Szonja Greilinger
szonja.greilinger@gmail.com
Independent
Translating Contemporary Canadian Fiction: Climate Issues in Carleigh Baker’s Short Story Collection Last Woman (2024)
Carleigh Baker is a contemporary Canadian author of Cree-Métis and Icelandic background. Her debut short story collection Bad Endings (2017, Anvil Press) won the City of Vancouver Book Award and it was also a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Emerging Indigenous Voices Award for fiction. I translated her short story “Last Woman” as my final exam translation to complete the Postgraduate Specialist Training in Translation Studies at Károli Gáspár University in 2023. Last Woman (2024) is a collection of fifteen short stories where the characters, the settings and the events create an eerie atmosphere with a pinch of irony, humor and unexpected wisdom. Carleigh Baker is committed to the protection of the environment and to raising awareness in her readers about climate change and climate crisis; how natural disasters affect our lives and how consumer society destroys nature. Canada has been an advocate for the protection of the environment but it has also been exploiting its natural resources for a long time. Baker’s honest, thought-provoking and sensitive voice and unique story-telling should be heard in translations as well . It may bring science, nature and literature closer not only to adults but to the younger generations as well.
Eliseo Guardado Salguero
eliseo.guardadosalguero@smail.unipo.sk
University of Prešov
Four Musico-literary Terms for Analyzing Narratologically Musical Novels: The Case of Four Metal Novels
As an extra theoretical product taken out of my dissertation work entitled The Metal Novel in Contemporary Fiction, four musico-literary terms, analogous in both literary and musical discourses, are both defined and proposed in this article. Such terms are , bar, scale, and rhythm. For that reason, such terms are applied in musico-literary narratology to offer another alternative to analyzing musico-literary works such as musical novels. Furthermore, some examples from four musical novels (metal, contemporary American novels to be more precise) are analyzed narratologically. Such metal novels are the three Death Metal Epic novels: I: The Inverted Katabasis (2013), II: Goat Song Sacrifice (2017) and III: Sinister Synthesizer (2022) by Dean Swinford, and The Armageddon Chord (2019) by Jeremy Wagner. The results out of these analyses evince that such musico-literary terms, despite their different discourse, can be harmonically used for analyzing narratologically musical works such as musical novels, which can contribute theoretically to the musico-literary research of not only metal novels but also musical novels such as pop-music or rap novels, in my opinion.
Christoph Haase
christoph.haase@ujep.cz
Purkyně University, Ústí nad Labem
Contrastive Pitch Movement in Native and Non-native Speech. A Comparison of Intonation Patterns
This contribution discusses the role of intonation patterns as contrastive devices in discourse from the perspective of the native speaker of English (NS) as adopted by non-native speakers (NNS) with Czech as a mother tongue. Typological considerations lead to predictions of transfer phenomena of these patterns for NNS as interpreted as auditory gestures (cf. PAM, Best 2021) which lead to a variety of effects like narrower frequency bands, lower F0 etc. Data set is represented by NS and NNS recordings obtained from a number of NS as control group and a larger number of NNS which are spectrographically analyzed, contour plots compared and statistically evaluated. A comparison of the predictions with the findings offers novel insights into NNS-accented speech of Czech learners and enables suggestions for more formalized teaching of English intonation patterns.
Yamina Hafian
yaminahafian01@gmail.com
University of Pécs, Hungary
Beyond Memory in Octavia Butler's Works
Octavia Butler is a top writer among sci-fi people whose books think on big human ideas. Memory is one of the weird powers she shows among her characters. In Butler’s books, memory and prediction twist, where folks use their mind of sadness to beat bad acts. The knowing of past and self is key in making your self, and Butler showed memory as a weight in her books. This essay will check the players’ parts and their own ways of handling things. For the folks in "Kindred", remembering is key towards getting their spots and choosing how to act next. For Dana’s first hop back in time, she drops from her normal life among the risk of the historical spot where her memories let her see how the power runs and the shape of the society. When she is saving a kid, she is unaware that her own memory gives her the skill, even amid danger (Butler 13). Being aware of history lets her not just outlive the threat but to see the broad view and what her actions suggest, deciding how they can change what comes next. Resilience amid systemic oppression strength is a usual trait shown by people in Butler’s book and story. The key players of book and story show strength inside the ways they change toward controlling forces that affect them. Inside book’s, Dana’s survival trick includes avoiding Rufus at first, but each time she’s shoved back toward 1823, she must take her family story and the idea that being “the only black woman on the plantation” has some duties and effects (Manis 5). Lauren’s plan in story is different; her changing includes building a belief system among her crew and family. All places include poor people changing to controlling forces, yet there’s a difference in the characters’ tricks as they meet similar ideas of control. Trauma's Influence on Identity Formation Personal pain plays a big part inside self-creation and growth of ties between folks and other folks in the tales of Octavia E. Butler. For one, Dana’s time-traveling trips to the Antebellum South show her the terrors of slavery, thus affecting her bond with her mate, Kevin, as they try to figure out their parts in the odd atmosphere (3). Past pain is clear inside people’s self, making them familiar with past suffering. Through the “Parable of the Sower,” Butler shows past pain as a wellspring of grit inside the people, like Lauren, who has “hyper empathy” and wants to build a new group. The responses of the people toward sore spots reveal their adjustment toward the spots.
Barbora Hamplová
barbora.hamplova@fpf.slu.cz
Silesian University in Opava
Bridging Generational Gaps: Navigating the Dynamics of Intergenerational Communication in Contemporary Society
Effective communication is critical in our daily interactions, enabling individuals to comprehend and evaluate their actions within diverse contexts. This paper explores the impact of evolving language—particularly the emergence of new slang and established expressions unique to specific generational cohorts—on intercultural communication. The integration of these terms into everyday discourse can create barriers for those unfamiliar with them, leading to potential misunderstandings between generations created by for e.g.: Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha. This phenomenon poses significant challenges as the rapid evolution of language within social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok fosters a dynamic yet complex communicative landscape. The research uses data from the corpus News on the Web (NOW) to analyze trends in intergenerational communication, assessing the frequency of use and context of newly coined terms and already established phrases over recent years. By investigating these trends, the paper highlights the necessity for greater awareness and understanding of contemporary language, emphasizing their role in fostering effective communication across generational divides.
Steve Hardy
hardy@phil.muni.cz
Masaryk University
Border Countries: Developing Psychogeographies
Partly focusing on two novels, by Iain Sinclair and Raymond Williams, respectively, each set primarily in Welsh side of the border country between England and Wales, this paper will seek to broaden and develop existing notions of psychogeography, linking it to related developments in chorology, human geography, and the sociology of globalism, on the one hand, and aspects of American and Australian spatial poetics, on the other.
Gabriella Hartvig
hartvig.gabriella@pte.hu
University of Pécs
“By the Authoress of”: Attributions of Authorship in the Works of Female Writers in the Late Eighteenth Century
The history of authorial attribution in late eighteenth-century novels is particularly compelling, especially in works by female writers who often had various reasons for concealing their identities. We may think of Frances Burney, who sent her manuscript of Evelina to the publisher Lowndes through her brother Charles, while Clara Reeve, following Horace Walpole’s precedent, chose to display her name on the title page of The Old English Baron to clarify that her work was not a translation of an old manuscript, as was suggested in the previous edition. Another marketing strategy employed by publishers was to link the newly published work to the author’s previous novels using formulas such as “by the authoress of” without explicitly revealing her name. Notable examples of this practice include Frances Burney’s Harcourt, a sentimental novel (1780), Clara Reeve’s The Progress of the Romance (1785), or Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) and The Romance of the Forest (1792). This paper will explore how publishers handled the delicate matter of authorship in the advertising and publication of works by female novelists in the final two decades of the eighteenth century.
Jaromír Haupt
Jaromir.Haupt@tul.cz
Technical University of Liberec
Having Students Have Texts Generated: Lessons Learnt from an Assignment in Text Linguistics
This study analyzes the outcomes of students’ interaction with generative AI as part of an assignment within a course on text linguistics. The students’ task was to have a LLM-based chatbot produce a text with parameters of their own choice. The parameters were to be based on any of the approaches/topics covered in the course, and students had to write a report of their experiment.
An exploratory analysis of the collection of two years’ worth of submissions by students (ca 60 essays) yielded a broad collection of observations. Perhaps the most striking one was a lack of explicitness and how clearly the assignment demonstrated it for students: the descriptions of procedures often fell short of warranting replicability; the instructions given to chatbots were underspecified, requiring more detailed input. The submissions also betray the ways in which students understand the approaches covered in class, suggesting they often view them as canonical and well-established. In addition, there are a number of observations concerning the chatbots themselves, and also on how self-explanatory the terms in the text-linguistic approaches are for both students and chatbots.
The practical implications discussed range across several disciplines. They include using communication with chatbots and experimenting to increase students’ sensitivity to explicitness and background assumptions, which are skills relevant in both academic writing and in practical teaching to give instructions. For a linguist, the data raise the question of the potential role of experimenting as a method in discourse analysis.
Dita Hochmanová
178804@mail.muni.cz
Masaryk University
Ladies in Distress: Female Agency and Peril in the Early Fiction of Eliza Haywood
Widely celebrated for her experimental prose, Eliza Haywood (1693–1756) was a major contributor to the development of the novel as a genre and one of the best-selling writers of her time. In contrast to the moral tone of her later works, Haywood’s early prose from the 1720s is often regarded as scandalous and has been highlighted by researchers like Kathleen Lubey and Mary Beth Harris for its openness about female sexuality and its challenge to established ideas of gender roles. Apart from daring thematic choices, her amatory fiction expresses Haywood’s objections through means that would later become inadmissible.
This contribution examines Haywood’s early novels from the perspective of affect theory and explores the rhetorical strategies she uses to engage her audience. By analyzing the imagery and atmosphere of distress in her novel Idealia (1723), the paper demonstrates that, beyond encouraging readers to empathize with her wretched heroines, Haywood also employs a rhetoric of outrage. Through this approach, she offers an alternative fantasy of female revenge, blending it with the more popular sentimental narratives of reconciliation in marriage and the tragic death of wronged innocence.
Annamária Hódosy
hodosy.annamaria@gmail.com
Visual Culture and Literary Theory Department, The University of Szeged, Hungary
Dog-keeping as a Technology of Bio-power in Jack London’s Dog Novels
The Anthropocene discourse calls for a change in our relationship to nonhuman beings, and this also affects our relationship to our companion animals. Companion animals, and dogs in particular, are generally treated by animal studies as a particular category of beings to which we have a radically different relationship than to other animals - either because we approach them with anthropomorphic projections for narcissistic reasons (Berger) or because they live in a special symbiotic relationship with humans (Csányi). Contrary to the usual characterisation, the presentation argues that our relationship with dogs is indeed a typical example of our problematic relationship with the non-human world. The evolution of dog ownership seems to be the ecological equivalent of the the way the strategies of power changed in the history of the West according to the Foucauldian analysis. From this point of view keeping companion animals is just a technologically perfected way of dominating the non-human world, so it cannot be the starting point or the model for a desanthropocentric opening towards the non-human world as it will be demonstrated mainly through the analysis of Jack London’s Michael, brother of Jerry.
Karin Hoepker
karin.hoepker@fau.de
FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
Love and the Algorithm - Romance Fiction in the Digital Age
My paper investigates the way in which literature, film, and TV-series engage with the subject of romance and ‘true love’ in the digital age. In my proposed paper I will focus on texts that test notions of human social life by reimagining the foundations of familiarity intimacy, and romantic love at a moment in time that opens up new spaces of technological possibility.
Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s work on the semantics of love as well as on a rich cultural field of contemporary novels and TV-series (such as AMC’s anthology series Soulmate or Netflix’s The One, alongside novels such as The Love Algorithm, The One, The Soulmate Equation) I discuss whether and to what extent our narratives of love and intimacy are shifting in their foundational assumptions as well as their generic patterns of narrative encoding. Engaging with topics of online dating, selective algorithms, and matchmaking, these texts explore how digital technology and economization impact human intimacy and interrelations. They illustrate how fantasies of technological (self-)optimization and control come sharply into conflict with our historically more aleatory understanding of romance and choice of partners. Romance fiction, which is perhaps next to fantasy both the best-selling and most critically disparaged genre, performs, as I will argue, important cultural work – it addresses a gap that is neither strictly private nor a mere guilty pleasure but that complements current debates on civic society and the public sphere.
Jakob Horsch
jakob.horsch@phil.muni.cz
Masaryk University and Slovak Academy of Sciences
Constructions, Non-modularity and Networks: Modeling Language with Construction Grammar
Construction Grammar (CxG) is an innovative approach to language that has gained significant popularity in the Anglosphere over the last decades. A cognitive approach to language, it assumes that the basic units of linguistic analysis are constructions: arbitrary and conventional form-meaning pairings, reminiscent of Saussure’s linguistic sign, but at all levels of linguistic analysis. It is thus a theory that, in contrast to words-and-rules approaches, does not assume a “clear-cut division of lexicon and syntax” (Hoffmann and Trousdale 2011: 2) and, in fact, “explicitly rejects the [modular] classic lexicon-syntax distinction” of generative grammar (Hoffmann 2019: 189). Furthermore, it assumes that constructions are stored in “mental constructional networks” (Hoffmann 2017: 349, cf. also Croft and Cruse 2004: 262-265; Goldberg 2006: 215; Diessel 2015; Hoffmann 2019: 15). These complex and elaborate networks, which are characterized by “massive redundancy and vastly rich detail” (Traugott and Trousdale 2013: 53), can be used to model linguistic knowledge, which in its totality constitutes the “construct-i-con” (Jurafsky 1992: 302; Goldberg 2003: 219), that is, the “mental grammar” of speakers (Hoffmann and Trousdale 2013: 3). While there is a large body of research that has provided evidence in support of its tenets, CxG remains unknown to many colleagues outside the Anglosphere, including Czechia and Slovakia (Horsch 2024). In this paper, I will therefore lay out and discuss the basic tenets of CxG, illustrated with examples from English and Slovak. I will also touch upon the fundamental differences between CxG and traditional approaches to language, particularly Mainstream Generative Grammar.
Antony Hoyte-West
antony.hoyte.west@gmail.com
Independent scholar, United Kingdom
Colonial Identity in School Textbooks in the British West Indies: A Case Study of the West Indian Histories Series
Dispersed across the vast Caribbean Sea, for much of the twentieth century the British West Indies consisted of eight colonies: the islands of The Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Windward Islands, and the Leeward Islands, as well as the mainland possessions of British Guiana and British Honduras. With markedly different ethnic, sociocultural, and religious compositions, each colony was shaped by a panoply of economic, social, and geographical factors, including the lasting imprint of the slave trade and – at different points in history – the desire of various European powers to dominate and control the different territories. With education representing a key vehicle of promoting British colonial identity and cohesion in these diverse lands located far away from the ‘mother country’, this presentation aims to explore how this identity is depicted in a well-known series of colonial-era school textbooks. First published in 1936 and designed for pupils in the British West Indies, Edward W. Daniels’s three-volume series of West Indian Histories were commonplace in the late colonial and the early independence period. Accordingly, utilising a postcolonial perspective and applying a case study approach, the aim of this contribution is to examine how dominant narratives were presented in the series, as well as how selected past events were portrayed and contextualised.
Kristýna Janská
kr.janska@gmail.com
Charles University
Elizabeth Boyd and the Conservative Counterpoint: Women’s Writing in the Shadow of Eliza Haywood
This paper explores the work of Elizabeth Boyd, a lesser-known eighteenth-century author, in relation to the more prominent voices of Eliza Haywood and Delarivier Manley. Boyd’s novel, The Female Page (1732), engages with the popular genre of masquerade romance, a literary form that allowed for explorations of gender roles, disguise, and power dynamics. In contrast to Haywood’s libertine themes in Fantomina (1725), Boyd presents a more conservative narrative, emphasizing societal order and traditional relationships. Set within the political and cultural landscape of early eighteenth-century Britain, The Female Page offers a fascinating reflection of contemporary political events and allegiances, particularly aligning with Whig ideals. Although Elizabeth Boyd has never become a canonical figure, this paper examines how her work contributes a significant perspective to the genre of masquerade romance, offering insight into the cultural and political debates of her time. Specifically, the paper will analyze Boyd’s response to Haywood’s Fantomina, highlighting the contrasting views on gender and morality. Through a close reading of Boyd’s novel and poetry, this presentation sheds light on her engagement with the tensions between radical and conservative ideas in women’s writing during this period.
Roslyn Joy Irving
rirving@uni-mainz.de
Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany
Prospects in Poetry and Prose of the Eighteenth Century
John Denham is credited with establishing prospect as a poetic form in Coopers Hill (1642/55), in which the lyrical subject “surveys” the landscape towards Windsor and the “wanton valleys” of the Thames (lines 159-60, 1655 version). Scholarly discourse on Denham’s work and other poems employing the view from a height to structure loco-descriptive verse into the eighteenth century, such as Alexander Pope’s Windsor-Forest (1713), John Dyer’s Grongar Hill (1726), and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Traveller (1764), demonstrate the significance of the form and the contestations of observation in this period. However, rather less attention has been paid to how the view from a height works in both poetry and prose. This paper argues for a consideration of prospect in prose writing of the eighteenth century, conditioned by a similar concern with physical space, futurity and the ideas of nation. By closely reading views from a height in novels, travelogues and poetry, this paper contributes to ongoing discussions on genre in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, it develops existing scholarship on loco-descriptive poetry from Ingrid Horrocks, Sam Hushagen, John Wilson Foster, and Michael Leslie, among others, by examining their arguments in conversation with prose contexts in which prospect takes on a familiar yet diffused shape.
Eva Juhasová
evajuhasova@mail.muni.cz
Masaryk university
Refusing a Proposal: An Act of Courage or Cowardice?
In 1802, a 27-year-old Jane Austen accepted an offer of marriage from Harry Bigg-Wither, only to refuse him the following morning: an act for which she is mostly praised by her devoted readers. But was it a brave act of an independent mind, or was she rather afraid of what married life could bring her or take away from her?
Possibly, it is not without interest, that all of Austen’s main heroines refuse a marriage proposal in a certain point of the story. The aim of this paper is not only to contextualize Austen’s experience with her characters, but mostly to provide reasons for the refusals. It analyzes the thought process and the situation of Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Morland, Marianne Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse, Fanny Price, and Anne Elliot. The paper sets as its goal to explain why some of the heroines are being applauded by both the readers and other characters in the book for refusing the man, and for being strong-minded, free and independent, while other heroines are despised for the same act, and are considered stubborn, weak or even cowardly. The paper, of course, takes into consideration the practices of Regency society, a woman’s position in it, and predominantly, her financial situation, because these are the key factors that young women had to face when accepting or refusing a proposal of marriage.
Therefore, this paper will investigate whether the refusals of the heroines in Austen’s novels were acts of cowardice or courage, and whether through her characters Austen portrayed her own dreams or regrets of her own “what if”.
Tomáš Kačer
kacer@phil.muni.cz
Masaryk University
Technology and/of Tragedy in Don DeLillo’s Plays
Don DeLillo is a celebrated novelist and an author of several plays for the theater. His dramatic oeuvre has become a center of focus recently (for example, Rey 2023). The topics of his plays often overlap with his focus in the novels. He is a sharp analyst (and critic) of the post-modern condition in the American post-industrial, consumerist society, which has been dominated by visual images as labels. An inability of his protagonists to achieve firm grounds in the complexities of manipulations and assumed identities is a common denominator for his stories. With references to various postmodernist critics (McLuhan, Postman, and others) and a view of the development in the post-COVID world of stay-at-home economy, VOD cultural platforms, and social media identity practices, the paper will investigate DeLillo’s plays such as Valparaiso (1999) in order to see them as tragedies of technological tales.
Simona Kalová
(With Linda Nepivodová)
kalova@phil.muni.cz
Masaryk University
Exams Then and Now
This paper examines the assessment practices employed in a specific university setting in the Czech Republic, tracing developments since the introduction of computer-based language testing at our department in 2003. Several research studies conducted at our department have explored different modes of test administration, investigating student results, perceptions and preferences. The most recent study delves into potential score differences resulting from supervised and non-supervised test administration during and post-COVID times, raising ethical and academic integrity questions. Additionally, our oral proficiency exams have undergone changes in delivery format in recent years, with the results and student attitudes yet to be presented. Some of these changes were spontaneous, while others were necessitated, for instance, by the impact of COVID-19. In this paper, we aim to highlight the main findings of the aforementioned studies, involving over 800 participants, and based on these results, we seek to outline potential future directions for language assessment in our context.
Janka Kascakova
janka.kascakova@ku.sk
Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia; Palacký University in Olomouc, the Czech Republic
On His Knees: The Symbolical Ending of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South in the Novel and Onscreen
The scholarly discussion concerning the ending of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 North and South usually revolves around Charles Dickens’ editorial practices in the magazine Household Words where the novel was first published in serialized form, and Gaskell’s frustration with them and, what she perceived as, forced acceleration of the conclusion. As a result of this well-known disagreement, many readers too see the ending as unsatisfactory and abrupt. This paper, however, looks at the finale from a different point of view and argues that it is actually the perfect symbolical conclusion of Margaret Hale and John Thornton’s story as informed by Gaskell’s religious persuasion and background. It will also explore how this symbolism was translated by the filmmakers to our contemporary times and the demands of modern audiences in the massively successful 2004 BBC adaptation of the novel into a four-episode miniseries, starring Daniela Denby-Ashe and Richard Armitage.
Barbora Kašpárková
b.kasparkova@ped.muni.cz
Masaryk University
“There’s no place like home”: Ti West’s Pearl as a Hollywood Pastiche
This paper examines Ti West’s 2022 horror movie Pearl and argues that its unsettling dissonance between the content and form aligns more with a postmodern “la mode retro” pastiche of Golden Age Hollywood than with a parody of classic movies such as The Wizard of Oz (1939) and movies from Disney productions. The central character, Pearl (Mia Goth), appears as a simulacrum of Dorothy, who turns into a deranged “Baby Jane” due to various external and internal factors. To evoke the aesthetics of nostalgic cinema, West uses Technicolor-inspired visuals, but beneath the vivid colors, unexpected in the horror genre, a nightmarish psychological horror steadily unfolds. This to be said, the colorful fantasy slowly crumbles when Pearl, the epitome of innocence and psychopathy, realizes she will not become a star.
By using pastiche, West creates an uncanny blend of the familiar and the disturbing. The cozy setting of a Texas farm in 1918 contrasts sharplyt with the “pet” alligator in a nearby pond, but also with the Great War and the Spanish influenza pandemic.
Although the pastiche pays homage to Technicolor films from the 1930s and 40s, it is also satirical. Pearl’s isolation and unfulfilled dreams set in motion gory killings reminiscent of classic slasher horror films. In addition, the movie critiques the rigid beauty standards in society sustained by Hollywood and its harmful impact on aspiring women, illustrated by the line: “We are looking for someone blond and younger.”
Victor Kennedy
victor.kennedy@guest.um.si
University of Maribor
The Iconography of Flannel Shirts in Canadian Popular Culture
This presentation will explore the symbolism of plaid flannel shirts in Canadian culture. Historically, plaid flannel shirts have been a symbol of working-class identity across North America, most often associated with settlers from Scotland who brought the plaid with them from their homeland, but it has a much longer and more widespread history. Nationalism is often expressed in national dress, and Canada has its own distinct version of symbolism in clothing. For example, poet Don McKay’s “Waking at the Mouth of the Willow River” associates flannel shirts with the Canadian wilderness; Pierre Berton recounts the role of plain flannel shirts in the history of the Klondike Gold Rush; in the sphere of popular music, the plaid flannel shirt is the trademark stage outfit of Canadian rock star Neil Young, who throughout his career has worn it to remind fans and viewers of his Canadian identity. It has also been a subject of parody by comic satirists including Monty Python (“The Lumberjack Song”), SCTV (Bob and Doug McKenzie), and The Red Green Show, who portray its wearers as dimwitted rustic bumpkins, but, ironically, such parodies have only reinforced the status of the flannel shirt as a symbol of real, individualist, independent Canadian identity.
Anna Kérchy
akerchy@gmail.com
University of Szeged
Women Walking with/as Animals: Barrett-Browning, Woolf, and Their Wanderings/Wonderings with Canine Companions
Human walkers have been metaphorically associated with animals in seminal essays about flânerie: Baudelaire observed the flâneur in his natural habitat of Haussmann’s newly redesigned Parisian cityspace to claim that “the crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish,” Walter Benjamin pictured the man of the street with a turtle on a leash dictating the tempo of his pace in the arcades, while for Virginia Woolf the flâneur’s detachment from the crowd turned him into a “central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye”. I aim to explore the philosophical, aesthetic, political implications of walking with/as animals through the example of Victorian women’s urban dog-walking and more specifically Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s (dog)walking experiences as described in her poems, letters, and her retrospective de/mythologisation as documented in Flush, a fictional biography of Barrett-Browning’s cocker spaniel authored by Virginia Woolf. Since Barrett-Browning for most of her life suffered from chronic illness that restricted her spatial mobility, she was a woman walker with a disability for whom walking provided a rare opportunity for a brief liberation from the claustrophobic confinement of the paternally supervised sickbed, a chance to experience ephemeral glimpses, fleeting sensations of the intensity of enworlded being, as well as an opportunity for melancholic self-contemplation (as recorded in her poem, „A Sea-side walk”). Barrett-Browning’s private history of walking is intricately intertwined with her experience of walking her dog, an emblem of the freedom of movement in her poetry: she shares with her spaniel the indoor armchair flânerie in Wimpole street mansion, their rare London walks are risky endeavours because of her fragile health and the menace of dognappers, while after the elopement with poet Robert Browning woman and animal are united by the sensorially stimulating touristic exploration of Italian streets. In Woolf’s biofiction, the dog becomes an alterego of the poetess, and an animated emblem of the feminist demand of the freedom of movement: the sensual exploration of the cityspace rich in corporeal, fleshly delights predominated by olfactory sense impressions described in an animal stream-of-consciousness clearly differs from the flaneur’s detached, distanced spatial observations. Woolf’s écriture/promenade féminine traces a transspecies aesthetics of walking the city, and also allows two generations of women writers (Barrett-Browning and Woolf) to cross paths in a peripatetic narrative.
Vera Kérchy
kerchyv@gmail.com
University of Szeged
Toxic Mothers and Their ‘Scapegoats’
The topic of my paper is the topos of a triangular relationship including an abusive mother, a mentally terrorized child, and an ‘innocent’ animal. The killing of the animal in Patricia Highsmith's short story The Terrapin (1962) or in the film Hatching (Pahanhautoja. Hanna Bergholm, 2022), can be interpreted as the extreme reflection of the child's suffering, while the child-animal relationship that unfolds before this profane redemption can be read as a demonstration of an alternative relationship to the power oppression, an open, accepting attitude towards the ‘other’. In the example of The Terrapin and the Hatching, the compassion for (even identification with) the non-human subordinate, and then the traumatic witness of its destruction, produces a radical change in the child. The rebellion triggered by standing up for the helpless ‘other’ unleashes forces that shift the blocked position of subject formation (of being held in childhood) from the Imaginary to the Real, and thus lead to the disintegration of identity. In addition to the psychodynamic study of the different attitudes toward the ‘other’, I will also explore the issue from the view of the Anthropocene, asking what if we approach these stories not as stories in which the animal is a projection, an anthropomothized substitute of the child, but as stories that show how animals see us humans as beings with excessive violence, “natural unruliness” (Kant). What if what we see in the eyes of a frightened animal is nothing but “our own monstrosity” (Žižek)?
Stanislav Kolář
stanislav.kolar@osu.cz
University of Ostrava
What We Talk About When We Talk About Jewish Identity: Nathan Englander’s Short Fiction
Nathan Englander (b. 1970) stands as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Jewish American literature. This paper explores how Englander depicts modern Jewish identity in a post-Holocaust world, focusing on stories from his debut collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999), and his later collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2012), whose title pays homage to the influence of Raymond Carver. Central to Englander’s work is the exploration of Jewish identity, a theme that permeates his stories across diverse settings, including America, Europe, and Israel, where he spent part of his life. His stories reflect the unique aspects of Jewish life in each region, highlighting tensions between traditional Orthodox values and the realities faced by highly assimilated Jews.
This paper delves into Englander’s search for authenticity in Jewish identity, examining his attempts to identify its core constituents. While some of his stories echo Holocaust themes, Englander critically resists oversimplified or reductive approaches to this historical tragedy, challenging the notion of the Holocaust as the sole formative element of identity for many American Jews. Special attention is given to stories set in Israel, where the tense Israeli-Palestinian relations cast an existential mood over his work. In light of persistent conflicts in today’s Israel, themes in Englander’s fiction—including his depictions of anti-Semitism escalating into violence—remain strikingly topical, despite the fact that some stories were written over two decades ago.
Klára Kolinská
klarakolinskak@seznam.cz
Jan Evangelista Purkyně University Ústí nad Labem
“A Whale of a Tale”: Environ-Mental Riskscapes in Robert Chafe’s Between Breaths
Since the extraordinary all-American success of Come from Away, the feel-good musical from Newfoundland, the history of which started in 2013, the theatre culture and dramatic literature of the easternmost Canadian province has elicited increased audience attention, as well as theoretical and critical scrutiny. The interest is partly caused by the cultural and geographical difference of Newfoundland, by its definitive spatial and mental distance from the North American mainland, and its immediate, sometimes imminent border with the immense, powerful and impassive waters of the Atlantic ocean.
One of the recent dramatic representations of the genuine positioning of Newfoundland is Robert Chafe’s play Between Breaths (2018), which enacts the true story of dr. Jon Lien, a respected researcher, educator and conservationist, known as the “Whale Man” of Newfoundland, who spent over twenty years – often single-handedly – rescuing whales entangled in fishing nets in the perilous waters off the island’s coast. Ironically, however, the biggest risk awaited him towards the end of his life, when his body and mind were inexorably overcome by progressing paralysis and dementia. Tragically – if perhaps naturally – he died trapped in his own body, pretty much like the creatures he risked his own life to set free.
The paper proposes to discuss Robert Chafe’s play as a story of people’s relationship with the natural environment, experienced as engagingly intimate, but also treacherous and irredeemably damaging, the message of which may well be the realization that the greatest risks are to be found more “close to home” than most of us dare to imagine.
Iva Koutská
iva.koutska@tul.cz
Technical University of Liberec
How Perceptions about EFL Teaching Change in Time: Comparison of EFL Pre-Service and In-Service Teachers
An important factor enabling professional growth in teaching is connected to the ability to self-question all the various aspects of the profession. The concepts people have about English language teaching differ in time and space, but the ability to ask relevant questions should be universal. Without posing questions, a (future) teacher cannot actively search for the answers and improve. The thematic analysis defines the clusters and categorises the questions under these umbrella terms. Excel computations follow to analyse their frequency. The thematic analysis of pre-service and in-service teachers' questions proves the change in perceptions about EFL teaching. The results show that pre-service teachers, the students of English language teaching study programs, are more doubtful about their competencies, are less confident and more self-critical. In-service teachers tend to be more student-oriented and less self-centred. The beliefs about the focus of EFL teaching mirror these doubts versus self-confidence. Pre-service teachers' aim is to teach grammar and vocabulary, whereas in-service teachers aim to teach children.
Filip Krajník
krajnik@phil.muni.cz
Masaryk University
Two Modes of Shakespeare in Early 18th-Century English Theatre
The first third of the 18th century witnessed a marked shift in English theatre culture, comparable to the theatrical boom in Shakespeare’s time or the revival of the theatre business in the wake of the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660. Indeed, it could be argued that this was the period when English commercial theatre as we understand it nowadays began to appear. A number of factors contributed to this development, the most obvious one being the growth of commercial rivalry among London theatre houses and the necessity on the part of their managers to adapt to the new competitive environment. As a result of this development, new genres of popular theatre entertainments appeared that were, on the one hand, immensely favoured by the spectators, while, one the other, criticised by authors and critics as something detrimental to English theatre and theatregoing audiences. For these critics, Shakespeare was a prime example of ‘high’ drama that was being replaced by ‘low’ spectacles (chiefly farcical or musical afterpieces). Through an analysis of several surviving texts of these short entertainments, this paper will demonstrate that, contrary to contemporaneous criticism, Shakespearean dramaturgy was in fact not restricted to high dramatic registers at this time, but was also significantly contributing to the burgeoning of lesser genres that helped establish modern British theatre.
Naděžda Kudrnáčová
kudrnada@phil.muni.cz
Masaryk University
Some Comparisons between Reflexive Resultative Constructions and Their Non-Reflexive Counterparts
The article argues against the view (Iwata 2020) that the possibility to form non-reflexive resultative constructions of the He worked to exhaustion type shows that fake reflexives (generally claimed to be necessitated by the Direct Object Restriction) are actually not needed. Such a view, disregarding semantic differences between the reflexive resultative construction (He worked himself to exhaustion) and its non-reflexive counterpart, violates the principle of non-synonymy (Goldberg 1995). The reflexive variant, in which the result state is predicated of the direct object, establishes a causal relation between the activity and the attainment of the resultant state and as such does not necessarily involve co-temporality (Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2001). This means that the result state is not presented as an inherent aspect of the activity but as its fully-fledged effect. The absence of the reflexive in the non-reflexive variant iconically reflects a much tighter relationship between the activity and the attainment of a given state. The two events are co-identified, hence necessarily co-temporaneous (Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2001). The to-prepositional phrase, introducing scalarity into non-scalar activities, presents a given state as anordered set of values. It measures the development of the activity and functions as its maximal degree modifier.
Katarina Labudova
katarina.labudova@ku.sk
Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia
Aging, Harmony, and Humour: Ecofeminism and Storytelling in Atwood’s Old Babes in the Wood
This paper explores Margaret Atwood’s portrayal of aging, body, memory, and identity in her short story collection Old Babes in the Wood, through the lens of ecofeminism. Atwood examines how aging reshapes bodily self-perception while drawing parallels between the human and the natural world. The elderly protagonists deal with human mortality, navigating themes of loss, hope, and the connection between bodily and environmental decay. Atwood intertwines humour and vulnerability, using mortality to highlight the interconnectedness of human and environmental fragility. The ecofeminist perspective enriches this analysis by considering how Atwood critiques traditional systems that marginalize both aging women and the environment. By presenting the intersection of humour, memory, and ecological awareness, Atwood creates a layered exploration of aging that transcends individual identity, connecting it to broader themes of interdependence and survival. This paper argues that Atwood’s storytelling and humor challenge aging stereotypes, offering a more compassionate perspective on aging bodies as interconnected with the natural environment.
Marie Lahodová Vališová
marie.lahodova@med.muni.cz
Masaryk University
Bridging the Pragmatic Gap: Native Speaker Perspectives on Czech Students’ Requests and Apologies in English (EFL)
This presentation explores the vital role of pragmatic competence in EFL teaching, focusing on its importance in enabling learners to use language appropriately across diverse contexts. While interlanguage pragmatics research has traditionally examined non-native speakers’ production, this presentation shifts the focus to native speakers’ perceptions of the acceptability of speech acts. Specifically, it investigates how native British English speakers evaluate the pragmatic competence of Czech students (EFL), concentrating on requests and apologies in formal and informal settings. Using a four-point scale, evaluators assessed six categories, including politeness, speech act appropriateness, and the use of typical expressions. Quantitative findings reveal that informal requests received higher ratings than formal ones, indicating students’ stronger performance in informal contexts. Conversely, formal and informal apologies were rated similarly, suggesting minimal influence of formality on their perception. Qualitative analysis results, based on semi-structured interviews with evaluators, highlight challenges in assessing overlapping categories such as politeness and directness. Evaluators also stressed the importance of indirect strategies, intonation, and context-awareness for pragmatic competence. This presentation emphasizes the need for EFL teaching to prioritize pragmatic competence through targeted instruction and discusses practical implications for bridging gaps in students’ pragmatic development to enhance their communication skills in various contexts.
Monika Leferman
monika.kosa@ubbcluj.ro
Babeș-Bolyai University
“…Whose Reality Is That?”: Ontological Liminality in Camilla Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet (2017)
One of the most idiosyncratic voices in contemporary Canadian literature, Camilla Grudova is a master storyteller who weaves narratives that defy traditional modes of interpretation, inviting readers to unravel the carefully woven stories. Her delightfully surreal, if grotesque, stories delve into the banalities of everyday life, imbued with Grudova's visionary imagination and penchant for fabrication and ambiguity. Grudova experiments with narrative practices and defamiliarizes the recognizable world by creating a fictional space of ontological liminality. This liminal aesthetic is an essential element of the stories' ontological structure and a necessary tool for reflecting Grudova's perception of reality. This paper aims to explore ontological liminality in selected stories from her first story collection, The Doll's Alphabet (2017), focusing on the textual strategies employed for such ontological estrangement. Furthermore, Grudova's fascination with literary experimentation offers alternative versions to traditional understandings of fiction, while also reinventing the writing process.
Ilka Lensen-Saal
ilka.saal@uni-erfurt.de
University of Erfurt
Surveillance & Theatricality in the American Realist Novel: The Whole Family (1907)
This paper takes a closer look at the complex visual and narrative dynamics of surveillance and theatricality inherent in many a late 19th- century realist novel. While the 19th-century novel tends to follow the larger paradigm shift, described by Foucault, from a culture of spectacle to one of surveillance, literary critics have also underlined that the late 19th-century novel does not so much repudiate the theatricality of earlier periods, but has come to domesticate it in the coercive cultural mechanisms of “vigilance and visibility” that patrol the “snug little homes” of the realist novel (Litvak x-xi). At the same time, theatricality’s inherent performative capacities along with its propensity for excess can also threaten the smooth operation of these mechanisms of control. In my current project, I examine how American women writers of the late 19th-century harness the theatrical dimension of the novel to undercut and destabilize the normative matrix of gender and sexuality that the realist spectacle of surveillance seeks to inscribe on its subjects. An interesting case in point is the 1907 novel The Whole Family, a collaborative project spearheaded by William Dean Howells (at the time the leading voice of American realism) and co-authored by twelve different authors, among them Howells, Henry James, Elizabeth Wilkins Freeman, Elizabeth Jordan, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and other well-known authors of the time. In this contribution, I trace how several of them deploy the theatrical potential of the novel to undercut and break free from the normative scenario of domestic surveillance that Howells implements in the opening chapter.
David Livingstone
Livingstone@seznam.cz
Palacky University
The American Songbag: Carl Sandburg as Folklorist, Musicologist and Musician
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) is most well-known as the unofficial poet laureate of the city of Chicago, as the biographer of Abraham Lincoln and for his passionate commitment to social justice. Among his varied interests, however, his contribution to American folk music is sometimes overlooked. This paper will examine his pioneering collections of folk songs The American Songbag, published in 1927 and The New American Songbag from 1950. Although not the first volume of its kind (John Lomax and his song ‘hunting’ greatly influenced Sandburg), the former collection was unique and eclectic in terms of the width and breadth of songs, embodying Sandburg’s myriad of passions: democracy, working class culture, humour and celebration of dialect, among other things. Sandburg also released records, most famously Flat Rock Ballads from 1959, where he sang many of the songs from the collections, accompanying himself on guitar. He also enjoyed performing and singing live. Sandburg was very much a public poet, giving thousands of readings over the course of his life. A typical evening would include some of his poems, excerpts from his prose and finally a performance of some of his collected folk songs (a number of these can be found on YouTube). The present paper will explore the importance of this aspect of his creative output and discuss his profound legacy on the following generations of musicians and poets: Pete Seeger, Marc Smith (father of slam poetry), to name but a few.
Sämi Ludwig
samuel.ludwig@uha.fr
Université de Haute-Alsace
Cancelled by Literary History: the Case of Ponteach
In this paper I would like to introduce the case of Major Robert Rogers’ 1766 play about the famous Native American Chief and the Siege of Detroit. Why was this fascinating play never performed? Rather than the lack of quality, I shall argue that it became the victim of its critical message, of too much knowledge about America, its distance to the London theater scene, resulting in its undermining the stage conventions of the time, and was later deemed irrelevant because of nationalist definitions of literature.
The second part of my paper will plead for a reassessment and focus on what we miss out on when we ignore this play: a rich tapestry of information on the visions of colonial America at that time—much relevant information that helps us better understand both, the English attitudes and the conflictual world of the Indian tribes in the wake of the English conquests in the French and Indian War. We get a vision of the American West immediately before the American Revolutions changed the rules. In addition to this historical dimension, the aesthetic qualities as well as aesthetic failures of the play can teach us much about the stage conventions of the time. Generally, I will argue that Ponteach is extremely rich teaching material.
Tomáš Mach
tomas.mach@mail.muni.cz
Charles University & UJEP
The EAP of Experts and Czech University Students: An Exploration of the Gaps
This talk presents results from a corpus-based investigation of written academic English by L1 Czech university students (BA and MA levels) using the Corpus of English Philology (ENPHI), which consists of approximately 1,500 academic texts (19 million words), equally divided between student theses and journal articles. The study adopts a comprehensive approach to compare student writing with expert academic discourse.
The primary research question is: How does the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing of Czech university students differ from expert academic writing?
To explore this, a modified set of 68 linguistic variables from Biber (1989) and Nini (2019) was used. These variables were chosen for their general applicability, allowing for a more general exploration before narrowing the analysis down to the most relevant one variables. A random forest classification was employed to identify which variables best differentiate between student and expert writing, thereby offering flexibility in adjusting the analysis to refine the results.
In the talk, I will discuss methodological challenges, such as decisions about including metadata (e.g. discipline) and the order of the individual steps. Finally, I will present key findings, particularly focusing on linguistic features that distinguish student writing from expert-level discourse. These results have potential implications for improving EAP instruction for non-native English speakers at different academic stages.
Csaba Maczelka
maczelka.csaba@pte.hu
University of Pécs
Narrative Techniques in Restoration Prose Fiction
The paper offers a detailed investigation of the narrative techniques employed by a handful of Restoration prose fiction authors, with specific focus on Aphra Behn (1640-1689) and her Oroonoko and Love-Letters Between a Noble-Man And his Sister (both appearing in some accounts as the “first” novels). The reading of the texts will be informed by the observation that Restoration prose fiction is naturally inclined to bring together seemingly disparate genres and text types, hybridity and compilation being organic qualities/techniques of the period’s prose production. Besides the narrative procedures appearing in the texts, the paper also pays special attention to contemporary reflections on the nature of prose fiction as reflected in texts and related materials. These include the emerging distinction between old and new romance, and the slowly shifting attitude towards different aspects of compilation and the increasingly problematic question of originality, which eventually led to the revolutionary 1710 Statute of Anne.
Michaela Marková
michaela.markova@tul.cz
Technická univerzita v Liberci
Self as Narrative: Trauma and Identity Formation in Dawn Quigley’s Apple in the Middle (2018)
One set of norms on which racial and ethnic differences emerge involves those that relate to incorporationism. Certain minorities, such as African Americans and Latinx, are more likely to believe that blending into the larger society and maintaining the cultural traditions of one's ancestors are not mutually exclusive and that both are very important factors which define being American. Many Indigenous NA communities, however, engage in an "oppositional process" by which the boundaries between Indians and the dominant groups are maintained due to the communal trauma the NAs have endured. They thus rather attempt to reconstruct their identity, and are reviving languages, bringing back ceremonies, regaining land and cultural items. This (re)constitution of identity is an important component of reconciliation, but some have claimed that possible loss might be greater and irretrievable. The questions then are: How to uphold Indigenous values and highlight authentic perspectives, where does subjective identity and registered national identity end? This proposed contribution will seek answers to these questions in Dan Quigley’s novel Apple in the Middle (2018), which will be analysed using Michelle Balaev’s perspective on trauma and identity formation. The novel lends itself to fascinating insight into how America is portrayed by minority and isolated groups with rather traumatic past. Employing such means, it redresses the grievance that NA perspective on heritage, ancestry, and community is still largely unknown and often seen as illegitimate.
Sylvia Mieszkowski
sylvia.mieszkowski@univie.ac.at
University of Vienna
Caught Between Curiosity and Exposure: Negotiating Black Visibility in Galgut’s Arctic Summer and Santos Donaldson’s Greenland
My talk forms part of a larger gender studies project on neo-Victorian biofiction, which cross-lights seven 19th century figures through two (late 20th or 21st century) novels each. One of these historical figures is the Edwardian writer E.M. Forster. For the Minding the Gaps conference, I will be focusing on the literary representations of Mohammed El Adl, Forster’s Egyptian lover, in Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer (2014) and David Santos Donaldson’s Greenland (2021), respectively. The gap between the roles El Adl plays for Galgut’s Forster and those he plays for Santos Donaldson’s protagonist Kip Starling, is a privileged site from which different ideologies of visibility emerge at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality (Haschemi Yekani et al 2022). Specifically, I will be looking into two key concepts – that of ‘curiosity’ and that of ‘exposure’ – in a field of vision characterised by the tension between the need of “being seen to be there” (Woodward 2015, 18; Schaffer 2008), on the one hand, and the policing heteronormative/homophobic/racist gaze, on the other. What interests me, is how ‘curiosity’ and ‘exposure’ operate between a Black man and a white man, in a social space that unfolds against the backdrop of colonial Alexandria during the Great War in Arctic Summer; and how – by contrast – they operate between two Black men in the relatively empty arctic wilderness in Greenland. The gap between two pieces of biofiction, I argue, is an uncomfortable, yet productive cultural site that teaches us, as contemporary readers, about conditions of seeing historical figures.
Ivona Mišterová
yvonne@ff.zcu.cz
University of West Bohemia
Minding the Gaps: Shakespearean Afterlives in Czech and British Adaptations
Adaptations, modifications, reinterpretations, sequels, branches, inspirations, transformations, translations, cultural reinterpretations, updates, and new renditions—these diverse terms, as noted by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, lack a single “correct” label, yet the reimagining of Shakespeare’s works remains a significant cultural trend and a thriving literary field. This paper explores (not only) recent Czech adaptations in prose and drama that offer fresh perspectives on Shakespeare’s plots, characters, and themes, set within the broader context of the Hogarth Shakespeare series, which has engaged prominent international writers over the past decade to “retell” some of Shakespeare’s best-known stories. The focus is primarily on how modern authors and dramatists transition between forms, genres, and styles, moving from Shakespearean verse to contemporary prose or drama, from romance to realism, and from early modern settings to postmodern interpretations. In particular, two adaptations, The Motive and the Cue (2023) and The Morning of the Magicians (2006), will be examined, with a focus on the adaptation techniques employed in each. The Motive and the Cue, by British playwright Jack Thorne, centres on the challenging rehearsal process of Shakespeare’s Hamlet under the direction of Sir John Gielgud for the 1964 Broadway production starring Richard Burton. The play explores the tension between Burton and Gielgud, as their conflicting views on theatre force them to confront their differences. In contrast, Roman Sikora, a Czech playwright, utilises Macbeth to examine political issues in The Morning of the Magicians. The location drastically changes to the imaginary island of Natal, a postmodern reversal of the Renaissance utopia, while keeping the original characters and plot. By examining how these adaptations reinterpret Shakespeare for today’s audiences, the paper aims to contribute to a broader understanding of the role of adaptation in reshaping canonical texts for new generations. Finally, the comparison highlights not only the enduring appeal of Shakespeare’s work but also the ways in which modern adaptations engage with contemporary political and cultural contexts.
Wesley Moore
wesley.moore@fau.de
University of Erlangen
Micro-Encounters: Community and Collaboration in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House
In this paper I propose Jennifer Egan implements thematic gaps in A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and its sequel The Candy House (2022), as means of privileging community through meaningful encounters in the fragmented political landscape of the twenty-first century. Egan’s structural gaps work, moreover, to promote a distinct relevance for prose fiction in hyper-mediated societies. Engaging the theories of Andreas Reckwitz, I argue Egan’s novels depict the splintering of the public sphere instigated by digital media and suggest the possibility of reconstructing a more unified society through interpersonal relationships; these expressions occur in “micro-encounters" between alienated characters that ultimately transcend the isolating effects of digital technologies. In Goon Squad, outcast Scottie Hausmann’s meeting with Bennie Salazar, a public figure, culminates in the Footprint Concert, a diverse gathering where meaningful social interactions occur between attendees, despite the omnipresence of alienating surveillance structures. In Candy House, social media exacerbate Drew Blake and Miles Hollander’s isolation, before their interactions in material space lead to a deep friendship and work in public service. By depicting micro-encounters in fiction, I suggest, Egan uses the novel to communicate the possibility of unity, underscoring its contemporary relevance. I also highlight Egan’s use of Powerpoint and Twitter as narrative containers and compare the novels’ fragmented structures to internet browsing. These aesthetics require the reader to bridge narrative gaps in digitally-influenced contexts, suggesting the collaborative nature of reading, the convergence of two unique perspectives that could result in its own micro-encounter.
Octavian More
octavian.more@ubbcluj.ro
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
“Under the Script of a Vacant Sky” – Nocturnal Mindscapes in Christopher Dewdney’s Poetry
Celebrated as one of the most innovative contemporary Canadian poets, Christopher Dewdney has impressed audiences and critics alike through a unique perspective that fuses romantic sensibility and scientific rigour with a view to exploring the liminal space between the human and the material. As many of his works suggest, Dewdney views nature as a text (Bök, 1993), a finely-woven net of semantic connections and potentialities that simultaneously echoes and challenges the codifying impulses of language. Building on these observations, in this paper we propose an examination of a number of select titles from Dewdney’s oeuvre in which nocturnal experience plays a central part. As we shall argue, in Dewdney’s works the nocturnal realm becomes an ecosystem of perception, thought and emotion, as well as a metaphorical space for verbalising the experience of strangeness through the convergence of science and myth, reason and intuition. Ultimately, Dewdney’s night poems serve as mindscapes, in which the subject, liberated from the “tyranny of appearances” (Daniel, 2008), is able to transcend the gap between the mundane and the mythical, proving, at the same time, that poetry itself embodies an “essential mystery” (Dewdney, 2007).
Abdelrahman Morshed
abed7510079@gmail.com
University of Pécs (Hungary)
Defining Neo-Victorian Literature: A Merger Between the Fields of Postmodernism and Adaptation
This paper examines how Neo-Victorian literature blends postmodernism with adaptation, focusing on how works in this genre both critique historical narratives and reimagine Victorian themes, characters, and styles. Using Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith as a key example, the paper argues that Neo-Victorian works function as a form of historiographic metafiction, which is one of the most important concepts when it comes to postmodern fiction, in which it critiques Victorian history while also drawing on its conventions. From a postmodern perspective, Neo-Victorian literature challenges the notion of history as an absolute truth, instead presenting it as subjective and open to reinterpretation. In Fingersmith, Waters questions Victorian representations of women’s sexuality, relationships, and roles in society, offering a more complex and liberated view compared to traditional Victorian narratives. At the same time, Neo-Victorian literature adapts and reimagines Victorian tropes, styles, and social concerns such as inheritance, thievery, and the dispute between classes. Fingersmith mirrors the intricate plots and character-driven narratives found in Dickens' novels, while also revising them to present a more progressive and nuanced portrayal of its characters. Through this combination of historical critique and literary homage, Neo-Victorian literature offers a rich exploration of both the past and present, inviting readers to reconsider the history it draws from while also celebrating and reworking its conventions.
Janos Nagy
nagy.janos@pte.hu
University of Pecs
Distinguishing Human and AI-Generated Narratives: A Comparative Analysis of Anaphora, Thematic Progression, and Deictic Expressions
This paper presents the second steps of a series of inquiries into what sets human and AI generated texts apart. We collected two datasets of 20 stories each: The HUMAN dataset included stories written by human participants and AI dataset comprised texts generated by a state-of-the-art AI model prompted to create narratives comparable to the ones produced by our human participants. After a quantitative analysis of textual and stylistic features, we decided to dig deeper in a search for more distinctive features on a textual level. The number and type of anaphoric elements were compared in the AI-generated and human texts. Thematic and rhematic structures (Daneš, 1974) and rhematic chains (Firbas, 1992) were analysed and compared in both corpora. The number and type of deictic expressions were also compared to see if there is any divergence in terms of spatial, temporal and personal referencing and distancing. Preliminary results suggest some differences in several linguistic dimensions. In the AI-generated narratives, a higher frequency of repetitive anaphoric elements was observed, potentially indicating less nuanced referential strategies compared to human-authored stories. Additionally, texts in the AI corpus exhibited more linear and derived theme progression consistently, whereas human texts tended to show more individual variation. Similarly, human authors varied in their use of deictic expressions and included a greater range of specific, context-sensitive markers as compared to AI-generated texts. These initial findings suggest that while AI-generated narratives may achieve surface-level coherence, they show divergence from human-authored texts.
Linda Nepivodová
(With Simona Kalová)
nepivodova@phil.muni.cz
Masaryk University
Exams Then and Now
This paper examines the assessment practices employed in a specific university setting in the Czech Republic, tracing developments since the introduction of computer-based language testing at our department in 2003. Several research studies conducted at our department have explored different modes of test administration, investigating student results, perceptions and preferences. The most recent study delves into potential score differences resulting from supervised and non-supervised test administration during and post-COVID times, raising ethical and academic integrity questions. Additionally, our oral proficiency exams have undergone changes in delivery format in recent years, with the results and student attitudes yet to be presented. Some of these changes were spontaneous, while others were necessitated, for instance, by the impact of COVID-19. In this paper, we aim to highlight the main findings of the aforementioned studies, involving over 800 participants, and based on these results, we seek to outline potential future directions for language assessment in our context.
Soňa Nováková
sona.novakova@ff.cuni.cz
Charles University Faculty of Arts
Margaret the First: The Power of Representation in the Work of the Duchess of Newcastle
Margaret Cavendish's works continue to be read from the perspective of authorial self-presentation and the authors's "empress-mongering". Indeed in The Blazing World the Duchess of Newcastle constructs for herself a textual empire of which she can be absolute monarch and creates thus a fantasy of the autonomous self (even if linguistically expressed as more potential than real). It is also a text full of unrestricted fancy. It positively revels in extravagantly excessive ornament and description. This is conveyed in linguistic opulence and fanciful rhetorics. In this process, Cavendish also builds on older representational practices.
In my presentation I intend to focus on these aspects of her texts, both fictional and dramatic: the visual and rhetorical representations of the imperial/aristocratic/sovereign figure. These are on the one hand reinforced by Cavendish's drawing on representational traditions of heroic women (warrior queens, Elizabeth I, Queen Henrietta Maria), of the royal figure of Charles II, seventeenth-century fashions in portrait-painting and Cavendish's own pictorial depiction, and also Petrachism. All these also fall in with other Restoration textual practices which were full of unsettling transmutations of language and gender, the public and private sphere, however which the eighteenth-century set out to contain.
Jana Pavlíková
jana.pavlikova@ujep.cz
Faculty of Education, J. E. Purkyně University Ústí nad Labem
New Era in Teacher Training: Neuroscience-Informed Design of ICT-Based Learning Materials
Advances in neuroscience are reshaping education by highlighting the importance of aligning instructional practices with the brain's natural learning processes. This study first identifies specific methodological characteristics of ICT-based language learning materials, such as e-learning platforms, that correspond with brain functions to enhance learning and cognitive development. Subsequently, a qualitative analysis was conducted on Moodle-based learning materials created by university students (Bachelor level, education-oriented program) to examine the prevalence of different sensory modalities, cognitive and metacognitive processes in content presentation and practice tasks. The focus was on identifying instances of higher-order thinking skills, such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, as opposed to mere memorization and uncritical acceptance of information.
The findings suggest that established neural pathways can influence teaching practices, leading to the replication of ineffective methods. Consequently, teacher training programs should focus on reprogramming these habitual practices and fostering innovative teaching approaches. Achieving this requires the systematic integration of neuroscientific insights and their educational implications—not just as content, but as a foundational approach within teacher training.
Jana Pelclová
pelclova@phil.muni.cz
Masaryk University
Voicing the Unspoken: Parental Regret as a Discursive Gap in Contemporary Parenthood
Parents who regret having become parents do not seem to align with the normative of a parental figure represented in mass media and in public discourse. Parental regret thus remains stigmatized and underexplored subject, because parents are reluctant to voice their feelings for fear of judgement and societal condemnation (Donath, 2015, 2017; Heffernan and Stone, 2021; Sihto and Mustosmäki, 2021). However, the landscape of social media has become a safe space to utter and share their regrets (Matley, 2020). This paper examines how online communities provide a discursive space to bridge the gap between societal ideals of parenting and the lived realities of regretful parents. The paper will discuss the strategies of confession, life-story narration, hypothetical past, blaming society, enhancing in-group solidarity and moral appeal. Following CDA (van Dijk, 1993, 2002; Fairclough, 1989, 1995; Wodak, 2001, 2009), the paper explores posts, comments and audiovisual content available on public profile of the Facebook group “I Regret Having Children,” Reddit’s “regretful parents,” and related YouTube channels. The preliminary findings highlight a significant discursive gap in parenting narratives: the coexistence of parental love and parental regret that is often excluded from public representation of parenthood and more than ignored by mainstream cultural texts. By examining how these online confessions renegotiate the cultural constructs of motherhood and fatherhood, this research sheds light on the broader implications of parental regret for societal expectations and identity formation in contemporary parenting discourses. Additionally, it also discusses the negative impact of the discourse of selfishness on parenting practice and identity formation.
Petra Peldová
petra.peldova@tul.cz
Technical university of Liberec
How Perceptions about EFL Teaching Change in Time: Comparison of EFL Pre-Service and In-Service Teachers
An important factor enabling professional growth in teaching is connected to the ability to self-question all the various aspects of the profession. The concepts people have about English language teaching differ in time and space, but the ability to ask relevant questions should be universal. Without posing questions, a (future) teacher cannot actively search for the answers and improve. The thematic analysis defines the clusters and categorises the questions under these umbrella terms. Excel computations follow to analyse their frequency. The thematic analysis of pre-service and in-service teachers' questions proves the change in perceptions about EFL teaching. The results show that pre-service teachers, the students of English language teaching study programs, are more doubtful about their competencies, are less confident and more self-critical. In-service teachers tend to be more student-oriented and less self-centred. The beliefs about the focus of EFL teaching mirror these doubts versus self-confidence. Pre-service teachers' aim is to teach grammar and vocabulary, whereas in-service teachers aim to teach children.
Petra Peldová
peldovapetra@gmail.com
Technical University of Liberec
Local Grammar of Unclarity
This study explores lexicogrammatical patterns of unclarity, specifically examining constructions with the negative adjective unclear or the negation not clear within the pattern it vlink unclear/not clear. Findings indicate that using negation—whether through the prefix un- or the particle not- alters the local grammar of the pattern, affecting its distribution and structure. The initial corpus, composed of over 500,000 tokens from front-page articles across six British newspapers (including The Sun, The Guardian, and The Telegraph), showed a significantly lower occurrence of the unclear/not clear pattern compared to its affirmative counterpart. To assess the consistency of this pattern across broader discourse, further analysis was conducted using the BNC 2014, a larger and more representative corpus. Findings from this comparison highlight distinctive grammatical behaviours in expressions of negative clarity, emphasising their nuanced role in shaping discourse.
Helena Polehlová
helena.polehlova@uhk.cz
University of Hradec Králové
For the Instruction of Posterity: Minding the Gaps in Gildas Sapiens and Venerable Bede’s Histories
The paper explores the rhetorical strategies employed by Gildas Sapiens in his treatise De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae and the Venerable Bede in his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum. Written in the 6th and 8th centuries respectively, these texts provide significant insights into Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon history. However, the differing structures of the works reveal distinct authorial intentions.
While Gildas seeks to admonish the social élite of his contemporary Britons for their moral failings through vivid and expressive language, urging them to emulate Biblical exemplars, Bede adopts a more measured and “objective” tone. Despite drawing extensively from Gildas, Bede carefully curates what he incorporates into his narrative.
The paper argues that both texts reflect a carefully crafted compositional strategy, skilfully applying the principles of classical rhetoric to achieve their respective purposes.
Tomáš Pospíšil
pospisil@phil.muni.cz
Masaryk University
Engaging Community In/Through Cinema: Inuit Representation in The Grizzlies and Slash/Back
This paper examines two recent Canadian films that explore Inuit issues: The Grizzlies (2018), directed by Miranda de Pencier, and Slash/Back (2022), directed by Inuit filmmaker Nyla Innuksuk. Both films feature ensemble casts of young Inuit actors and delve into themes such as growing up Inuit, navigating success and failure, and valuing Inuit identity and cultural heritage. They also address pressing social challenges within Inuit communities. While The Grizzlies operates within the framework of a sports drama and Slash/Back embraces the alien invasion genre, both films transcend these boundaries to engage with larger cultural narratives. This paper explores how these films offer representations of Inuit life on screen while fostering meaningful community involvement off-screen. The paper will comment on their respective approaches to storytelling, production, and cultural engagement and argue that both films serve as vital platforms for Inuit representation through cinema.
Sarkar Pritha
pritha@xim.edu.in
XIM University
Agency Precedes Disinterestedness: Overcoming Patriarchal Insemination through a Feminist Lens in The Lowland (2014)
In my talk, I will dissect the dominating patriarchal features operative in contemporary middle-class families through Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013). I shall trace how these patriarchal elements dominating in families and relationships seeps into everyday life. Thus, the paper peeps into the androcentric underpinning in the society using the lens of cultural feminism. Beyond recognising the dominating gender inequality, this talk tries to trace its causes. Finally, I propose how disinterestedness leads to agency in overcoming this patriarchal limitation. Through the journey of the protagonist, I shall show how disinterestedness can develop into a major tool of personal resistance. The protagonist is able to frame her independent identity only by voluntarily disassociating herself from the patriarchal shackles, accepting the consequent ostracizations, and thereby asserting her agency. Hence, the paper contributes to the broader scholarship on women’s agency by identifying how it is disinterestedness that precedes the exertion of agency for a woman beyond the assigned patriarchal framework.
Michael Pitts
mpitts@unyp.cz
University of New York in Prague
The Captain as Auteur: Reconsidering Masculinity in Firefly/Serenity
It is often noted that science fiction uniquely enables its contributors and audience to imagine new modes of being, both for the individual and society more broadly. As Neta Crawford points out, the genre grounds its often-futuristic settings within the “consequences of present social and technological trends” (198). Central to this extrapolation of a future grounded in but distinct from present realities are the ways science fiction imagines transformed performances of gender. In the introduction of Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (2018), Bridgitte Barclay and Christy Tidwell note the suitability of speculative texts for gender readings since such “texts often ask questions such as where is nature, what is natural, and who is equated with nature” (ix). Science fiction calls into question traditional, essentialist understandings of femininity and masculinity. Close analyses of gender in speculative texts therefore illuminate how the genre normalizes and in turn marginalizes divergent performances of gender.
This proposed paper, which focuses upon the American science fiction television program Firefly (2002), seeks a better understanding of how such negotiations of masculinity take form in the medium of television. By considering the program’s centering of Captain Mal Reynolds and its careful presentation of both his positive and problematic qualities, this presentation seeks to measure the development of science fiction television and its treatment of gender at the beginning of the 21st century.
Iva Polak
iva.polak@zg.t-com.hr
University of Zagreb
Minding the Gaps while Driving Down Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road
In the 21st century, neo-western or postwestern in Australia has gained currency as a revisionist genre that has become a space to discuss the weight of its own origins and the legacies of the unresolved colonial era spilling into the present. In narrating the colonial past (e.g., The Tracker, dir. Rolf de Heer; The Proposition, dir. John Hillcoat), the unsettling present (e.g., Goldstone, dir. Ivan Sen; Limbo, dir. Ivan Sen), and the dystopian future (e.g., The Rover, dir. David Michôd), Australian neo-western engages with both historical and contemporary tensions. Inasmuch as its protagonists face external adversities, the main conflict remains the internal one and imperils their identities. In the context of Australia’s Blak Wave cinema (sometimes referred to as the Post-Mabo cinema), Indigenous Australian directors appropriate neo-western to liberate the genre from its gendered bias (The Drover’s Wife, dir. Leah Purcell), colonial mythmaking (Sweet Country, dir. Warwick Thornton) and problematic presentism (Limbo, dir. Ivan Sen). Internationally acclaimed Indigenous Australian auteur Ivan Sen uses the neo-western genre to evoke contemporary hauntings in Indigenous communities, which is why his films are often referred to as examples of so-called outback noir. Drawing on Sen’s first neo-western Mystery Road (2013), the presentation will show how Sen’s suggestive cinematography places his protagonist in the landscape/Country that provides a commentary for the protagonist’s and nation’s troubled past. Consequently, the protagonist’s meagre agency runs parallel with the nation’s slow progress in confronting its own past.
Vanja Polic
vpolic@m.ffzg.hr
University of Zagreb, Department of English
That Wild West Again: Yellowstone and the Persistent Allure of the Western Myth
The paper will analyze the continuing allure of the Western genre on the example of Taylor Sheridan’s TV series Yellowstone (2018-2024). Drawing on the theories of the West and the Western genre from critics such as Slotkin, Tompkins, Cawelti, and Mitchell, the paper will show how Yellowstone repeats the basic traits of the American origin story, its Manifest Destiny. The traditional Western motifs that are also utilized in Yellowstone include landscape, cowboys, horses, “Indians”, guns for hire, death, movement, freedom. They also remain remarkably unchanged when situated in the 21st-century Western setting, serving to feed the genre’s mythopoetic charge by continuing to claim that they depict the ‘authentic’ American way of life, which is predominantly still white and patriarchal. The paper will therefore discuss the general tendency of the Western to be an escapist genre that offers a spectacle, mainly through stunning visuality, and a nostalgia for allegedly simpler and more straightforward times.
Edit Rácz
racz.edit@kre.hu
Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest
Question Types for Reading Texts in EFL Textbooks
The teaching of the reading skill in foreign language education has been researched widely. Yet only few academic papers focus on the categorisation of questions and task types accompanying reading comprehension texts in EFL (English as a foreign language) textbooks.
In my talk I focus on the reading syllabus of the latest edition of a global EFL textbook series, Solutions (2017). Based on Freeman’s taxonomy of comprehension question types (2014) I give an account of my own research into the types of questions found in the volumes under scrutiny. The findings show that there are questions belonging to each major category (Content, Language, Affect) and also to the eight subcategories of Freeman’s taxonomy. I also argue that her categorisation needs to be modified. The last one of the three major categories of her taxonomy (Affect) is proposed to be expanded with a new subcategory, which I call ’further research’, whereby language learners required to perform a high-level cognitive task based on the topic of the text in the reading chapter. This modification would allow for the inclusion of tasks that the textbook series calls ‘internet research’, whose aim is to enhance learners’ active participation and make them search for data on the internet in order to collect relevant information about a particular topic.
Arthur Redding
aredding@yorku.ca
York University
Freedom and Constraint: American Literature in the Cold War
How did the global ideological conflict between two superpowers over the second half of the twentieth century shape American writing? This talk will survey literary communities over the four decades of the Cold War. From the experimental formal innovations of Beats and Black Mountain poets and the lifestyle alternatives articulated by New Left activists through to the postmodernism of the Reagan years, literary production shuttled between tropes of “freedom” (aligned with “the West” in the geopolitical imagination) and “constraint” (a presumed feature of life under conditions of “totalitarian” communist regimes). At the same time, writers attended to threats of nuclear apocalypse, environmental crisis, and American imperial over-reach. Spurred by the Civil Rights movement, communities long discriminated against in American social, economic, and political life developed expressive literary practices suitable for their own forms of resistance and demands for liberation, often in solidarity with anti-colonial struggles globally. The innovative literature produced by writers allied to second wave feminism, Black Arts, the American Indian and Chicano/a literary renaissance, the youth underground, and the gay and lesbian movements challenged the certainties as well as the conventional representational practices of the liberal status quo.
Maxmilian Rhys
maxmilian.rhys@tul.cz
Technical University of Liberec
Exclusion and Self-Exclusion in Canadian (Sub)Urban Novel from the 1960s to the 2020s
Since the very beginnings of Canadian literature, many a protagonist excluded themselves for various reasons from the rest of the society by more or less deliberately choosing to live in the infinite Canadian wilderness. These solitary heroes were in fashion only until the moment when writers realized the discrepancy between Canadian literature still idealizing the solitary protagonists surviving in the harsh natural environment on the one hand, and the undeniable fact that Canada’s growing urbanization and issues linked to it seem to have been neglected in terms of their importance as themes on the other hand. However, exclusion and self-exclusion not only did not cease to exist with the passage from “the novel of the wilderness” to “the (sub)urban novel” in the second half of the twentieth century – these two topics seem to have started to thrive both quantitatively and qualitatively in Canadian post-WWII novel. Representative examples retrieved mainly from the (sub)urban novels written after 1960, supported by additional examples from the 1940s onwards to confirm the newly arising trend, will be selected in order to analyze: (1) the persistence of the phenomenon in terms of its adaptation to the character of the (sub)urban novel in comparison to previous developmental stages of Canadian novel; (2) various forms of exclusion and self-exclusion in the selected novels, including the reasons leading to these; and, last but not least, (3) a generalizing assessment of the two phenomena, including its echoes across decades in the most recent (sub)urban novels.
Leona Rohrauer
leonarohrauer@gmail.com
Free lance
On the Role of the Verb in Sentence Information Structure
This paper offers some observations on the role of the verb in information structure on the sentential level. The choice of the theoretical framework is the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) as elaborated by Jan Firbas (1992). The language material is in German, and it was collected from the works of Wolf Haas, a Viennese author with the style marker of everyday spoken German. The research corpus consists of 500 samples of sentences with an omitted verb. Despite the universally acknowledged role of the verb in a sentence as central (both semantically and syntactically), the structures are perfectly legible, and thus the question arises under what circumstances the verb recedes in the background to such a degree that it can be omitted. The results tally with the most recent study exploring deaccented verbs in corpora of spoken Czech (cf. Volín, Hanžlová (2024) ‘Deaccented Verb as an Element in the Utterance Information Structure’, Speech prosody conference paper), i.e. the verbal categories of most frequently omitted verbs involve auxiliary verbs, modal verbs, and copular verbs. On the top of it, we observe full lexical verbs omitted and verb omissions which are not straightforward to fill in. It is also noted that some of the structures simulate dependent adverbial clauses but are in fact mere adverbs (usually of reason). The results offer some insights into the relations the verb enters and its contribution to the unfolding of information in the sentence not only in German, but also in general.
Petra Romportlová
(Poster)
petra.romportlova@tul.cz
Technical University of Liberec
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in Contemporary Education
This poster explores the critical shift from teacher-centred pedagogy to learner-centred Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in contemporary education. CLT emphasises meaningful communication and the development of practical language skills over rote learning and grammar-focused instruction. By encouraging active student participation, collaboration and authentic language use, CLT promotes learner autonomy and critical thinking. However, the transition to CLT is impeded by several challenges, including insufficient teacher readiness, curriculum rigidity, resistance to pedagogical change and resource constraints. In addition, cultural and institutional barriers, such as large class sizes and traditional assessment practices, complicate its implementation, particularly in contexts where teacher-centred methods predominate. This study reviews international research on CLT implementation to provide a comprehensive overview of its global practice. To contextualise the study, it examines the Czech educational environment through a literature review and pilot testing in primary schools, analysing how CLT principles are interpreted and implemented locally. While the challenges are significant, CLT offers considerable potential for improving language education by addressing learners' communicative needs in a globalised world. The findings underscore the importance of targeted professional development, innovative teaching strategies and systemic support to facilitate a successful transition to learner-centred pedagogy.
Valeriya Sabitova
valeriya.sabitova@ff.cuni.cz
Charles University, Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures
Staged Body: Challenging Un-Staged Reality
My paper will depart from Rachel Hann’s conceptualization of scenographics as a form of atmospherics whose interplay between bodies, materials, and devices engenders tangible experiences. Hann argues that certain paintings orient physically and emotionally, connect different senses of the world, and can, therefore, be understood as in some way “scenographic.” I approach this proposition through an interdisciplinary lens by looking at Francis Bacon’s Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1963) and Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1968), Duncan Macmillan’s play People, Places & Things (2015), and Juul Kraijer’s series of photographs (2014-2024). While each work pursues a distinct agenda within its own medium, it will be argued that the notion of the “staged body” in these pieces challenges the perception of un-staged reality. The common thread among these diverse works is the prevalence of staged postures that transform bodies into objects within a spatial context; hence the term “staged body” refers to the deliberate construction of physical presence that transforms bodies into spatial objects with performative aspects. By analyzing physical distortion and setting in Bacon’s works, the twisted body in Kraijer’s photography, and the body in Macmillan’s exploration of addiction, identity, and theatricality, this paper argues that the body is not merely an object through which scenographic experiences are articulated; rather it is inherently scenographic. The body produces sensation and affect through its interaction with surrounding elements, creating complex images in which bodies are shaped by and shape their environments.
Jiří Šalamoun
salamoun@ped.muni.cz
Masaryk University
From Destruction to Redemption: The Deep Web as Sacred Space in Pynchon's Bleeding Edge
This paper examines the unprecedented synthesis of technology and religion in Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge (2013) through close textual analysis and comparative reading with his earlier works. While in Pynchon's previous works, such as Gravity's Rainbow (1973), technology is depicted primarily through destructive manifestations like V2 rockets decimating London, with religion serving merely to legitimize such violence through practices like Zen archery and OUIJA board sessions, Bleeding Edge presents a markedly different vision. The paper shows that in this novel, technology and religion create a potent antidote for capitalism and life destruction through the sacred space of the Deep Web. By demonstrating how resistance and redemption become possible through this synthesis of technology and religion, this paper identifies a revolutionary shift in Pynchon's approach to both. This development, which is not yet adequately described in available research literature, shows Pynchon moving from his traditionally Luddite skepticism toward a nuanced vision where digital spaces can enable rather than prevent spiritual experience and political resistance.
Filip Salcburger
filip.salcburger01@upol.cz
Palacký University Olomouc
Contextualizing Gameplay as a Method for Description and Characterization
This paper aims to explore the narrative, ludic, and descriptive aspects of Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, Take-Two Interactive, 2018). More specifically, it aims to analyse the ludic/narrative aspects of the game, their structure and resulting effect on player agency and, by doing so, find out how their inclusion in the game affect the separate, non-narrative, paidic aspects.
This analysis is predicated on the understanding that, like many other Rockstar games, Red Dead Redemption 2 presents the player with a clear separation between the ludic, story sections of the game and the paidic, free-roam sections, making it difficult to satisfyingly categorize them as either narrative or game. Relying on theories of narrative by Marie-Laure Ryan, Seymour Chatman, Gérard Genette and others, and on theories of games by Espen Aarseth, Gonzalo Frasca, Jesper Juul, and Marie-Laure Ryan, this paper will seek to present descriptivity, in relation to narrativity and ludus, as a potential method of approaching videogame media, and as a potential explanation for those videogame elements that cannot neatly be categorized as either narrative, or ludus.
The purpose of this paper is to further the understanding of videogames in narratology by focusing on those aspects of videogames that are not easily approachable from either a ludic, or a narratological standpoint, in line with the approach outlined by Aarseth, and to see how different parts of narrative theory can help us in doing so.
László Sári
sari.laszlo@pte.hu
University of Pécs, Hungary
Residual History: Neoliberalism and Remains of the Cold War in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses Novels
The paper argues that Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels (and short stories, from 2010 to the present) build an extended storyworld in which residual narratives from the Cold War era intersect with contemporary political and economic pressures on the secret services to create a crisis for the very framework in which the secret services are to operate. In the fictional Britain of the Slow Horses, new technologies of surveillance as well as the reconfiguration of the British political and economic climate upset the spheres of intimate, private, and the public, and the novels and short stories offer a contingent, and as such, pessimistic, consolation for patriotic sentiment by the Slow Horses' traditional reliance on the archive and memory, by a return to a repressed traumatic past that is instrumental in (barely) avoiding an even more traumatic future.
Pavel Sedláček
pavel.sedlacek@vut.cz
Brno University of Technology
Evaluating the Future of Point Roberts: Prospects for Canadian Succession
The Treaty of Oregon of 1846 resulted in a unique geopolitical situation for Point Roberts. The territory remained part of the United States, but it became accessible solely through Canada, or by sea. Prior to 2001, the open border policy facilitated relatively seamless connections with the rest of continental United States and cross-border cooperation with Canada flourished. However, the 9/11 events brought significant restrictions to cross border movement and the COVID-19 pandemic made Point Roberts completely isolated, leading to significant changes in demographics and business environment. The situation deteriorated to the point when serious discussions regarding the potential secession of Point Roberts to Canada are taking place. This paper aims to examine the current situation and explore possible future outcomes.
Majid Shirvani
shirvanim17@univie.ac.at
Vienna University
Negotiating Identity through Dialogue: A Bakhtinian Analysis of Philip Roth’s Contribution to Jewish-American Literature
This article explores the interrelation of dialogic language and identity in the works of Philip Roth, emphasizing the dynamic process of identity negotiation within Jewish-American literature. It examines two primary dimensions: Roth’s employment of dialogic relationships between characters and the authorial voice, and the contribution of trans-linguistic factors in shaping the understanding of Rothian characters and their constructed realities. By utilizing Bakhtin’s diverse concepts, this analysis underscores the importance of meta-language in viewing identity as a relational construct. Through this lens, Roth’s narratives emerge as rich dialogues that reveal how individual identities are formed and negotiated amid social, cultural, and historical interactions. The findings highlight Roth’s significant contribution to the exploration of Jewish-American identity, illustrating how dialogue functions not only as a literary device but also as a means of asserting identity amidst the complexities of a multicultural society.
Eva Skopečková
skopecko@kan.zcu.cz
Department of English, Faculty of Education, University of West Bohemia
Student Teachers’ Attitudes to Translation and L1 in ELT: Communication Facilitator or the Last Resort?
“Translation has been too long in exile, for all kinds of reasons (…). It is time it was given a fair and informed appraisal.” (Widdowson, 2003, p. 160). This need has been echoed by a considerable body of scholarly work and research studies (Butzkamm & Caldwell, 2009; Cook, 2010; Garcia, 2014; An & Macaro, 2022; Molway et al., 2022), including the almost three-year-long research project (2021-2023) that assessed a concrete didactic model for optimal translation - and learners’ own language - practice in English Language teaching (OTP in ELT) through its integration into teacher education program for EFL lower-secondary school teachers in the Czech Republic (Skopečková, 2024). Nevertheless, apart from suggesting an alternative way to approach translating and learners’ own language use in the language classroom, the research yielded several inspiring findings that served as an incentive for further research. It was mainly “the relative consistency of the rather positive attitude towards learners’ own language as a communication facilitator” that student teachers tend to admit despite the “sort of expected legacy of the negative connotation that translation and own-language use have in the ELT context” (Skopečková, 2024, p. 208). Employing action research design (including pre-and post-surveys and focus group interviews), the present follow-up research project aims to explore this issue, elaborating on further aspects of student teachers’ attitudes regarding learners’ own language and also translation use in the ELT context. The present contribution presents the preliminary results and indicates further steps in the present research project.
Jeff Smith
smith@phil.muni.cz
Masaryk University
What’s Wrong With This Picture?: The Butch Cassidy Controversy and the Misremembering of Movies
For many years a debate has been underway among movie fans on the internet about a certain key scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the celebrated 1969 “hippie western” that starred Paul Newman and Robert Redford. In this interactive presentation, we will watch the scene and attempt through a brief, informal survey to resolve the debate by separating the meaning of the onscreen events as understood by their creators – screenwriter William Goldman and director George Roy Hill – from their later meanings in mythic and cultural memory. A theory will be suggested regarding how and why misrememberings of this kind happen, and what they tell us about audience expectations for and reception of movies and other popular narrative.
Vladislav Smolka
(With Renáta Timková)
smolka@pf.jcu.cz
University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice, Czech Republic
Preverbal Rhematic Subjects in English: Identification and Prosodic Indication by Slovak and Czech Students
The paper explores the ability of Slovak and Czech university students of English to identify and, accordingly, prosodically indicate the rheme in sentences implementing the presentation scale by preverbal subjects carrying the intonation nucleus. While this type is common in English, Slovak and Czech speakers may find this prosodic structure counterintuitive, as the rheme in their respective native languages, regardless of its syntactic function, is typically positioned at the end of the sentence, resulting in final intonation nucleus in spoken language.
The data for the research will be obtained by recording Slovak and Czech students reading aloud a short text containing the structures in question. Four groups of participants will be examined: one will include first-year students without prior instruction concerning English intonation; another will include BA students who have taken English phonetics in the course of study; the third group will consist of advanced MA students, and the last will be a control group consisting of native speakers of English.
The analysis of the data will focus on nucleus identification by the participants and on comparison of the results, within and across the respective groups, with emphasis on the degree of native language interference. Attention will be given to the ability of the Slovak and Czech participants to interpret linguistic clues indicating the information structure in English, such as determination, verb semantics, etc.
Markéta Šonková
sonkova.marketa@gmail.com
Independent researcher
Minding the Gaps: The New Zealand Approach to Countering Terrorism after the Christchurch Attacks
The paper will present how the Christchurch terrorist attacks of March 2019 changed the approach of New Zealand towards terrorism, which led to minding and bridging multiple gaps: policy, political, legislative, but also trans-continental; the paper will look at both the inward and outward gaps and they were bridged. Despite previous international cooperation, New Zealand became quickly involved and turned into a leader in new approaches to fighting terrorism and co-funded, alongside France, the Christchurch Call to Action, which grew into a global initiative, as well as broadened and deepened cooperation with other relevant stakeholders. The local response to the attacks was also specific due to the empathetic leadership of the then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who helped give human face to the new measures. Similarly, the post-attack investigations paid attention to local as well as indigenous realities of New Zealand and presented a comprehensive approach of how to unite the population shaken by such an atrocity. The aim of the paper is to show in what ways was the reaction in New Zealand different, point to the local realities – paying attention to the role of local leadership as well as indigenous realities, and what lessons-learned can be drawn into the future from the New Zealand example. Especially since the legacy of the attacks is still very pertinent as others draw inspiration from it and it set a precedent in the way this kind of content was streamed and shared online.
Don Sparling
don.sparling@gmail.com
Masaryk University
Southern Ontario Gothic in the Work of Barbara Gowdy, Timothy Findley and Richard B. Wright
Much has been written about Southern Ontario Gothic as a genre – its combination of realism and anti-realism; its propensity for exploring, beneath the ordinary, everyday pattern of life, fears and thwarted desires; its deep moral and ethical concerns; its probing of humans’ terrible ability to destroy both themselves and others. Several authors writing in this genre have become internationally famous – to mention just three, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies. This paper will deal with three other Canadian authors whose work is also based firmly in this genre: Barbara Gowdy, Timothy Findley and Richard B. Wright. Though less well known to general readers, and increasingly absent from university curricula, their best works offer versions of the Southern Ontario Gothic that are unique, and in many ways far more uncomfortable and disturbing than the creations of other authors in the genre. Apocalyptic war, a strangely ambivalent avian pandemic, a petty, vengeful god, necrophilia, child stalking, the rape and murder of a boy, assisted euthanasia – these are only some of the themes and settings giving rise to what has been termed the “extremism” of some of their work. The aim of this paper is to examine how these devices function and why the authors use them – which may indeed be one of the reasons why they have “fallen through the cracks”.
Kateřina Šteklová
katerina.steklova@ujep.cz
Purkyně University, Ústí nad Labem
Contrastive Pitch Movement in Native and Non-Native Speech. A Comparison of Intonation Patterns
This contribution discusses the role of intonation patterns as contrastive devices in discourse from the perspective of the native speaker of English (NS) as adopted by non-native speakers (NNS) with Czech as a mother tongue. Typological considerations lead to predictions of transfer phenomena of these patterns for NNS as interpreted as auditory gestures (cf. PAM, Best 2021) which lead to a variety of effects like narrower frequency bands, lower F0 etc. Data set is represented by NS and NNS recordings obtained from a number of NS as control group and a larger number of NNS which are spectrographically analyzed, contour plots compared and statistically evaluated. A comparison of the predictions with the findings offers novel insights into NNS-accented speech of Czech learners and enables suggestions for more formalized teaching of English intonation patterns.
Bartosz Suchecki
(With Radosław Dylewski)
Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz Univerisity in Poznań
Is the Modal Preterite Phenomenon Truly an American Phenomenon? A Study Based on the News on the Web Corpus
Greblick (2000: I) identifies the Modal Preterite Phenomenon (MPP) as a feature of colloquial North American English, exemplified by sentences like “I should’a went to Miami when I had the chance.” MPP involves a modal verb (would, could, should, must, might, or occasionally may), followed by an abbreviated form of the auxiliary have (’a or ’ve, pronounced like of), and concluding with a preterite form of the verb instead of the expected past participle. While Greblick describes MPP as distinctly North American, Chatten et al. (2024: 13–14) document its presence in both American and British English, suggesting it may have originated in the United States before spreading globally.
Using the Corpus of News on the Web (NOW), we investigated whether MPP is uniquely American or a broader linguistic phenomenon. Our analysis examined MPP usage patterns, adopting a broader definition that included fully rendered instances of auxiliary have. We analyzed sub-corpora from the United States, Great Britain, and also from Ireland (given the historical transoceanic links).
Surprisingly, the Irish sub-corpus showed the highest normalized frequency of MPP, with 0.84 cases per million words (956 instances in 1.14 billion words). In contrast, the American sub-corpus yielded 0.51 cases per million words (2,890 instances in 5.63 billion words). British English exhibited much lower frequencies – 0.21 cases per million words (451 instances in 2.15 billion words). These findings challenge the notion of MPP as predominantly American, highlighting its prominence in Irish English instead.
References:
Chatten, Alicia, Kimberley Baxter, Erwanne Mas, Jailyn Peña, Guy Tabachnick, Daniel Duncan and Laurel MacKenzie. 2024. “‘I’ve always spoke like this, you see’: preterite-to-participle leveling in American and British Englishes.” <a href="https://www.english-corpora.org/now/">American Speech</a> 99, 1: 3–46.
Greblick III, Anthony J. 2000. The Modal Preterite Phenomenon (MPP) in Colloquial American English: A Diachronic and Synchronic Analysis. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of Southern California [University of Southern California Digital Library].
Corpus of News on the Web (NOW): https://www.english-corpora.org/now/.
Magda Sučková
suckova@vut.cz
Brno University of Technology
Expressing Praise and Criticism in Dissertation Reviews
Evaluation, namely expressing praise and criticism, is at the very heart of dissertation theses reviews, an understudied (and – in many national contexts – occluded) academic genre. These important evaluative documents present a minefield of face threatening acts (Brown and Levinson, 1987): the reviewers need to assert their expert opinion, request clarification and additional information to be given at the defense and provide advice on how to improve the text before the potential publication. All this, in English-medium academic discourse, requires a heavy use of redressing and mitigating devices in order to cater to the positive and/or negative face needs of all parties involved, including the Ph.D. candidate, their advisor, the reviewer, and possibly their affiliate institutions, too.
In this paper we draw on Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory to study the use of both hedging and boosting expressions utilized when giving praise and criticism in a corpus of 32 English-language dissertation reviews. In addition, we analyze the occurrence and function of positively and negatively connoted words in evaluative comments and the incidence of praise-criticism pairs.
References
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.
Jan Suk
jan.suk@uhk.cz
University of Hradec Králové
Bridging the Gaps: Pedestrian Sublime, Theatre of Goat Island & Michel de Certau
The present paper draws a transversal line between pedestrian practices and performance productions of Chicago-based theatre Goat Island. Elaborating on Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, I want to examine the interrelationship and parallels between the two phenomena, particularly in their exploration of space, time, and resistance to dominant narratives.
I am departing my analysis from the notion of "pedestrian sublime" as advocated by Adrian Heathfield. He uses the term "pedestrian sublime" to describe a concept in which everyday, mundane experiences are elevated to moments of profound reflection and transcendence. Heathfield suggests that even the most ordinary acts—like walking or observing one’s surroundings—can reveal beauty, depth, and meaning, akin to the feelings often associated with the sublime. By playing with the contrast between the "pedestrian" (ordinary, commonplace) and the "sublime" (awe-inspiring, beyond comprehension), I propose that sublime experiences are not confined to grand, dramatic events or natural wonders; instead, they can be found in the quiet, subtle aspects of daily life. This concept encourages a re-enchantment with the everyday, inviting a deeper engagement with the seemingly trivial or overlooked aspects of our environments and routines. The pedestrian sublime can thus be rooted in the present moment and ordinary human actions, bringing a sense of wonder to the act of simply being present, hence it is a suitable tool for bridging the gap between performance art and the everyday.
Anna Světlíková
anna.svetlikova@tul.cz
Technická univerzita v Liberci
Responses to Trauma in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Lila
The novels of Marilynne Robinson, an acclaimed American fiction writer, essayist and public speaker, have been described as “philosophical” and at the same time “domestic,” but scholars have also analyzed their representation of trauma, which is a particularly prominent theme in Robinson’s first novel Housekeeping (1980) and her fourth novel Lila (2014). The former depicts the response to trauma of several female orphans, particularly the novel’s narrator Ruth; the latter centers on a single female orphan, Lila. Following Michelle Balaev’s pluralistic interpretation of traumatic experience in literature and her focus on the literary use of place and landscape in connection to the representation of the memory of trauma, I discuss the characters’ multifaceted responses to trauma in connection to existing ecocritical readings of the selected novels, which have focused on the role of “wild” nature in Housekeeping and the garden in Lila, and the concepts of home in both novels, to show that remembering trauma can be an active and creative interpretative process in which the character redefines her identity in an ongoing negotiation.
Gertrud Szamosi
szamosi.gertrud@pte.hu
University of Pécs
Filling the Gaps: Reimagining Nature in Literary Landscapes
Throughout history, the wind has been vital in advancing human progress. It powered early explorers as they sailed across the globe, fostering discoveries, trade, and technological innovation. Today, it remains a crucial source of renewable energy. Despite its many contributions to humanity, the wind retains an air of mystery, embodying a natural force that resonates deeply and personally with each of us.
From an ecocritical perspective, the wind is a versatile and potent symbol, reflecting the complex and often paradoxical relationships between humans and the environment. The wind shapes the dynamic interplay between ecological systems and human narratives, whether as a literal natural force or a metaphor for change, freedom, and resistance.
I will argue that the wind is one of the central characters in Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven (1990), a contemporary Canadian novel. The main human character, Ann, is a Bronte scholar in Toronto and writes a book about Wuthering Heights: A Study of Weather. This paper will analyse the wind as the focal character: introduce its many features, the roles it plays in the different settings of the novel—in the Yorkshire Moors, Toronto, the Arctic, and Venice—and its relationship with other characters, and also provide examples of the wind as a metaphor in relation to the themes and the title of the novel.
Zuzanna Szatanik
zszatanik@ubb.edu.pl
University of Bielsko-Biała
She Would Prefer Not To. A Reading of Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation
The cover of Otessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel features a painting entitled Portrait of a Young Woman in White created c. 1798. It shows one of the merveilleuses, i.e. French aristocratic women who survived the Reign of Terror and shocked the society with lavish parties and sheer tunics. The young woman in white, however, looks neither entertained nor traumatized. Instead, she looks positively bored.
Even though Moshfegh’s novel is set in New York City at the turn of the millennium, its unnamed Narrator finds herself feeling less and less animated. This is a desired state of mind, part of a project of her own design whose aim is for her to hibernate for a year. In an attempt to numb herself to the outside world, the Narrator takes increasingly higher doses of drugs. Importantly, however, it is not obliteration that she is after but a form of hard reset: she wants to reemerge into the world anew.
Much has been said about the novel in the context of the Narrator’s past trauma or the state of modern Western culture. The focus of this feminist reading, however, is on its unique representation of the “female malady” and the self-imposed “rest cure.” The Narrator repurposes the private sphere of her apartment, clearing it of any signs of domesticity. The narrative also reverses the traditional hierarchy between a psychiatrist and their patient - stereotypically a man and a woman respectively - and parodies the methods that used to be employed to treat “feminine disorders.”
Judit Szathmari
szathmari.judit@arts.unideb.hu
University of Debrecen
Coyote Waits, Coyote Springs, and has Four Souls: Trickster’s Appeal in 21st-Century American Indian Studies in Central Europe
American Indian Studies, likewise other field studies, saw radical changes in the past few years. The attempt to indigenize scholarship has indisputably impacted research by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. Gaps, however, still might obstruct cooperation and hinder understanding. Minding these gaps may take many forms and point beyond academic discussions. The presentation proposes to explore the possibilities of how Four Souls of Coyote, a Hungarian animated “adventure drama” testifies to how the academic and non-academic, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, local and universal binaries/ gaps may be reconciled through the introduction of the figure of Trickster. Four Souls of Coyote defies Western bias “toward economic and political interpretation” (Champagne) and offers a holistic cultural interpretation, a central notion to American Indian cultures. Widely circulated not exclusively in Hungary, Four Souls of Coyote also allows for the emergence of public platform debates, lacking in the attempts of indigenizing American Indian Studies. Since Trickster figures are “both creators . . . but also put constraints upon [the world] . . . by creating culture and institutions” (Champagne), the presentation explicates on the appeal of the American Indian culture hero to jump the gaps separating “us” from “them,” academic discourse from popular culture, the US from Europe.
Szilárd Szentgyörgyi
szentgyorgyi.szilard@htk.uni-pannon.hu
University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary
Problematic Speech Sounds – Where Do They Belong?
In this talk I will present how the sonorant phonemes /j/, /w/, /l/, or /r/ usually considered to be hardcore consonants, or /h/, which is considered to be a fricative within the class of consonants, escape clear categorization and function as sounds of ambiguous status in English and other languages.
To demonstrate their manifold behaviour, I will present their special status in syllable structure, the phonotactic constraints on their occurrence - for example, the prohibition of the glottal fricative in the syllable coda - and the allophonic alternations specific to these sounds - for example, the English [j]~[ɪ] or [w]~[ʊ] alternations in piano or usual-type words.
The above phenomena and the conclusion to be drawn from them will allow us to come to generalizations that can be used in language teaching – for example, to teach the phenomenon of hiatus filling in English by reference to similar phenomena in another language – and to develop methodological tools to teach the different properties of these sounds possible to classify in different ways by analogy from different areas of the language learner’s mother tongue.
Renáta Timková
(With Vladislav Smolka)
renata.timkova@upjs.sk
Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia
Preverbal Rhematic Subjects in English: Identification and Prosodic Indication by Slovak and Czech Students
The paper explores the ability of Slovak and Czech university students of English to identify and, accordingly, prosodically indicate the rheme in sentences implementing the presentation scale by preverbal subjects carrying the intonation nucleus. While this type is common in English, Slovak and Czech speakers may find this prosodic structure counterintuitive, as the rheme in their respective native languages, regardless of its syntactic function, is typically positioned at the end of the sentence, resulting in final intonation nucleus in spoken language.
The data for the research will be obtained by recording Slovak and Czech students reading aloud a short text containing the structures in question. Four groups of participants will be examined: one will include first-year students without prior instruction concerning English intonation; another will include BA students who have taken English phonetics in the course of study; the third group will consist of advanced MA students, and the last will be a control group consisting of native speakers of English.
The analysis of the data will focus on nucleus identification by the participants and on comparison of the results, within and across the respective groups, with emphasis on the degree of native language interference. Attention will be given to the ability of the Slovak and Czech participants to interpret linguistic clues indicating the information structure in English, such as determination, verb semantics, etc.
Nikola Tutek
ntutek@uniri.hr
University of Rijeka
Margaret Atwood's Flash Fiction Story “Stump Hunting“ – Canadian Post-Modern Code
This article first discusses the basic theoretical and thematic features of the so called 'post-modern literature’ in the Anglophone literatures. Based on the presented literary theory, the article exemplifies Canadian post-modern literary code through the analysis of Margaret Atwood’s short story “Stump Hunting” from the collection Good Bones and Murder. The aim of the article s to show that, although often neglected in Southeastern Europe (in the consideration and teaching of the post-modern Anglophone literature), Canadian literature offers illustrative examples of literary creation that can be considered exemplary post-modern literature, Atwood’s flash fiction certainty being on of the important ones.
Key words: Margaret Atwood, post-modern, “Stump Hunting”, literary theory
Alexey Tymbay
alexey.tymbay@tul.cz
Technical University of Liberec
Communicative Strategies at the Age of Chatbot Pragmatics
In the age of "chatbot pragmatics" (Kecskes, 2024), communicative strategies of human interaction have significantly evolved. Traditionally, pragmatic principles in human communication emphasize context, shared knowledge, and the cooperative principle, where meaning is co-constructed between interlocutors. In contrast, interactions with chatbots are governed by "prompting" as the primary strategy. Besides, chatbot pragmatics is deprived of widely used implicit cues, non-verbal communication, and the ability to adjust to the dialogue partner situationally. While human-human communication is fluid and adaptive, human-chatbot interaction necessitates a strategic adaptation by the user, often focusing on reducing ambiguity and optimizing the input for machine processing. This shift underscores a fundamental difference in communicative strategies, transitioning from co-constructed meaning in human dialogue to user-driven clarity in human-machine exchanges. The report presents the results of a case study involving 24 participants engaged in chatbot communication (Chat GPT) to complete a list of various tasks that required different levels of contextual understanding. The experiment aimed to explore how prompting strategies impact the effectiveness of human-computer interaction. The participants were divided into two groups: one group received training on prompting techniques, while the other did not. Task completion rates, user satisfaction, and the frequency of chatbot misunderstandings between the two groups were then compared for equivalence (non-inferiority). It was concluded that prompting, while making communication more effective, requires users to frame their inputs to align with the machine's understanding, often requiring specificity and adherence to specific linguistic patterns to elicit the desired response.
Reference
Kecskes, I. (2024). What does intercultural pragmatics have to do with chatbot pragmatics? In 10th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication (INPRA).
Zénó Vernyik
(With Nandi Weder)
zeno.vernyik@tul.cz
Technical University of Liberec
“We Are the Little Girls You Couldn’t Scare”: Len Pennie’s Feminist Dollhouse
Scots poet Len Pennie's debut volume, Poyums, has arrived with a bang, receiving the 2024 Scots Book of the Year Award and ranking #2 on the Sunday Times Nonfiction Bestseller List. Having been praised for its wit, playful rhymes and deeply critical content, our presentation focuses on the use of the imagery of childhood, including fairy tales and toys, and the perspective of a young girl to poignantly criticize oppressive aspects of abusive relationships. We argue that the perspective of a child, alongside the paraphernalia of childhood, provides an opportunity for a more effective and striking criticism of the abuse. This is since the popular, if at times mistaken, association of childhood with innocence, naivety, sheltered existence and other similar qualities, through the effect of artistic contrast, shows the act of the abuse, as well as the abuser, in a harsher, and more dramatic light.
Ludmila Volná
ERIAC Université de Rouen Normandie
(The) English in India: R. K. Narayan’s Perspective
When R. K. Narayan (1906-2001), one of the so called Founding Fathers of Indian writing in English, published his first novel in 1935, India was still under the British rule. In his writing, the author creates and recreates an imaginary South Indian town called Malgudi, which can be seen as a metonymy for India (Mukherjee). There is a significant emphasis on what can be defined as ‘Indianness’, the Indian way of life and cultural values, as is also evident in his non-fiction works.
In this light, and given that Narayan's writings refer to both the colonial and the post-colonial periods, it is pertinent to examine the ways in which he addresses the power-related as well as other aspects of colonialism. It can be argued that, while employing subversive strategies and critiques of the power-based colonial schemes/designs, Narayan does not focus on confrontation and/or victimisation, but on India’s quest for a “self-defining and self-sustaining” condition (Ashcroft et al.). To this end, the paper will further discuss, the author employs his specific humour, irony and bathos, the rewriting of myths, as well as some of the theoretical-philosophical and cosmological concepts of Indian culture. Selected texts will be analysed to illustrate this.
Kamila Vránková
vrankova@jcu.cz
University of South Bohemia
To Fill the Gaps: The Sublime and the Gothic in Anglo-American Children’s Fantasy Fiction
The paper will discuss the types of Anglo-American children´s fantasy fiction with respect to various theoretical approaches (J. Goldthwaite, R. Jackson, F. Mendlesohn, P. Hunt, K. Coats) as well as to particular authors (for example, Peake, Barrie, Baum, Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Pullman, Snicket, Gaiman). The discussion will concentrate on the specific role of the sublime in these texts, considering especially the influence of the Gothic and Romantic sublime on the concept of the liminal experience and the theme of transformation in children´s literature. In particular, the fantastic stories will be observed with respect to Burke´s fear of emptiness and Lyotard´s idea of the unspeakable, as well as to the Kantian concern with imagination, which can span the distance between the familiar and the unknown, overcome the split between childhood and adulthood and achieve the experience of wholeness.
Corin Wardzich
c.wardzich@doctoral.uj.edu.pl
Jagiellonian University in Kraków
“I Am Discovering Parts of Myself Hitherto Unknown”: The Possible Queer Readings of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things
The 2023 film adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things has been described as polarising by many critics and news outlets. With reviews ranging from praises of the visuals to criticisms of the number of sex scenes, it is understandable that many audiences have been left with different readings of the film through the lens of feminist and Marxist criticism. However, there is a small but intriguing subset of online reviews that are concerned with various queer readings of the film. The paper aims to bring attention to these readings and open a discussion for the possible interpretations of the movie through a queer lens, ranging from an analysis of the portrayal of women-loving-women relationships and sapphic desire in the movie to a possible interpretation of the storyline as a trans coming-of-age narrative. The research will use the aforementioned reviews as a starting point for a wider analysis of the cinematic work from the perspective of queer/trans studies and auto/biography studies. The frameworks will be used not only to determine the quality of those portrayals but also to engage with how the authors of online reviews of the film use these theories. Finally, the paper will attempt to address Lanthimos’ attempts at utilising some of the aforementioned critical frameworks, particularly Marxist criticism, in his work.
Nandi Weder
(With Zénó Vernyik)
nandi.weder@tul.cz
Technical University of Liberec
“We Are the Little Girls You Couldn’t Scare”: Len Pennie’s Feminist Dollhouse
Scots poet Len Pennie's debut volume, Poyums, has arrived with a bang, receiving the 2024 Scots Book of the Year Award and ranking #2 on the Sunday Times Nonfiction Bestseller List. Having been praised for its wit, playful rhymes and deeply critical content, our presentation focuses on the use of the imagery of childhood, including fairy tales and toys, and the perspective of a young girl to poignantly criticize oppressive aspects of abusive relationships. We argue that the perspective of a child, alongside the paraphernalia of childhood, provides an opportunity for a more effective and striking criticism of the abuse. This is since the popular, if at times mistaken, association of childhood with innocence, naivety, sheltered existence and other similar qualities, through the effect of artistic contrast, shows the act of the abuse, as well as the abuser, in a harsher, and more dramatic light.
Jana Zerzová
(Poster)
79615@mail.muni.cz
Masaryk university
ASD Pupils’ English as a Foreign Language Skills Development: Obstacles, Strengths, Weaknesses, Preferences and Adjustments
The poster aims to present findings from a research study on ASD learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome conducted at the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Education, Masaryk University. It presents the ASD learners’ views on their EFL classroom experience, the obstacles they face and preferences they have in their EFL skills development and implications for EFL teachers, summarizing the adjustments or accommodations in the classroom environment and the teaching process informed by the research. The sample consisted of ten ASD learners of English from lower- and upper-secondary schools and ten ASD adults. The data were collected via semi-structured interviews and qualitative surveys, transcribed and analysed via a deductive and inductive thematic analysis. The findings present guidelines that are important for EFL teachers on how to accommodate ASD pupils in their classes.
Petra Zmrzlá
zmrzlapetra@vut.cz
Brno University of Technology
Expressing Praise and Criticism in Dissertation Reviews
Evaluation, namely expressing praise and criticism, is at the very heart of dissertation theses reviews, an understudied (and – in many national contexts – occluded) academic genre. These important evaluative documents present a minefield of face threatening acts (Brown and Levinson, 1987): the reviewers need to assert their expert opinion, request clarification and additional information to be given at the defense and provide advice on how to improve the text before the potential publication. All this, in English-medium academic discourse, requires a heavy use of redressing and mitigating devices in order to cater to the positive and/or negative face needs of all parties involved, including the Ph.D. candidate, their advisor, the reviewer, and possibly their affiliate institutions, too.
In this paper we draw on Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory to study the use of both hedging and boosting expressions utilized when giving praise and criticism in a corpus of 32 English-language dissertation reviews. In addition, we analyze the occurrence and function of positively and negatively connoted words in evaluative comments and the incidence of praise-criticism pairs.
References
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.
Éva Zsizsmann
zsizsmann.eva@gmail.com
Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Budapest
Crimes You Find Along the Way: Tamas Dobozy, Stasio (2024)
My paper deals with the latest collection of novellas by the 2012 Rogers Writers Trust of Canada Fiction Prize winner Tamas Dobozy.
Stasio is a “terrible detective” with a penchant for overcomplicating cases that, typical of the noir detective genre, often fail to lead to ‘satisfying’ conclusions where law and justice neatly prevail over the criminal element. The crime he starts out looking at is never as important as the other crimes he finds along the way. My paper aims at revealing the way the three novellas in the volume use a given crime as a point of departure to explore political, social, and psychological issues.
Dobozy’s take on the detective mystery format is heightened by his unique prose style characterised by lyricism, crisp dialogue, well-drawn characters, and intellectual depth. Despite the typically dark nature of the content, plot, and characters, there is room for witticism and surrealism in his narratives.
A story of false identity and betrayal, Stasio is also a prime example of how the past in Dobozy’s fictions is never dead, forgotten, or erased — only transformed. It is a ghost, a psychological haunting that can’t be exorcised, inevitably compromising the present. I propose to focus on the noir elements of the narrative and throw light on the way it differs from the standards of the genre.