Buchreihe zu den Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Marta Degani Werner Delanoy (eds.) Power in Language, Culture, Literature and Education Perspectives of English Studies Power in Language, Culture, Literature and Education Buchreihe zu den Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik / Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Herausgegeben von / edited by Alexander Onysko, Ulla Ratheiser, Werner Delanoy Mitherausgeber: innen / Editorial board: Sibylle Baumbach, Marcus Callies, Marta Degani, Alwin Fill, Walter Grünzweig, Sarah Herbe, Walter Hölbling, Julia Hüttner, Allan James, Cornelia Klecker, Ursula Kluwick, Benjamin Kremmel, Andreas Mahler, Christian Mair, Georg Marko, Frauke Matz, Sabine Pfenninger, Peter Siemund, Ute Smit, Laurenz Volkmann, Max von Blanckenburg, Werner Wolf, Libe García Zarranz Erstherausgeber / Founding editor: Bernhard Kettemann Band 28 Marta Degani / Werner Delanoy (eds.) Power in Language, Culture, Literature and Education Perspectives of English Studies Published with the support of the Research Council and the Faculty of Humanities and Education at the University of Klagenfurt. DOI: https: / / doi.org/ 10.24053/ 9783823396048 © 2023 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Alle Informationen in diesem Buch wurden mit großer Sorgfalt erstellt. Fehler können dennoch nicht völlig ausgeschlossen werden. 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Internet: www.narr.de eMail: info@narr.de CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0939-8481 ISBN 978-3-8233-8604-9 (Print) ISBN 978-3-8233-9604-8 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-8233-0481-4 (ePub) Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. www.fsc.org MIX Papier aus verantwortungsvollen Quellen FSC ® C083411 ® 9 25 41 59 79 97 119 149 Contents Werner Delanoy & Marta Degani Power in Language, Culture, Literature and Education: Perspectives of English Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part 1: Perspectives from English Linguistics Alexander Onysko Power to the Englishes? - Reflections on the Notion of Equality in World Englishes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christopher Blake Shedd Martin Luther King as a Wielder of Power. A Linguistic Analysis of Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marta Degani About Attributions of Power and Political Control: Crititical Reflections on Populism and its Challenges from Linguistic Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vesna Lazović ‘Wherever You Go, Your Bank Travels with You’: Personification as a Powerful Strategy in British and Serbian Online Bank Advertisements . . . Nikola Dobrić & Günther Sigott The Use of Error Profiles in Applied Linguistics - Empowering Language Instruction by Cataloguing Rating-negative Performance at the English Department, University of Klagenfurt, Austria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Eva-Maria Graf, Frédérick Dionne & Melanie Fleischhacker The Transformational Power of Questioning Practices in Coaching - Insights from Linguistic and Interdisciplinary Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part 2: Perspectives from Anglophone Literatures and Cultures Alexa Weik von Mossner The Power of Love: Reading The Silver Linings Playbook as Romantic Neuronovel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 181 201 215 233 255 279 301 323 347 Marijana Mikić Ecosocial Harm, Grief, and Communal Empowerment in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carina Rasse Feeling for Others: Environmental Justice, Emotion, and Moral Imagination in Lina Hogan’s Solar Storms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iris van der Horst “I Am Husband Now in Master Frankford’s Place”: Abuse of Power in the Main Plot of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness . . . . . . . . . Matthias Klestil Unveiling Subjection, Practicing Subjectivation: Race, Power, and Strategies of Rewriting the Self in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition . . . Ursula Posratschnig The Story of Meat - Challenging Carnist Ideology, Science Denial, and the Erasure of Animal Cruelty, Ecocide and Social Injustice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Armin Lippitz, René Reinhold Schallegger & Felix Schniz Disempowering the Controller - Videogames and the Metanarrative of Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part 3: Perspectives from English Language Education Werner Delanoy The Power of Literature (Teaching): Experiencing Warsan Shire’s Home . . Anita Millonig Post-inclusive Education, Diversity and Multilinguality in ELT . . . . . . . . . . Ursula Posratschnig & Günther Sigott Teaching Academic Writing to Undergraduate Students of English in Klagenfurt: From the Word to the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carmen M. Amerstorfer & Clara Kuncic The Power Within: The Motivation, Interest, and Engagement of Students in Problem-based Preservice English Teacher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 371 391 Irena Vodopija-Krstanović Understanding EMI Teacher Empowerment: What Does it Mean and How Can it Be Enhanced? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contents 7 Power in Language, Culture, Literature and Education: Perspectives of English Studies Werner Delanoy & Marta Degani 1 Introduction In one of the contributions to this edited volume an interviewee argues that “English is power”. For researchers in the field of English Studies this raises the questions of where the power of English resides and which types and practices are implied in the uses of English. In this book, linguists, scholars of literature and culture, and English language educators address aspects of these questions in a wide range of contributions. The book shows that the power of English (Studies) can oscillate between empowerment and domination, on the one hand enabling humans to develop manifold capabilities and on the other inhibiting their scope of empathy, reflection and action. As for the basic intention informing this book, a case is made for perspectives in English Studies which are dialogic, empowering and power-critical in approach. Indeed, power is a highly controversial concept with multiple meanings. In the following, we will offer a definition of the term permitting inclusion of practices of domination and liberation. We will then apply this concept to some perspectives of English (Studies). Finally, the different articles in this volume will be introduced to highlight their specific contributions to a highly diverse and controversial field of research. 2 What do we mean by power? When working on this volume, we came across a feeling of unease among our colleagues, who pointed out that the term power was too negatively connoted to permit a discussion of empowerment practices in the interest of a dialogic and democratic agenda. This did not come as a surprise considering that since the advent of neo-Marxist, postmodernist, poststructuralist or postcolonial perspectives the focus has shifted to concepts viewing power as hegemony and domination, with Michel Foucault’s work serving as a major reference point. However, on closer inspection, such an understanding of power would severely curtail engagement with the highly diverse uses of the term. Moreover, it would be very limiting to reduce power-critical schools to such an understanding. For example, the later Foucault suggested a notion of power inclusive of freedom, resistance, reversibility and social change, thus himself calling into question “an extremely pessimistic interpretation” of his work (Heller 1996: 105). This raises the question of how power can be defined to integrate its diverse manifestations without losing sight of its productive and restrictive dimensions. In philosophy, such a definition is suggested by Byung-Chul Han. For Han (2005: 7), there is widespread theoretical confusion over the meanings of power, a term which is ubiquitously and controversially invoked in different fields of research. To avoid such confusion, he, therefore, suggests a neutral definition capable of encompassing divergent notions. For him power opens up space for an “ego” or “self ” to find continuation in an “alter” or other self (Han 2005: 14, 76). This definition is echoed by Foucault in The Subject and Power (1982: 789-790), where power is discussed in neutral terms as a contextually situated set of actions impacting the actions of other people. Building on the later Foucault, Kevin Jon Heller (1996: 103-104) explains that “power is not evil itself ”, that it can be used “to increase the freedom of others, or to capture them in relations of domination”. Summing up, Foucault, Han and Heller advocate a flexible notion of power, where not power itself but its diverse uses merit particular attention. The uses suggested by the contributors to this volume all aim for empower‐ ment through practices of English Studies. Such a focus necessitates further clarification of what we mean by empowerment. Our understanding of the term is shaped by Hannah Arendt’s notion of power as expressed in her book The Human Condition (2018 [1958]). Arendt’s understanding of the human condition rests on three basic principles, plurality, natality, and power as the force to create a democratic public realm. While plurality stands for the uniqueness of human beings and the diversity of human life approaches, natality denotes the human capacity of rebirth, of creating change (Arendt 2018: 175-178). As regards the third principle, power is defined as the force to create a “public realm […], where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities” (Arendt 2018: 200). Finally, Arendt views such power as a potential with uncertain outcome. As a potential, continuous actualization is required to keep a democratic public realm alive (ibid.: 200, 204). As situated in “an ocean of uncertainty” it is “never safe from the disruptive initiatives of further actors” (Canovan 2018: xxxi). 10 Werner Delanoy & Marta Degani Of course, Arendt’s perspective is only partly compatible with the definition of power suggested above. While for Arendt power equals ongoing creation of a democratic public realm in a plural and uncertain world, our definition is more neutral and broader in scope, making Arendt’s notion applicable to only one set of power practices amongst others. Moreover, Arendt’s theory comes with limitations when discussed in the light of current power-critical debates. Arendt is mainly focused on humans, while current ecological and posthumanist perspectives have made a case for de-centering humans to include non-human actants, be they animals, environmental or technological forces. Moreover, critical theory after Bourdieu, Butler, Delanda, Foucault, Said or Spivak has drawn attention to structural forces going beyond those of plurality, nativity and democracy-building, thus highlighting how humans are shaped by hegemonic discourses, colonial mindsets, or regimes of discipline, and how they are enmeshed in highly complex networks inclusive of human and non-human actants. In the light of these theories, humans are not as free to determine their lives as Arendt’s position may suggest. However, this does not mean that Arendt’s perspective is incompatible with those presented by critical theorists. Foucault (1989: 790), for example, also views plurality (“subjects are faced with a field of possibilities”) and the capacity to create something new as basic structural constituents of power relations. We, therefore, treat the two perspectives as implicated in each other, and as stimuli for mutual critical self-inspection. Following Heller (1996: 79), Foucault views power as an ambivalent capacity, both shaping and being shaped by humans, both dominating and liberating them. Indeed, we view ambivalence as a pre-condition for critical thinking, our understanding of ambivalence linking back to Peter Zima’s dialogic theory. Zima (2000: 368) suggests a perspective where ambivalence is treated as ultimately irreconcilable, where opposite poles cannot be fully resolved in a synthesis. In line with such a concept, neither absolute domination nor freedom are possible since the two poles are always competing with each other. In other words, even in contexts in which empowerment is the aim, its initiators are implicated in socio-cultural contexts they can only partly grasp and control. Conversely, when moves are hegemonic in intention the wish to dominate also clashes with the plurality of available options and the creative potential of humans. To our mind such a position on the one hand necessitates self-critical reflection whereand whenever empowerment is envisaged. On the other hand, it can help highlight possibilities for resistance and liberation where domination and hegemony are practiced. Power in Language, Culture, Literature and Education: Perspectives of English Studies 11 So far, we have repeatedly invoked the term dialogue without explaining what we mean by it. As further explained in Werner Delanoy’s contribution to this volume, our notion of dialogue rests on the belief that all human understanding and initiative is subject to manifold limitations but can be widened and transformed through respectful and (self-)critical engagement with diverging viewpoints. Despite our preference for such a concept, a note of caution should be added here. According to Zima (2000: 369, 376), people also take risks when committing themselves to the power of dialogue. On the one hand, their empowerment may significantly grow through inclusion of divergent perspectives. Also, such inclusion can foster interand transcultural conviviality on local and global levels. On the other hand, confrontation with other viewpoints can also overwhelm subjects, thus potentially threatening their sense of self and reducing their capacities to act. This may happen to individual and collective subjects, the discipline of English Studies being one of them. 3 The power of English Studies After Foucault, speaking of English Studies as a discipline or subject immediately draws attention to the field’s implication in power relations. For Foucault, discipline refers to practices of power which affect people’s desires, thinking and corporality in a manner “that allow[s] them to act in appropriate and expected ways and to do so through the exercise of self-control” (Scott 2001: 94). Such a perspective invites meta-reflection on the disciplinary power of English Studies practices. Despite its importance, such meta-reflection, however, goes beyond the confines of this volume. Let us just add that in light of an ambivalent understanding of power we see discipline both as a restrictive and productive force, limiting and enabling people’s scope for empowerment. The same can be said of the term subject. On the one hand, it refers to subjection, that is to how English Studies practices and practitioners are shaped by forces outside their control. On the other hand, scholars have coined the term subjectification to refer to the possibilities of human independence from such forces (Biesta 2016: 21; Heller 1996). Following Zima (2000: 414), we believe that the freedom of subjects resides in their abilities to self-critically and creatively engage with different perspectives in ongoing debate. Such engagement is also what we have in mind for English Studies. The power of English Studies to a great extent results from the popular demand for English in a globalized modernity. Its economic utility is a major factor for widespread motivation to invest into learning English as a foreign language, leaving those at a disadvantage whose proficiency levels remain 12 Werner Delanoy & Marta Degani low. Moreover, the dominance of English may result in “linguicide”, that is the disappearance of small languages with little market value (Phillipson 2008). The still growing demand for English as an international language undoubtedly re‐ sults from Britain’s imperial past and the United States’ wide-reaching political, economic and military power. Indeed, we strongly believe that the subject’s past and present cannot be divorced from colonial and imperial ideologies, finding expression, for example, in the preference for particular varieties of English, canons or interpretation practices. Also, the market for English Studies publications is by and large controlled by publishers operating from Inner-circle countries, such as Britain, the US, Canada or Australia, thus also subjecting authors from outside to these publishers’ rules and regulations. Finally, in global popular culture the influence of Hollywood, Netflix or communication platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, all with strong roots in anglophone countries, can have a significant impact on people’s structures of feeling, thinking patterns and modes of interaction. Yet, the use of English as an international language has also opened up manifold possibilities for empowerment. English as a global language can foster intercultural dialogue, promote cosmopolitan conviviality, and give marginalized voices a better chance to be heard. The use of English as a lingua franca is moulding English in new ways, thus extricating English from the control of a small circle of players. Moreover, new orientations in the study of culture, the so-called cultural turns (Bachmann-Medick 2016), have opened up manifold space for critical self-inspection and the development of alternative concepts. Colonial, racial, genderor class-related hegemonic practices have been critically questioned in the interest of more egalitarian, diverse, cosmopolitan and dialogic initiatives. In literature, canons have been deconstructed, revised and replaced by poly-central text ensembles. The shift from British and US-American literature to literatures in Englishes has drawn attention to writers and socio-cultural practices from all over the planet. Also, the inclusion of popular and digital media has significantly widened the scope of English Studies, bringing it into contact with other subjects and their academic traditions. As stated above, to our mind, English Studies should aim for dialogic empow‐ erment. In other words, English Studies is seen as a dynamic field committed to a democratic agenda and open to manifold directions for new development. As a dialogic discipline, English Studies should (self)-critically engage with past and present hegemonic practices in its different and changing areas of concern. Moreover, such English Studies not only shows respect for difference Power in Language, Culture, Literature and Education: Perspectives of English Studies 13 but also cultivates plurality to create a rich basis for mutual enlightenment and innovation. Furthermore, English Studies must reflect upon its specific contributions to the humanities and beyond to make the subject a particular public realm, the way Arendt has defined this term. For us, this specificity results from engagement with different and changing uses of Englishes in diverse local and global contexts with the aim of empowering its users. In the light of such a program, English Studies is a dynamic and open-ended field of enquiry, as in Bakhtin’s (1981: 30) diction “there is no first word and the final word has not yet been spoken”. Therefore, following Rob Pope (2002: 12), we are in favor of an approach to English Studies which aims at preparing “[…] the way for subjects, disciplines and forms of knowledge which as yet have no name”. While we believe that the power of English justifies the continuing existence of English Studies as an academic subject in its own right, transdisciplinary dialogue may well lead to new subject formations with parts of English Studies only playing an ancillary role. In fact, English Studies itself came into existence through a reconfiguration of disciplines by replacing, for example, Rhetoric (Pope 2002: 13), and it may itself be subsumed under emerging subjects such as Global Citizenship Education or Game Studies, the two being referenced in the contributions to this volume. Finally, power is always situated in specific contexts and constrained by its contextual embedding. Of course, this is also the case for our book project, which is inextricably linked to the history and aims of the department from which we speak, namely, the English Department at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. All the contributors to this volume are affiliated to this department both as regular staff members, project team members and external lecturers. The 18 articles included highlight the diversity of English Studies as practiced in this location and the contributors’ commitment to practices of dialogic empowerment. While in some of the contributions the tried and tested is revitalized in the light of new theories and challenges, other book chapters show a subject in transition with new perspectives emerging. 4 The contributions in this volume Our grouping of the contributions reflects common divisions in English Depart‐ ments. In English Studies it is still common practice to view language, literature, culture, and language teaching as the main areas of investigation plus as the main categories for departmental differentiation. Building on this system, we have also grouped the contributions in this volume around the categories of (a) 14 Werner Delanoy & Marta Degani linguistics, (b) literature and culture, and (c) language education. However, we are aware that there is manifold overlap between and exchange across them. In other words, some of the articles would equally fit into at least one of the other sections. Moreover, the four domains are highly heterogeneous entities with different histories, aims and approaches. This is also the case in the present volume. Finally, some of the contributions go beyond the categories used, thus indicating the need for different categorization within and beyond the field of English Studies. In the following, the individual contributions will be introduced section by section: (a) Perspectives from English linguistics In the first contribution to our volume an English linguistics perspective is introduced which highlights plurality and diversity of Englishes across the world. In “Power to the Englishes? Reflections on the notion of equality among world Englishes”, Alexander Onysko discusses how, on the one hand, research into different Englishes has created a diversified and rich knowledge base on Englishes in the world while, on the other, this research has so far failed to truly emancipate non-standardized Englishes. The chapter provides an extensive and detailed discussion of the theoretical approaches to the study of world Englishes that have been proposed in the literature so far, with a specific focus on the range of heuristic models that have been (and still are) employed to categorize Englishes around the globe. The contribution closes off with a provocative reflection on the concept of ‘nativeness’, making a call for abandoning this controversial notion in order to take a significant step towards empowering all Englishes. In the following chapters, the focus lies on the moves and strategies underlying powerful discourses. In “Martin Luther King as a wielder of power”, Christopher Blake Shedd conducts a linguistic analysis of one of King’s books, namely, Where do we go from here: Chaos or community? Shedd analyzes how the civil-rights-movement leader made use of the lexical item power in this seminal publication. By integrating lexical semantics with etymological research, the author shows how King refers back to a quote by Alfred the Great and expands on it in the interest of a democratic and peaceful agenda. Moreover, King’s definition of power is discussed, which strongly overlaps with the definition offered in our introduction. In similar terms, King views power as the ability to affect others, and he also distinguishes different uses of power, ranging from democratic empowerment to violent repression. His contribution is followed by Marta Degani’s “About attributions of power and political control: Critical reflections on populism and its challenges from Power in Language, Culture, Literature and Education: Perspectives of English Studies 15 linguistic perspectives”. In this chapter, Degani critically reflects upon the manipulative power of right-wing populist discourses, shedding light on the complexity of this phenomenon. With the help of Critical Discourse Analysis, populism is discussed as a discursive reality with its specific objectives, strategies and topics. In addition, a typology is introduced to highlight the most relevant features of right-wing populist discourse. By doing so, a power-critical perspective is suggested for engagement with a hegemonic discourse that can seriously undermine a democratic agenda. In the following chapter, which focuses on the strategic use of language in banking discourse, Vesna Lazović investigates personification as a powerful strategy in British and Serbian online bank advertisements. The author’s theoretical basis is Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and she shows how both British and Serbian banks have made use of the ontological metaphor INANIMAT E I S H U MAN (and the two sub-metaphors A B AN K I S A P E R S O N and A B AN K S E R VI C E I S A P E R S O N ) to present themselves as reliable and trustworthy, stimulate positive reactions, and influence the decision-making processes of their clients. Again, this article documents how language is used to wield power, that is to attract people’s attention, to impact their feelings and to make them act in certain ways. Nikola Dobrić and Günther Sigott’s chapter “Use of error profiles in applied linguistics - Empowering language instruction by cataloguing rating-negative performance at the English Department, University of Klagenfurt, Austria” would equally fit into our section on English Language Education. As the subtitle reveals, the two authors aim for empowering language instructors and error raters by systematically cataloguing specific error types at distinct proficiency levels. Dobrić and Sigott present their model with reference to a learner corpus of written student performances compiled at the English Department at the University of Klagenfurt. In their discussion, the two authors demonstrate how an erstwhile but no longer dominant area in applied linguistics (Error Analysis) can be revitalized to give practitioners the tools for understanding how errors work and which errors deserve particular attention at different competence levels. The final contribution in this section is an article co-written by Eva-Maria Graf, Frédérick Dionne and Melanie Fleischhacker. In “The transformational power of questioning practices in coaching - Insights from linguistic and inter‐ disciplinary research”, the authors discuss how certain questioning practices can initiate self-reflection processes, invite changes in perspective and generate new knowledge in the context of a particular helping profession. In their chapter, a combination of Conversation Analysis and psychological perspectives is suggested to discuss the empowering potential of certain question types. 16 Werner Delanoy & Marta Degani The data presented are taken from the authors’ project Questioning Sequences in Coaching (QuesCo). Different from the other chapters in this section, this contribution is situated in applied linguistics more generally and takes an interdisciplinary approach to analyze coaching discourse as an example of Conversational Analysis in a helping profession. (b) Perspectives from anglophone literatures and cultures In the first three contributions of this section a traditional textual practice - that of close reading - is revitalized and reshaped by interlinking literary, cultural and neuroscientific perspectives. All contributions show how literary texts can foster their recipients’ empathetic capabilities in the interest of dialogic empowerment. In “The power of love: Reading The Silver Linings Playbook as a romantic neuronovel”, Alexa Weik von Mossner highlights how a love story can pre-structure reader response through its generic appeal and narrative design to widen the recipients’ scope for empathy and acceptance of otherness. Drawing on cognitive cultural theory, the author demonstrates how a combination of culture-related perspectives and neuro-scientific insight can help redefine the dialogic power of literature. In the following contribution, Marijana Mikić’s theory building is also informed by a combination of cognitive psychological research, narrative and critical theory. The author offers a close reading of Sherri L. Smith’s Afrofuturist young adult novel Orleans. In her contribution “Ecosocial harm, grief, and communal empowerment in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans”, she investigates how grief can empower readers to care for others subjected to oppression, marginalization and ecological harm. In her discussion of the novel, Mikić shows how Smith’s text “can […] be a catalyst for imagining and practicing more communal and liberating ways of engaging with the world”. Empathy, ethics and environmental concerns also play a key role in Carina Rasse’s “Feeling for others: Environmental justice, emotion, and moral imagination in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms”. In her discussion of the novel, Rasse interlinks ecocritical, narratological and cognitive neuro-scientific concepts to explore the relationship between literature, emotion, social criticism and environmental ethics. Building on the notion of “embodied simulation” (Gallese 2005), the author explains how readers can become cognitively, affectively and somatically engrossed in fictional worlds, and how they can develop empathy for the characters portrayed and their social concerns. The following two chapters offer a historical and a contemporary perspective on uses of power in literary texts. The first article is focused on a Jacobean play. In “‘I am a husband now in Master Frankford’s place’: Abuse of power in the main plot of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness”, Iris van der Horst offers an in-depth reading of the play with an eye to the various Power in Language, Culture, Literature and Education: Perspectives of English Studies 17 power imbalances and abusive power dynamics written into the text. The author situates her text analysis both in the play’s historical context and in that of modern concepts, thus drawing attention to the play’s past and present significance. While a comparison between the play and Jacobean conduct man‐ uals can help document the unusually harsh treatment of Master Frankford’s adulterous wife, the modern concept of consent permits a re-evaluation of the illicit relationship between her and Frankford’s close friend. In this modern context, this relationship no longer classifies as adultery but as sexual assault. In the next chapter, Matthias Klestil builds on the distinction between subjection and subjectivation to discuss how Charles W. Chestnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition can give insight into racial oppression and open up space for black people’s socio-cultural empowerment. Klestil’s focus is on Foucauldian ideas of self-construction. In his analysis of Foucault’s late ethical phase, Klestil shows that the French philosopher’s notion of self includes domination through an other (subjection) and liberation from such a force (subjectification). The author then applies these two concepts to Chestnutt’s novel, thus offering a reading of the text which can simultaneously focus on “the legacies of race” and on “strategies of resistance and resilience”. The last two contributions in this section show new directions for English Studies and equally belong to subjects beyond our discipline. The first one brings together critical animal studies and ecocritical discourse analysis. In “The story of meat”, Ursula Posratschnig challenges, as her subtitle reveals, “carnist ideology, science denial, and the erasure of animal cruelty, ecocide and social injustice”. In her discussion of “western mainstream beliefs and practices regarding meat consumption”, Posratschnig documents the destructive effects of industrialized meat production and consumption on human and non-human beings, plus the environment. One of the author’s central concerns is that of erasure, which she defines as the “systematic absence of discourses […] that would reveal connections between meat and ecocide, social injustice, health hazards, and extreme physical violence inflicted on nonhuman animals”. Armin Lippitz, René Schallegger and Felix Schniz have specialized in Game Studies research. In “Disempowering the controller: Videogames and the metanarrative of agency”, the three authors focus on player disempowerment in videogames as a design strategy. They emphasize the empowering potential of such a strategy by pointing out how videogames that deny their players agency permit critical insight into complex life-worlds and can offer new perspectives for engagement with them. Building on critical concepts of agency, plus gamespecific definitions of interactivity and aesthetics, they turn to six concrete examples to highlight their potentialities for player empowerment. 18 Werner Delanoy & Marta Degani (c) Perspectives from English language education The final section focuses on practices of English language education. In “The power of literature (teaching): Experiencing Warsan Shire’s Home”, Werner De‐ lanoy situates English language education in a dialogic perspective combining a post-Gadamerian hermeneutics and critical theories informed by Bakhtin and cosmopolitan philosophy. As regards the power of literature, he uses reader response criticism and its dialogic capacities as a starting point to highlight the particular possibilities of aesthetically motivated discourse. In its practical dimension, the article calls attention to written and multi-modal versions of Warsan Shire’s poem Home. In his discussion, Delanoy refers to the potential power of the text to immerse readers in an unfamiliar world and to challenge existing modes of feeling and thinking. In line with the first three chapters in the literature and culture section, the power of the literary text discussed again resides in its appeal to widening people’s scope of reflection and empathy. The concern for voices going unheard is also a key theme in Anita Millonig’s “Postinclusive education, diversity and multilinguality in ELT”. In her contribution, Millonig makes a case for including the learners’ manifold first languages in English language education, thus offering a critical perspective on monolingual ELT practices (cf. Phillipson 2010: 15-16). Her understanding of post-inclusion links back to the aims of intercultural and critical pedagogy. Following Yildiz and Heydarpur (2018), such a program makes diversity on different linguistic and socio-cultural levels the basis for teaching and learning practices offering equal chances to all students. Millonig not only offers a theoretical perspective but also supports her arguments with concrete data gained from a school ethnography project she carried out herself. In “Teaching academic writing to undergraduate students of English in Klagenfurt: From the word to the world”, Ursula Posratschnig and Günther Sigott present a two-pronged concept combining a from-paragraph-to-essay approach with Global Citizenship Education. As for the mechanics of academic writing, the authors argue in favor of what they see as the dominant approach in anglophone academia. However, their concept goes far beyond the mere mechanics and the manifold skills informing this dominant practice. The authors also call attention to the importance of critical language awareness and mindful language use. Moreover, they interlink academic writing with engagement with important socio-political and ecological challenges. The final two chapters present perspectives on teacher-empowerment in different areas of English Language Education. Carmen Amerstorfer and Clara Kuncic give insight into their approach to pre-service teacher training in ELTcourses accompanying the teaching internships at Klagenfurt University. In Power in Language, Culture, Literature and Education: Perspectives of English Studies 19 “The power within: The motivation, interest, and engagement of students in problem-based preservice English teacher education”, the authors make a case for problem-based learning as a methodology to foster professional creativity, pre-service-teacher collaboration and sustainable learning. They also present the findings of an empirical study, which confirm that this methodology positively impacts student motivation and can help achieve the objectives pursued. The focus of Irena Vodopija-Krstanović’s article is on EMI (English as a medium of instruction) teacher empowerment. In her chapter, the author explains that in higher education the need for English medium instruction in subjects other than English has grown very strongly in the past two decades. While she underlines the importance of academic English language proficiency for international mobility and competitiveness, she also calls attention to the fact that the vast majority of the programs offered are located in the UK, US, Canada and Australia. Thus, as regards EMI, Vodopija-Krstanović distinguishes two directions for empowerment. First, it can widen the professional scope of academics outside English Studies significantly. Secondly, a case is made for offering EMI-programs in non-English speaking countries to reduce the market-dominance of anglophone institutions. The author then documents her university’s efforts -the University of Rijeka in Croatia - to offer EMI-focused teacher-training programs. References Arendt, H. (2018 [1958]). The Human Condition. Second Edition. With a New Foreword by Danielle Allen. Introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press. Bachmann-Medick, D. (2016). Cultural Turns. New Orientations in the Study of Culture. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: Austin University Press. Biesta, G. J. J. (2016). Good Education in an Age of Measurement. London/ New York: Routledge. Canovan, M. (2018). Introduction. In H. Arendt, The Human Condition. Second Edition. With a New Foreword by Danielle Allen. Introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chi‐ cago/ London: The University of Chicago Press, xix-xxxii. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8 (4), 777-795. Gallese, V. (2005). Embodied simulation. From nervous to phenomenal experience. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4, 23-48. Han, C. H. (2005). Was ist Macht? Stuttgart: Reclam. 20 Werner Delanoy & Marta Degani Heller, K. J. (1996). Power, subjectification and resistance in Foucault. SubStance, 25, 1 (79), 78-110. Phillipson, R. (2008). Lingua franca or lingua Frankensteinia? English in European integration and globalization. World Englishes, 27 (2), 250-267. Phillipson, R. (2010). Linguistic Imperialism Continued. New York/ London: Routledge. Pope, R. (2002). The English Studies Book. An Introduction to Language, Literature and Culture. London/ New York: Routledge. Scott, J. (2001). Power. Cambridge/ Malden: Polity. Yildiz, E. and S. Heydarpur (2018). Vom Methodologischen Nationalismus zu einem postinklusiven Bildungsverständnis. Kontrapunktische Betrachtungen. Erziehung und Unterricht, 5-6, 1-11. Zima, P. V. (2000). Theorie des Subjekts. Tübingen: Francke. Power in Language, Culture, Literature and Education: Perspectives of English Studies 21 Part 1: Perspectives from English Linguistics Power to the Englishes? - Reflections on the Notion of Equality in World Englishes Alexander Onysko 1 Introduction In English studies, the early 1980s witnessed the emergence of a new branch of linguistic research that shifted the focus onto the diversity of Englishes across the world and abandoned the monolithic conception of ‘the English language’. Braj Kachru, one of its foundational scholars, introduced the notion of Englishes to highlight the essential differences and variation of codes that have historically derived from English but have taken on different forms according to their various linguistic and social contexts. In Kachru and Smith’s terms Englishes symbolizes the functional and formal variation in the language, and its international acculturation, for example, in West Africa, in Southern Africa, in East Africa, in South Asia, in Southeast Asia, in the West Indies, in the Philippines, and in the traditional English-using countries: the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. (Kachru and Smith 1985: 210) The acknowledgement of diversity came with a call for the emancipation of English speakers in different socio-political territories, particularly in those nations that gained independence from Britain. This chimed in with the post‐ colonial struggle of freedom and identity formation, which became part and parcel of postcolonial literature studies, speaking of the appropriation of the colonizer’s language to give voice to liberated, self-affirmed identities in what Bhabba (1994) terms cultural hybridity. Since the late 1990s, the world-wide diversification of Englishes has also been perpetuated through electronic means of communication that have evolved from e-mail, Internet-based services such as websites, blogs and chats, to multiple applications of social media communication primarily accessed via mobile devices. These global channels of linguistic interactions have boosted both the reach and the use of Englishes as major global means of interand transcultural communication. Building on Bhabba’s claim that Englishes have become a voice of cultural hybridity, electronic forms of communication have added a layer of medial hybridity to using Englishes, which is manifest in the mixing of genres and registers, influenced by the specific affordances of online communication and characterized by a frequent mixing of semiotic modes of communication (e.g. text and images, cf. James 2016). In the analysis of the different forms and uses of Englishes, linguistic hybridity emerges as a general characteristic since Englishes are shaped by the interaction of different linguistic conventions and various linguistic codes, as evident in the occurrence of language contact features (e.g. mixing of codes, borrowing or calquing). While the diversity of Englishes is thus the result of the different sociocultural realities of their users, the acknowledgment and labelling of different Englishes in the emerging research paradigm of World Englishes was grounded on the awareness that the ‘new’ Englishes are fully fledged languages in their own right and not an aberrant form of a standardized code of English. The following quote by the Indian literary critics Naik and Narayan is an example of this ideological emancipation. Years ago, a slender sapling from a foreign field was grafted by “pale hands” on the mighty and many branched Indian Banyan tree. It has kept growing vigorously and now an organic part of its parent tree, it has spread its own probing roots into the brown soil below. Its young leaves rustle energetically in the strong winds that blow from the Western horizon, but the sunshine that warms it and the rain that cools it are from Indian skies; and it continues to draw its vital sap from this earth, this realm, this India. (Naik and Narayan 2004: 253, qtd. in Kirkpatrick 2007: 85-86) Using the image of the many branched and multiply rooted Indian Banyan tree, Naik and Narayan create a powerful metaphoric analogy describing that English became part of India and that it is now an Indian tongue (among the multilingual constellations present in the subcontinent). From the point of view of World Englishes, this expression of linguistic emancipation is also an implicit call for Indian English (and by extension all Englishes) to be considered equal among other Englishes, particularly in relation to standardized English dialects. As pointed out in a recent chapter by Saraceni and Jacob, the beginnings of research into World Englishes were very much driven by the ambition to “redress the inherent inequality that existed between varieties of English […] and […] to achieve equal Englishes” (2021: 11). Despite this noble intention, the authors find that the notion of “equal Englishes” has remained a mere façade that obstructs a clear view of the Englishes-speaking world as being built on unequal Englishes up to the present day. 26 Alexander Onysko On this ideological backdrop of the strive for equality among Englishes across the world, the current contribution will throw into relief the main approaches and concepts that have characterized World Englishes research so far. Special emphasis will be given to the critical assessment of how the research paradigm of World Englishes has failed to achieve its foundational goal of facilitating Englishes to become equal among each other. Some thoughts are offered in closing on what might be a condition that can make Englishes come closer to this ideal(ized) state. 2 A multitude of Englishes and theoretical approaches While it is virtually impossible to do adequate justice to the plethora of research that has defined the field of World Englishes (WEs) during more than four decades of research, the intention of this section is to highlight some of the main theoretical models that define our understanding of Englishes more generally. In addition, certain key notions have become important shapers of scientific discourse on the subject, and the function of English as a global language and lingua franca is another crucial domain relevant to the discussion. To begin with major theoretical models, the field has been characterized by the Three Circle Model of Englishes devised by Braj Kachru as part of the initial phase of world Englishes research (1983, 1985, 1988). The model has evolved out of an earlier distinction of Englishes into ENL (English as a native language), ESL (English as a second language) and EFL (English as a foreign language) (Strevens 1978), which has been recast by Kachru into three circles of Englishes labelled Inner Circle (corresponding to ENL), Outer Circle (corresponding to ESL), and Expanding Circle (corresponding to EFL). While the differentiation into second language and foreign language has become a matter of debate in the field (cf., e.g., Deshors 2014; Gilquin 2015) since it is basically a question of language acquisition in diverse multilingual contexts, Kachru drew a line between the two so that the Outer Circle prototypically captures Englishes in postcolonial contexts whereas the Expanding Circle refers to English being used as a main learner language in nations where English does not have a more widespread use among the population or other institutionalized functions. At the time when the model was proposed, it offered a terminological shorthand to raise awareness to the existing plurality of Englishes across the world and had the invaluable function of providing a basic template for research into the multitude of Englishes. As the field evolved, however, the model became subject to repeated criticism (e.g. Bruthiaux 2003), as, among others, its conception maintained a hierarchy of center vs. periphery, in which the more Power to the Englishes? - Reflections on the Notion of Equality in World Englishes 27 powerful center is defined by countries in which English is spoken as a ‘native’ language such as the UK, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. From the point of view of current world Englishes research, continued reference to a stratification of Englishes in terms of the Three Circle Model (and to labels such as ENL, ESL and EFL) thus reinforce a hierarchical, unequal conception of Englishes. Other early models trying to map Englishes across the world took a less hierarchical albeit territorial view. MacArthur’s Circle of World English (1987) arranges Englishes according to continents and nations, which is also the approach taken by Görlach (1988). Besides national and ethnic labels of Eng‐ lishes (e.g. Australian Standardized English, Aboriginal English), MacArthur also acknowledges the existence of diaspora Englishes that form among migrant communities of other language speakers such as Hispano-English in the US and Ukranian English in the Canadian context. This dimension is lacking in Görlach’s model, which, on the other hand, includes English-based Pidgins and Creoles among the diverse territorial Englishes. MacArthur’s and Görlach’s models can be taken as representative of a general territorial and social classification of Englishes, i.e. a listing and labelling of Englishes corresponding to national and social/ ethnic names. This kind of approach has been criticized due to the fact that national labels tend to gloss over internal variation and that social/ ethnic labels are essentializing categories that fail to acknowledge the fluid and dynamically shifting ways of language use that characterizes speakers of Englishes and languages in general. More recent research in the field (D’Arcy 2010; Degani and Onysko 2021) has adopted the no‐ tion of ethnolinguistic repertoires (Benor 2010), which emphasizes the fact that codes can be variably and flexibly employed to index ethnic identities. The static conception of Englishes as nationally-bound entities has been deconstructed in research focusing on Englishes as part of globalizing non-territorial dynamics, as expressed in terms such as global flows (Pennycook 2007), metrolingualism (Pennycook and Otsui 2015), the sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert 2010), and superdiversity (Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Vertovec 2007). In a similar vein, a translingual approach to languages (and Englishes) laid out in Canagarajah (2013: 8) emphasizes that “semiotic resources in one’s repertoire or in society interact more closely, become part of an integrated resource, and enhance each other. The languages mesh in transformative ways, generating new meanings and grammars”. This perspective on Englishes is further pursued in the works of Lee (2018) and Jenks and Lee (2020) that highlight the fluid and transformative nature of language use, which conventionalized labels and categories of Englishes fail to capture. 28 Alexander Onysko Besides this range of approaches and notions that take a post-varieties turn, World Englishes also became enriched by developments in other fields, most prominently in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (e.g. Geeraerts et al. 2010), which inspired research into cultural models and metaphors across diverse Englishes (see, e.g., Callies and Onysko 2017; Wolf and Polzenhagen 2009). Related research on language and culture, which was initially inspired by work on cognitive anthropology that became labelled cultural linguistics (cf. Palmer 1999), brought about further insights into how Englishes are shaped by cultural conceptualizations of speaker communities that have adopted the language (e.g. Degani 2017; Malcolm 2017). Thus, despite the fact that reference to initial models and their terminology has continued, research in World Englishes has seen richly diversifying theo‐ retical approaches. What is more, theory building in WEs has also been evolving towards process-based models that attempt to describe the diversity of Englishes in the world. Edgar Schneider’s Dynamic Model of the evolution of post-colonial Englishes (2007) was among the first process-based theories. It characterized the evolution of postcolonial Englishes in five stages: foundation, exonormative stabilization, nativization, endonormative stabilization and differentiation. His model has found widespread acclaim in the field and has proven to provide valid insights into the relation between language development and socio-historical events from the spread of English as a colonial language up to its emancipation in postcolonial settings. More recently, Schneider’s model has been built upon by Buschfeld and Kautzsch (2017) who propose the Extraand Intra-territorial Forces Model. In an attempt to address the highly complex factors that influence the uses and functions of Englishes across the world, also outside colonial contexts, Buschfeld and Kautzsch (2017) name a range of ‘forces’ relating to attitudes, policy-making, globalization, socio-demographic speaker variables, tourism and colonization that are held to influence the development of Englishes in Schneider’s five stages. While this theory is still in need to be fleshed out further, other processbased models of world Englishes include typologies of Englishes such as Mesthrie and Bhatt’s (2008) types of what they call the “English Language Complex” (excluding L1 Englishes) and Kortmann et al.’s (2020) classification of Englishes as traditional L1 varieties, high-contact L1 varieties, indigenized L2 varieties, English-based pidgins, and English-based creoles. Some of the labels in Kortmann et al.’s typology acknowledge the role of language contact as a possible classifier of Englishes, and the pivotal role that language contact processes and scenarios play for an overarching modelling of world Englishes is Power to the Englishes? - Reflections on the Notion of Equality in World Englishes 29 more extensively elaborated in Onysko’s (2016) Language Contact Typology of Englishes. Delineating macro-settings of contact that are flexible on historical grounds and potentially variable depending on scale (individual speaker vs. speaker communities), Englishes or uses of English can be described as aligning with the types of Global Englishes (GEs), Englishes in Multilingual Constella‐ tions (EMCs), Learner Englishes (LEs), English-based Pidgins and Creoles (EPCs) and Koiné Englishes (KEs) with examples of standardized English dialects for the latter category. Mufwene’s (2001) model of language contact, which postulates a feature pool uniting all linguistic elements of languages in contact that is available for speakers to draw on, has inspired some other, contact-based models of Englishes. Biewer (2015) applies it to Englishes in the South Pacific and Meierkord (2012) takes it into the domain of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). According to her, when speakers of different languages use English to communicate among each other, this contact situation relies on a pool of features that comprises the Englishes and multilingual repertoires from the speakers involved. Accommo‐ dation and selection from this metaphorical pool are the processes that shape such ELF interactions. In a similar vein, Pitzl (2016) describes ELF interactions as forms of transient language contact that are influenced by the multilingual repertoires of the speakers and their shared multilingual resource pools. In general, researching the uses of English as a lingua franca has become a budding field of research on its own despite the fact that this context of using Englishes is part and parcel of the diversity of Englishes across the globe and thus another facet of world Englishes. The most holistic approach to understanding lingua franca uses of English has been put forward in James’s (2021) tricodal/ trimodal theory of modelling the communicative event involving English as social prac‐ tice. Foregrounding an analysis of Englishes that focuses on the communicative event, James’s model is in line with a post-varieties perspective on Englishes as it is most vociferously argued for in the translingualism paradigm. At the same time, his model of how English and other language elements form heteroglossic discourse offers descriptive linguistic insights by establishing a connection between three modes of language use (identification, representation and action) and the linguistic domains of lexicophonological, lexicosemantic and lexicogrammatical encoding. As the brief discussion of the various theoretical approaches to Englishes and uses of English has shown, research on world Englishes has come a long way from its beginnings of acknowledging the plurality of Englishes across the globe. Despite the ‘stickiness’ of concepts and classifications of Englishes that have determined early scientific discourse in the field, the different models theorizing 30 Alexander Onysko Englishes from process-based perspectives have diversified and increased our understanding of both the complex reality of communicative acts involving Englishes and their abstracted, reified and conventionalized labels as English codes. In view of the ideological framing of world Englishes research in terms of emancipation and equality, the mentioned process-based models steer generally clear of portraying Englishes in hierarchical relationships. Indirectly, however, certain (conventionalized) notions such as native/ non-native Englishes or first and second language Englishes reinforce existing dichotomies of power when used as labels in some of the proposed classifications or when illustrating some of the theories. Among the new models put forward in the last decade, there is actually only one theory that relies explicitly on power differentials in the Englishesspeaking world. This is Mair’s world system of Englishes model, which applies de Swaan’s (2002, 2010) theory of the global language system in analogy to Englishes across the world. From the point of view of the global economy and global political power, de Swaan calls English a “hyper-central” language, i.e. the most important language in the world in terms of economic power and, at the same time, a global promise for upward social mobility and increasing wealth. Accordingly, people all over the world will strive towards acquiring English as the most valuable linguistic capital to have. In analogy, Mair (2013) divides the Englishes-speaking world into more and less central Englishes, putting standardized American English on top of the hierarchy. However, this application of de Swaan’s model suffers from the misleading prediction that all speakers of Englishes will eventually aspire towards speaking standardized American English, which in itself remains difficult to pin down (cf. Lippi- Green 2000; Preston 2005). In fact, if English is conceived of as a global commodity, what would rather be expected is that speakers of other languages (or Englishes) will tailor their English usages according to their communicative necessities that will help them to achieve their economic goals. This can more generally be described as an orientation towards using English as a lingua franca in multilingual contexts (including accommodation to their interlocutors’ Englishes). In a forthcoming publication, Mair (2023) concedes that Pluricentric English is not a happy democracy of voices, but remains a hierarchically structured constellation of varieties and styles. They all command different prices in economic terms and are evaluated very differently in terms of cultural prestige. In this constellation, it is ELF uses that are developing most dynamically. The ELF boom is driven by globalisation and more immediately responsive to economic factors than traditional ENL and EFL uses. (n.p.) Power to the Englishes? - Reflections on the Notion of Equality in World Englishes 31 Mair’s approach can be seen ambivalently since on the one hand, it is certainly an economic truth that Englishes (and among those some codes rather than others) are economic commodities that are instantiated in the global and local markets, and as such a source of capital that people aspire to. On the other hand, the approach is still strongly situated in established categories and labels of reified Englishes furthering the long-practiced institutionalization of Englishes that has, among others, become severely criticized in recent, post-varieties discussions of English-informed codes (e.g. in the translingualism paradigm). Furthermore, the economic side of Englishes is complexly entangled in local and global forms of (c)overt prestige, depending on individual situations and goals. From the point of view of equality among Englishes, Mair’s model makes it clear that linguistic equality is impossible on grounds of political and economic power differences. While this can be taken as a sobering assessment of the ideological backbone of world Englishes, the strive for equality among Englishes has also been commented on critically among world Englishes researchers. The next section will highlight some main arguments in this regard. 3 Decolonizing World Englishes In 2015 Mario Saraceni clearly voiced that while the field of World Englishes had produced a large volume of research, there was little progress made in terms of its initial aspirations to decolonize the language. According to him, World Englishes has reached an impasse. World Englishes began very much as an anti-establishment, revolutionary philosophy, which opposed old, traditional, anachronistic, stale and unrealistically monolithic ideas about English, and proposed new, fresh, modern ideas that would take into consideration the diverse sociolinguistic realities in which English had relocated. Now, the novelty is somewhat wearing off. […] If, nearly 30 years later, we’re still advocating the need to begin to favour plurality against singularity, one could be excused for feeling that, perhaps, there may have been a certain amount of congestion in the field. Where do we go from here? (2015: 3-4) Saraceni’s observation happened at a time when research in World Englishes became influenced more strongly by approaches that highlighted the global, fluid and translingual nature of Englishes (see Section 2). Despite that, he noted that very little progress (if not none) had been made in the applied sense of world Englishes research, i.e. in changing the power structures that continue to favour certain standardized, ‘native’ Englishes over others. In this sense, Saraceni’s metaphor of the impasse describes the situation that the field of 32 Alexander Onysko World Englishes has remained stuck in its noble intentions of creating equality among the Englishes while, in fact, a situation of unequal Englishes has persisted throughout. As such, Saraceni’s voice can be seen as one among others that take a critical view on the role of certain Englishes in the world. Already a few decades earlier, Phillipson (1992) demonstrated how institutionalized Englishes, taking the example of the British Council, continue to be driven by colonial attitudes in spreading standardized English via education globally. Similar observations were made by Skutnabb-Kangas (1988), commenting on how the promotion of (standard) English in education leads to linguicism, which is the discrimination of other languages and their speakers to the detriment and potential loss of other languages. Lamenting the fact that norms of Standard English have continued to domi‐ nate English language education has remained part and parcel of the academic discourse of World Englishes and its extensions into English as a lingua franca and applied linguistics. A recent volume dedicated to “Pedagogies” (Bayyurt and Saraceni 2021) provides a telling overview of that. The most critical notions that have continued to be part of this discourse are the unfounded and unjust practice of “native-speakerism” (e.g. Galloway 2021; Matsuda 2021), British and American centric teaching materials (e.g. Syrbe and Rose 2021), and the lack of alternative norms and assessment practices. In a different volume, Kirkpatrick (2021) provides an engaging account of the issues and finds that although world Englishes (including English as a lingua franca) are now commonly taught in teacher training programmes, they become scarsely implemented in the classroom. He acknowledges that teachers are frequently open to a world Englishes perspective; however, practical reasons such as the lack of coded alternatives (e.g. reference works and teaching materials) stand in the way of implementing non-native speaker targets. According to him, the resilient native speaker model can only be dissolved top-down, which means by changes in the curricula and in the practices of stakeholders involved in the English language teaching industry (2021: 266). As Kubota (2021) argues, this change of English models in the educational domain depends on a necessary break-up of the widespread, normative language ideologies towards English. Normative ideologies are in turn entangled with the commodification of English in the global market place (cf. Park and Wee 2021) and the hegemonic role it plays in the capitalist world system (cf. O’Regan 2021). The issue of liberating (non-standard) Englishes and other languages thus emerges as a gargantuan task and one that causes a challenge to the current world system. It is ultimately connected to a power struggle over capital and Power to the Englishes? - Reflections on the Notion of Equality in World Englishes 33 resources and will target the currently privileged beneficiaries of the standard English commodity in the global market. Saraceni and Jacob (2021) chime in with these observations when they point out that, despite forty years of research into world Englishes, the colonial mindset remains deeply ingrained not only as widespread negative attitudes towards non-standard Englishes, but also in how research on Englishes perpet‐ uates colonial ideologies of elitist language use. Drawing on Mohanty (2017), they state that English remains a language of the elite and that it “benefits the already English-rich […] more than the English-poor” (Mohanty 2017: 275, qtd. in Saraceni and Jacob 2021: 17). To break up the institutionally embedded power hierarchies of Englishes globally, they propose three steps to decolonize world Englishes. A first impor‐ tant aspect is de-mythologizing world Englishes, which means engaging in interdisciplinary research with fields such as history, sociology, politics, and international relations in order to understand more about the world in which Englishes are embedded (2021: 21). Another important aspect is to change the ways we talk and write about the subject of study, avoiding metaphors and expressions that give agency to Englishes rather than its speakers (ibid.). As such de-mythologizing Englishes is closely connected to de-silencing speakers of Englishes and fully embrace them and their first-hand knowledge as part of world Englishes research (2021: 22). Approaches such as citizen sociolinguistics, engaging with communities as a researcher, giving back to communities and their participants as part of research practice as already called for in seminal work by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Decolonizing Methodologies, 1999) is necessary practice to de-silence the users of Englishes. The third necessary condition for decolonizing Englishes referred to by Saraceni and Jacob is de-centering Englishes from current ‘native’-speaker norms (2021: 23). This not only involves English language education but also a more general unsettling of authority over Englishes. Who gets to be heard, who acts as gatekeeper, who is recognized as an expert, who is rewarded for praising decolonized Englishes, and who is rewarded for continuing to use Inner Circle norms? This unsettling must take several forms, as decolonizing entails adapting to the local conditions of coloniality. (Saraceni and Jacob 2021: 23-24) These questions allude to the comprehensiveness and complexity of decolo‐ nizing Englishes and world Englishes scholarship. They also hint at the radical societal transformations that a true unsettling of authority over Englishes will entail. 34 Alexander Onysko 4 Conclusion: Equal Englishes? The discussion so far has highlighted that the field of World Englishes has been ideologically born on good intentions but has failed in causing an application of equality in the practice of how Englishes are used, taught and approached in terms of attitudes and identity constructions. At the same time, research and theoretical understandings in the field have evolved and diversified greatly, doing justice to the manifold manifestations and uses of Englishes and to their fluid, constantly evolving and transformative nature. While the field of research has thus kept apace with studying and describing the phenomenon of Englishes from multiple perspectives, the ideological thrust has stalled despite constant scholarly reminders during the last five decades. Seeing this disconnect between the knowledge that has been built as well as the well-intended scholarly ‘preaching’ that has been done and the actual continuing reality of unequal Englishes, perhaps it is merely time to concede that the notion of ‘equality’ is a fata morgana or an idealized social myth that can never be achieved as it is not how humans organize their lives in social groups. On the other hand, the strive towards equality remains to be an important moral value, which can guide peaceful and inclusive human co-existence and can be instantiated as an underlying value of the institutionalized social practice of law making. From this point of view, it is thus justifiable to ask the question of what can be done to make the Englishes-speaking world a more equal communicative space. As pointed out above, Kirkpatrick (2021) observes that changing the current standard centric model in teaching practice can only happen from the top of English power structures, i.e. by changing attitudes, opinions and actions of institutions laying down curricula and other stakeholders in the language learning industry. This moves institutions as gatekeepers of English such as university Departments of English at center stage in this process, and the question arises of how English departments can contribute to this in the future. In the context of English departments that cater for the study and research of Englishes as a subject, typically from the areas of literature, culture and linguistics, for the study of the language as an object (e.g. promoting language competence), and for the training of English teachers, the disconnect between understanding and practice becomes particularly palpable. On the one hand, critical approaches to Englishes as a subject are frequently part of university courses and to varying degrees also in English teacher education. When it comes to language proficiency, however, implemented models and standards are for the most part still oriented towards standardized British Power to the Englishes? - Reflections on the Notion of Equality in World Englishes 35 or American English and generally towards native speaker norms. In such constellations, English departments frequently find themselves as raising crit‐ ical awareness about Englishes and their socio-historically, culturally and linguistically relevant entanglements, while, at the same time, they reinforce standard centric practice and native speaker idealizations. This makes English departments institutions that preach and praise the postcolonial and the post‐ modern and seemingly embrace concepts such as diversity, plurality, transcul‐ turality, hybridity, multiand translingualism, and so on, whereas they live an institutionalized traditional and colonial practice of standardized native speaker models. Without any claims for proposing a solution, it seems that English depart‐ ments would have to work on alternative means of constructing a competent and successful student (and teacher) of Englishes, ideally in unison with higher level authorities such as ministries, curricular authorities and with publishers of teaching materials. One step in this direction of real progress in English studies and education has long been prevented by a major mental stumbling block: the notion of native speaker. As, among others, Saraceni and Jacob (2021, see section 3) emphasize, English needs to be decentered from native speaker norms and, to extend on that, from native speaker exceptionalism. Doing away with the term ‘native speaker’ might pave the way for a mental change in the current categorical understanding of the concept up to the point that it might fall into oblivion. If we acknowledge the continuous colonial load of this term and its discriminatory and politically incorrect nature, its avoidance becomes an instrumental part of the quest towards a more equal Englishes-speaking world. 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Christopher Blake Shedd 1 Introduction George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (2003 [1980]: 3) argue that people’s thinking is structurally fashioned by the metaphorical concepts they hold; given this, they conclude that language itself provides valuable evidence to identify and describe this structure because of how people use language to communicate, a process undergirded by a metaphorical conceptual system. To achieve an understanding of this system, a fundamental approach using lexical semantics offers tools to understand what a word means (Geeraerts 2017: 2). By understanding a word’s definitions, connotations, and etymology in addition to a word’s metaphorical uses and by delving into how the word has been used in different contexts by multiple language users, a clear, informed understanding of a term and part of a person’s conceptual system as expressed through that term can be attained. In this paper, I analyze the term power as it is used in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (2018 [1967])  1 by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968). This work lends itself particularly well to a study of this word in that King grapples with power, its many forms, and its implications for the civil rights movement and articulates a clarion call to action to urgently redress the drastic racial inequalities in the United States. In his treatment of Black Power, King, invoking the past to explicate his contemporary society’s understanding of power, quotes King Alfred the Great: “Power is never good unless he who has it is good” (61). This quotation is examined in detail to exemplify how the diachronic development of this term can supplement an un‐ derstanding of King’s own use(s) of power. The groundwork for this discussion rests on an investigation into the etymology and definitions of power along with its Old English (OE) predecessor anweald, which occurs in the original text by Alfred. Relevant historical information regarding the source of Alfred’s text is also provided to show how power can be corrupted through translation. Further linguistic analysis of King’s conceptualization of power informs a broad understanding of how the civil rights leader views power, especially in terms of how it is situated in political and racial realities. 2 Methodology The following procedure has been followed to collect and analyze the data for this study: (1) a close reading of King’s text; (2) an itemization of the uses of power in the text; (3) an identification of uses of power not attributed to King followed by an in-depth analysis of selected quotations; (4) an analysis of each use of power by King according to part of speech and its meaning (literal, metaphorical, definitional, connotational); and (5) an expanded analysis of each instance to include a consideration of relevant context (including compiling a list of collocations) and to determine how King conceptualizes power. As part of the in-depth analysis of one of the quotations King includes, further research into the source of the quotation attributed to King Alfred along with its original source written by Boethius serves to situate a consideration of King’s use of the term in a historical context. Insight into the translation of the text from Latin into OE is gained regarding how Boethius’s text is adapted for an Anglo- Saxon context. With this contextual information, the Present-Day English (PDE) translation of Alfred’s text as used by King can be appropriately analyzed. 3 The terms anweald and power - 3.1 Etymology and definitions of anweald In order to contextualize King’s use of the words of King Alfred, the history of the OE term is provided here. The OE equivalent for power is anweald, which does not exist as a noun in PDE though the etymon is seen in the verb to wield, its derived noun wielder, adjective forms (un)wieldy, and personal names, for example, Oswald (OE ōs ‘god’ + weald ‘power, leader’), Walter (OE weald + here ‘army’), and Harold (OE here + weald) [OED 2022: s.v. wield, v.; Kunze 1998: 25-26]. With the latest entries dated to the thirteenth century, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists the obsolete noun onwald meaning ‘power, rule, authority’ (s.v. †onwald, n.) and the obsolete verb onwald ‘to have dominion over; to bring under one’s power or rule; to subdue, conquer’ (s.v. †onwald, v.). 42 Christopher Blake Shedd A citation from 1908 for the obsolete noun wield (here spelled waald) offers more recent evidence of this etymon: “A score o’ selkie skins ’at they hed slippit aff tae get a better waald o’ their legs i’ the dance” (CSD 2017: s.v. †wield, n.). As evidenced by this quote, however, it is not PDE that is the inheritor of this Old English etymon but rather Modern Scots, a language derived from Old Northumbrian, itself a dialect of Old English. According to the Concise Scots Dictionary (CSD 2017: x), it retains the word in the nominal form waald ‘command, control’, which is marked as being in use in Scots-speaking areas from the late fourteenth century until the end of the nineteenth century with attestations only in the Orkney Islands from the twentieth century onwards (CSD 2017: s.v. waald). As in English, the verb wield ‘to use (a weapon or ability); to direct, control (one’s body); to possess; to gain mastery’ has also been retained in Scots (CSD 2017: s.v., wield). The OED records that the PDE verb wield is “[a] merging of two distinct but closely related verbs”: wealdan/ wieldan and wieldan/ wældan, West Saxon and Anglian forms respectively (s.v. wield, v.). A related OE noun anweald is defined as ‘power, sovereignty, sway’ and ‘a sovereign’s or lord’s dominion: realm, domain, empire’ (DOE 2018: s.v. an-weald). Also of note is the similar term ānweald that occurs as a calque translation of Latin monarchia (derived from Greek μοναρχία > μονο ‘one’ + ἄρχειν ‘to rule’, hence a system of government by one ruler) (DOE 2018: s.v. monarch, n.1). A synonym in Old English, geweald is noted as preferred by Wulfstan, the bishop of Worcester, over anweald, found “in Alfredian translations and Ælfric” (DOE 2018: s.v. anweald; cf. modern German Anwalt, Gewalt); the distinction between geweald and anweald is addressed further in Section 4.4 in the context of the Alfredian quote. - 3.2 Etymology and definitions of power The OED defines power as the ‘ability to act or affect something strongly; physical or mental strength; control or authority over others; dominion’; its earliest recorded entries are dated approximately to the fourteenth century in texts that likely provide evidence of even earlier usage than the attested date of manuscript creation (OED 2022: s.v. power, n.1). The OED provides various orthographic representations of the term in Anglo-Norman, Old French, and Middle French (e.g., poer, pouair, pooir, pouvoir, poir) (OED 2022: s.v. power, n.1). The term power is a borrowing from after the Norman Conquest, a watershed moment in the history of English marking the beginning of the rapid adoption of Romance-derived terms, stemming mainly from Norman French and largely situated within the realms of influence held by Norman French speakers (Smith and Kim 2018: 172). The ancestor of the French term is ultimately the Martin Luther King as a Wielder of Power 43 classical Latin posse ‘to be able, to be possible, to have power’, an etymon whose Proto-Indo-European (PIE) counterparts reveal a gendered origin for the term, e.g., Gothic -faþs (as in brūþ-faþs ‘bride-groom’) is etymologically related (OED 2022: s.v. posse, n.1) as are other PIE reflexes like Classical Greek πόσις ‘husband’, whose PIE antecedent root *potimeans ‘powerful; lord’ (Harper n.d.). Additionally, the definition for the transitive verb power is given as ‘to supply with mechanical or electrical energy; to provide with a source of power’; this term is described as having been “[f]ormed within English, by conversion”, meaning that the verb represents a zero-derivational morphologically derived form from the noun (OED 2022: s.v. power, v.). The earliest citation for this use is dated to 1592 and represents an obsolete/ rare meaning not present in PDE: ‘to make powerful, empower, strengthen’ (OED 2022: s.v. power, v.). The term Black Power appears as the first cited entry for the definition of power when preceded by a “distinguishing word” used to represent ‘a movement to promote the interests or enhance the status or influence of a specified group’ (OED 2022: s.v. power, n.1); this definition reflects the meaning as used for the slogan and the movement King discusses at length in his text. Having a clear distinction between the nuances of the verb and noun forms is important for understanding King’s lexical choices as evidenced in the following analysis. 4 Analysis of power in King’s text In Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967) there are 250 instances of power as used by King, that is to say, King in his own words. One particular use of King’s stands out, namely Black Power, whose meaning is examined below along with other racialized types of power. A further thirteen uses are found in the text but represent the term as used in quotations of or references to contemporary (Stokey Carmichael {known latterly as Kwame Ture}, Willie Ricks, George Kelsey, Gunnar Myrdal) and historical (Marcus Tullius Cicero, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Paine, Henry George, King Alfred) figures; two references are to unnamed individuals (an anonymous Black Power proponent and a crowd of people). A selection of these are analyzed in Section 4.3. - 4.1 Analysis of King’s use of power The following lexical semantic analysis provides a thorough description of King’s use of power; Table 1 lists these uses of power, its inflected forms, and its compounds. 44 Christopher Blake Shedd Of the 250 instances of the word power, it is used as a verb only twice. The first instance is in the simple present passive, third-person plural: “[…] and dissolves the confidence born of a partial victory by which new efforts are powered” (13), and the second instance is in the simple past active, third-person singular: “He powered the drive” (19). The parsing of these verbs bears relevance for this discussion because it reveals grammatical information important for understanding how power is wielded and by whom. Words Frequency Power 209 Powerful 21 Powerlessness 4 Powerfully 3 Powerless 3 Powers (all nouns) 3 Manpower 3 Powered 2 Tot. 250 Table 1. Morphological variants and compounds of power as used by King The significance of such a low count for power as a verb raises an interesting question as to the reason for this distribution, two reasons for which are postulated here: (1) The primary meaning of the verb may differ from the primary meaning of the noun to such a degree that the noun is preferred in King’s text, that is to say, the verb power denotes providing energy in order to effect a change while the noun power refers more to control (which, of course, requires energy to exert). Given King’s focus on achieving equality in terms of social and political power, this might explain why he uses the noun form more frequently. (2) King may be using verbs that are synonyms for the abovementioned definition for power (n.) in order to signify the exertion of influence over other entities, ideas, or people. For example, he writes, “Even if blacks could control each of these counties, they would have little influence […]” (49). Likewise, King may be using other nouns that are synonymous with power when he writes that “the Negro obviously needs organized strength” (51) and “the organized strength of Negroes alone would have been insufficient to Martin Luther King as a Wielder of Power 45 move Congress and the administration” (52). These two types of synonymy warrant closer examination to determine whether the degree of semantic overlap between these terms justifies an expansion of King’s understanding of power. The adverb powerfully occurs with the past participle “integrated” (16-17) functioning adjectivally, the adjective “constructive” (52), and the verb “facili‐ tate” (214). The adjective powerless occurs attributively with “morality” (38) and “subordinate” (157). A metonymic use of powerless also occurs: “The powerless, on the other hand, never experience opportunity[…]” (144). Metonymy accounts for two of the uses of powerful (144, 209). Much more frequent is the attributive use of the adjective as illustrated in Table 2. powerful new alliance (17) powerful demand (21) most articulate, powerful and self-assured young white people (28) powerful attack (29) powerful weapon (44) most powerful civil rights law (59-60) powerful antidotes (96) powerful united front (132) powerful gospel songs (135) powerful talent (135) powerful action programs (136) powerful action program (137) most powerful economy (147) powerful force (153) powerful organization (165) powerful nations (184) richest and most powerful nation (199) this powerful commitment (201) Table 2. Attributive uses of the adjective powerful as used by King 46 Christopher Blake Shedd As a predicate adjective, powerful occurs once: “[A] change of focus which will enable us to see that the things that seem most real and powerful are indeed now unreal and have come under sentence of death” (195). The contrast between real and unreal heavily underscores the contrast between powerful and being under sentence of death. Excluding the racial/ ethnic terms King uses (see discussion in Section 4.2 and Section 5), Table 3 shows the most frequent preposed adjective collocations with power. Considering the context about which King is constructing his argument, the frequent references to power in the political and economic realms stands in contrast to a perhaps expected line of argumentation relying on explicit connections to morality. Preposed adjectives Frequency politica 6 economic 3 positive 3 legitimate 2 necessary 2 moral/ immoral 2/ 1 Table 3. Most frequent adjective collocations with power as used by King Overall, King’s use of non-racialized power generally shows negative and posi‐ tive connotations. Few instances of power are neutral in tone. For example, King describes power as being basic (39); this adjective, however, is the first in a trio, which is rounded out by necessary and legitimate (39), thus offsetting any neutral connotation to one more positive. Power is described as creative (38), compelling (145), untapped (154), and peaceable (195), exemplifying how power can be viewed positively; however, rigid and brutal (76), destructive and conscienceless (38), entrenched segregationist (86), and obscure and indistinct (146) indicate how power can be viewed negatively. In addition to such characterizations, King also locates power as belonging to certain groups or individuals (e.g., the state (86), the police (76), {slave}masters (40, 41) or to certain domains (e.g., economic (50, 163); political (14, 31, 48, et al.); and military (142)). Ideas and movements can also be imbued with power (e.g., nonviolence has spiritual power); King writes, “When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men” (183). This comparison of types of power shows the nuance with which King depicts the notion of power by describing how each type can Martin Luther King as a Wielder of Power 47 result in certain outcomes when in competition. Moreover, this reveals at least in part how King views the distribution of certain types of power, namely that imbalance in one type may have disastrous results. - 4.2 Racialized power Warranting particular consideration given their importance in the civil rights movement are two compounds with power: Black Power (66 instances) and White Power (11 instances). Three other compounds of the same type (i.e., ethnicity + power) also occur in the text: “Jewish power” and “Irish or Italian power” (31), but considering King’s focus in the text and the low frequency of occurrence (one time each), these will be excluded from this analysis of racialized power. Of greater import is how King defines and conceptualizes Black Power and White Power, the analysis of which in terms of conceptual metaphor is found in Section 5. This analysis of the political slogan Black Power focuses on King’s linguistic use of the term but not (necessarily) his conceptualization of the movement within the broader sociocultural implications for the Civil Rights movement (for a comprehensive overview of the Black Power movement as situated in Black Studies, see Joseph 2006a). While the origins of the word power or anweald are situated in the extant textual records of antiquity, the origin of the political slogan Black Power stems from a political rally held in the Mississippi Delta in 1966 ( Joseph 2006b: 2). Uttered by Stokely Carmichael on June 16, in reference to numerous injustices, this slogan stands in stark contrast to King’s preferred slogan, “Freedom Now”, and marks a watershed moment as it becomes the political rallying call for the Black Power movement (ibid.). King himself laments the status of the movement and its slogan: “I had the deep feeling that it was an unfortunate choice of words for a slogan. Moreover, I saw it bringing about division with the ranks of the marchers” (30). - 4.3 King’s appropriation of others’ power The thirteen uses of power quoted by King can be divided into two main categories: contemporary and historical references. The focus of this treatment of these quotations is on the historical references given what interpretational concerns such texts raise. According to Ralph Keyes (2006: 264-265), a common issue with historical quotations is identifying whether the quotation is properly attributed and, when necessary, translated; in fact, many reference materials offering sources for or translations of quotations are fallible. Nevertheless, attempting to ascertain the authenticity of a quote is a worthwhile endeavor. Keyes (2006: 266) identifies one reason why identifying the sources of quotations is important: “Determining who actually said what is a step toward self-awareness. Exploring not just the 48 Christopher Blake Shedd relevance of misquotations but considering why they prevail can help us gain insight into our collective psyche”. Thus, it is imperative that a quote’s provenance be verified or discounted so that a solid foundation can be constructed upon which the interpretation of a text can be built. Quotation Author: (C)ontemporary or (H)istorical Page What we need is black power. Stokely Carmichael (C) 29 Willie Ricks […] shouted, “What do you want? The crowd roared, “Black Power”. Again and again Ricks cried, “What do you want? ” and the response “Black Power” grew louder and louder […]. Crowd at rally (C) 29 “Power”, he said, “is the only thing respected in this world, and we must get it at any cost”. Stokely Carmichael (C) 31 It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, the philosopher of the “will to power”, to reject the Christian concept of love. Friedrich Nietzsche (H) 37 It was this same misinterpretation which in‐ duced Christian theologians to reject Nietz‐ sche’s philosophy of the “will to power” in the name of the Christian idea of love. Friedrich Nietzsche (H) 38 Freedom is participation in power. Cicero (H) 55 To hell with conscience and morality. We want power. Anonymous Black Power advocate (C) 61 Power is never good unless he who has it is good. King Alfred (H) 61 It arose as an ideological justification for the constellations of political and economic power which were expressed in colonialism and slavery. George Kelsey (C) 73 We have the power to begin the world over again. Thomas Paine (H) 75 At the same time America’s prestige and power abroad would rise immensely. Gunnar Myrdal (C) 89 Though there have been increases in pur‐ chasing power, they have lagged behind in‐ creases in production. Henry George (H) 172 Table 4. Citations of power by King in his text Martin Luther King as a Wielder of Power 49 The first step is to identify the source of the quotations. Three of the quotes are verbatim renderings of what people said while in King’s presence (sometimes directly to him) and usually include a time reference, namely the quotations from Stokely Carmichael, the crowd at the rally, and the anonymous Black Power advocate (the last of these however has no time reference). The remaining quotations are all textual. The titles and years of publication are provided in-text for the quotations from George and Myrdal; the title of the source of Kelsey’s quotation is cited in-text while the date and publisher are provided in a footnote in the index. The quotes from Nietzsche, Paine, Cicero, and King Alfred are elaborated upon here insofar as possible. The first two references are easily elucidated. A reference to a philosophical concept, the Nietzschean phrase “will to power” is a translation of the German (der) Wille zur Macht, which first appeared in Nietz‐ sche’s Also sprach Zarathustra and later served as the title for a posthumously published book (Magnus 2022). The quote from Thomas Paine can be found in his pamphlet Common Sense, a search made easy with modern technology (for the original quote, see Conway 1894: 118). However, the quotation from Cicero is more problematic (even with the name provided); an extensive search of relevant source materials has been undertaken, and an original source of the exact wording of the quote still proves elusive. Keyes (2006: 251) warns, “[q]uotes without citations should be treated with the utmost suspicion”. Should a source be found showing the origin of the quotation, then King’s words can be placed into a context better informed by Cicero’s words, and due authority can be given to the quotation. Identifying the sources of these quotations allows the modern reader to process King’s words unencumbered by concerns regarding their authenticity or the fidelity of any translations. What, then, do quotations from the past about power reveal, especially if their origins are misattributed or their original context lost? How much should the original context be considered when incorporated into modern texts? How does investigating these quotations shed light on “our collective psyche”? A detailed look at the quote from King Alfred offers possible answers to these questions. - 4.4 The power of Alfred’s anweald and how King wields it In order to expound on how King’s use of historical conceptualizations of power elucidates an understanding of his own definition, the quotation he includes from King Alfred is examined here in more detail: “Power is never good unless he who has it is good” (61). The original text is an Old English translation of a source text approximately three centuries older than Alfred’s translation; the source text’s author is the Roman consul and philosopher Anicius Manlius Severinus 50 Christopher Blake Shedd Boethius, whose De Consolatione Philosophiæ (DCP, Consolation of Philosophy) exists in Old English due to Alfred’s appeal for vernacular translations (Irvine and Godden 2012: vii, xi). Germane to King’s use of power is the context of the original text. The text by Boethius is written after he is tried for treason and “apparently sentenced to death, but in the event only exiled to Pavia” (ibid.: viii). The words of this Roman exile are then taken up by an Anglo-Saxon king and rendered into Old English with “lengthy, additional rephrasing and the addition of the king”, changes that introduce an element not present in the original (Davis-Secord 2016: 58). The Latin original and the Old English translation (each with PDE translations) are reproduced here: At si quando, quod perrarum est, probis deferantur, quid in eis aliud quam probitas utentium placet? Ita fit ut non uirtutibus ex dignitate sed ex uirtute dignitatibus honor accedat [But if ever they [power and honour] are conferred upon estimable men, which is very rare, what is pleasing in those men other than the exercising of virtue? Thus it happens that honour proceeds not to virtue from rank but from virtue to rank]. (Bieler 1957, qtd. in Davis-Secord 2016: 57-58) Gif hit þonne æfre gewurð swa hit swiðe seldan gewyrð þæt se anweald and se weorðscipe becume to godum men and to wisum, hwæt bið þar þonne licwyrðes buton his god and his weorðscipe, þæs godan cyninges næs þæs anwealdes? Forþam þe se anweald næfre ne bið god buton se god sie þe hine hæbbe [If it then ever happens—as it very rarely happens—that power and honour should fall to a good and wise man, what is praiseworthy in that [fact] other than his goodness and honour, that of the king and not of the power [itself]? Therefore, power is never good unless he who has it is good]. (Godden and Irvine 2009: 1: 272, qtd. in Davis-Secord 2016: 57) Writing about Alfred’s text, Godden and Irvine (2009: 309-310) summarize the tenor of the broader passage thus: “Its claim that wisdom and virtue naturally bring power seems indeed very much at odds with the general argument of the DCP” (qtd. in Davos-Secord 2016: 58). Furthermore, Davis-Secord (2016: 58) observes, “[p]resented as the product of a ruler and not a captive, the translation develops a different conception of power, one in which earthly power has its uses and benefits”. These assessments of the Alfredian translation establish how power can be adopted and adapted in new contexts, relevant parts being kept while other elements are expanded, added, or removed. Davis-Secord (2016: 46) offers a detailed analysis of Alfred’s translation and identifies that “two terms for power used by Boethius, potentia and potestas, are frequently translated as anweald, which, however, is also used for other terms as well, e.g., virtus and dignitas”. The OE geweald also appears in Alfred’s text, but, while geweald Martin Luther King as a Wielder of Power 51 “expresses ‘power’ simply, anweald provides the more complicated sense of ‘sole authority,’ ‘complete authority,’ or ‘a ruler’s authority’” (Davis-Secord 2006: 47). The PDE translation of King Alfred’s text erases this distinction, replacing the OE term with a French borrowing (power), one which does not offer the same morphological nuance. In addition to other differences between the source and target texts, this explanation reveals that Alfred’s Boethius has localized the question of power differently than the original and addresses “the unique power specifically of a king as the earthly extension of the heavenly King” (Davis- Secord 2006: 47). King likewise contextualizes power differently than Alfred (and than Boethius). Immediately before quoting Alfred, King asserts, “[p]ower at its best is the right use of strength” (61); he cites Alfred and then expands on Alfred’s words, writing, “[n]onviolence is power, but it is the right and good use of power” (61). Thus, King asserts both that the goodness of power rests not only with its wielder but also with its use, more emphasis being given to the latter. King does not situate power in the hands of an earthly or heavenly monarch, but he does imbue it with salvific power when he claims that “it can save the white man as well as the Negro” (61). The textual and situational context of King’s words thus underscore that any person can attain and wield power and thus be saved. 5 Extending power’s grasp: How King conceives of power King himself provides a basic definition of power: “Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose” (37). This is in line with the definition of power provided earlier: “ability to act or affect something strongly” (OED 2022: s.v. power, n.1). He elaborates on this definition of power by equating it with various concepts and qualifies power by defining it at its best (see Table 5). A contrast is provided in King’s identification of “[o]ne of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love” (37). Noticeably absent is a definition of power at its worst, perhaps because King’s contemporary society can be described as immoral power in action. The closest King comes to defining power negatively is when he speaks of white power as existing “in its most brutal, cold-blooded and vicious form” in contemporary Mississippi where the perpetrators of the murders and lynchings of civil-rights workers are not punished for their crimes (33-34). 52 Christopher Blake Shedd Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice (38). Power at its best is the right use of strength (61). Nonviolence is power, but it is the right and good use of power (61). Courage […] that power of the mind capable of sloughing off the thingification of the past […] (131). We have to put the horse (power) before the cart (programs) (145). Power is not the white man’s birthright […] (165). Table 5. Definitions of power provided by King The examples in Table 5 highlight the expansive understanding King commands regarding power. By equating power with nonviolence, King is drawing a stark contrast to a contemporary countermovement, the Black Panthers, whose manifesto views “self-defense as a full-fledged strategy that was deemed a realistic alternative to nonviolence” (Wendt 2006: 158). The last example in Table 5 shows that power does not inherently belong to a particular group. In addition to equating power with other concepts, King also uses conceptual metaphors to explain what power is, thus further expanding the semantic field the term holds (the seminal work by Lakoff and Johnson (2003 [1980]) underpins much of the following analysis). The following section selectively treats some of the conceptual metaphors relating to power that are used by King. The notion that P O W E R I S AN O B J E C T occurs numerous times. For example, he writes, “[e]ven the Supreme Court […] curbed itself only a little over a year after the 1954 landmark cases, when it handed down its Pupil Placement decision, in effect returning to the states the power to determine the tempo of change” (11). This conceptualization of power also indicates that the state can be a recipient of power. Table 6 shows how this conceptual metaphor, evidenced numerous times in King’s text, is often accompanied by a verb that signifies the notion of organizing or collecting a large amount or a particular type of power. Negroes have irrevocably undermined the foundations of Southern segregation; they have assembled the power through self-organization and coalition to place their demands on all significant national agendas (17). We must use every constructive means to amass economic and political power (31). When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance when they have accumulated the power to enforce change (144). Table 6. Examples of P O W E R I S A N O B J E C T Martin Luther King as a Wielder of Power 53 Some examples of P O W E R I S AN O B J E C T that offer contextual clues as to what kind of object power is also appear in the text. King writes, “[i]t is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times” (38). Here King conceives of both power and morality as physical objects which undergo a collision like cars or planets meeting in a violent fashion and resulting in destruction. […] the voice of Black Power was heard through the land and the white backlash was born […] (3). P O W E R I S A P E R S O N , i.e., power comprises a constituent body part (voice) So Greenwood turned out to be the arena for the birth of the Black Power slogan in the civil rights movement (28-29). A N U T T E R A N C E I S A P E R S O N For centuries the Negro has been caught in the tentacles of white power (33). P O W E R I S A N A N I M A L / O C T O P U S It simply means that those appeals must be under‐ girded by some form of constructive coercive power (137). P O W E R I S A S U P P O R T I V E P I E C E O F C L O T H I N G Table 7. Examples of conceptual metaphors connected to power It is necessary to distinguish between Black Power as a political slogan or movement and as an example of racialized power. If deemed the former, then it must be discerned whether the conceptual metaphor is about power or the other element in the phrase. As seen in the second example in Table 7, the conceptual metaphor for the political slogan ( A S L O G AN I S A P E R S O N ) refers to the birth of the slogan and not the Black Power movement, Black Power, or power alone. This example clearly shows a conceptual metaphor for slogan ( AN U TT E R AN C E I S A P E R S O N ) rather than expressing a conceptual metaphor about power. This example, however, is ambiguous: “First, it is necessary to understand that Black Power is a cry of disappointment” (33); here the term Black Power is more likely a reference to the slogan and not to the notion of power. Perhaps this has implications for understanding that AN U T T E R AN C E I S A P E R S O N given that people utter cries (though a cry could also be a negatively tinged synonym as well). The latter seems more likely given that King frequently refers to Black Power as a type of call: “a call to black people to amass the political and economic strength to achieve their legitimate goals” (37), “a call for the pooling of black financial resources” (38-39), and “a psychological call to manhood” (39). These exemplify the multifaceted, nuanced understanding King identifies in Black Power. 54 Christopher Blake Shedd Also paramount in understanding King’s conceptualization of power is how he juxtaposes the contrasting conceptual metaphors for Black Power and White Power. Twice does King refer to the “white power structure” (37, 45) while referring to the “Black Power movement” nine times (41 (3 times), 46 (twice), 48, 56, 66, 125). These two sets of examples show two different understandings of power depending on its valence: P O W E R I S S TATI C (structure = negative) and P O W E R I S D Y NAMI C (movement = positive). Within Lakoff and Johnson’s framework (2003 [1980]: 263), the metaphor for Black Power can then be seen as representing C HAN G E I S M O TI O N with White Power being the inverse. The conceptual metaphor P O W E R I S U P also appears in King’s text. Contextu‐ alizing how other ethnic groups have attained power, King writes, “[i]t is a myth to believe that the Irish, the Italians and the Jews…rose to power through separatism” (51). An orientational metaphor, this reflects the fact that “[s]tatus is correlated with (social) power and (physical) power is up” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003 [1980]: 16). When power is conceived of as having control, this too reflects a physical basis: “Physical size typically correlates with physical strength, and the victor in a fight is typically on top” (ibid.: 15). An extension of this idea is that power itself is the catalyst or agent that moves someone or something up: “It will be power infused with love and justice, that will…lift us from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope” (69). Also present in King’s prose is the conceptual metaphor that P O W E R I S A D E S TINATI O N on a metaphorical journey. At its simplest, it can be a destination towards which a person can travel: “Yet behind Black Power’s legitimate and necessary concern for group unity and black identity lies the belief that there can be a separate black road to power and fulfillment” (48). King then draws these paths so that they intersect: “[T]here is no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white paths, and there is no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not share that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity” (54). This indicates that arriving at the desired destination (power) requires that both black and white paths must cross; he notes that people must move “together toward that colorless power” (55). “Necessity will draw us toward the power inherent in the creative use of politics”, observes King (163). This image expands on the idea that not only can it be true that P O W E R I S A D E S TINATI O N at which people wish to arrive, but enticement (necessity) can be used as a lure or means of encouragement towards reaching the destination. In a related vein to location, when conveying that P O W E R I S A C O NTAIN E R , King uses the preposition “in” to show that people occupy a particular space within an object, for example, he describes people as being “those in power” Martin Luther King as a Wielder of Power 55 (26) or “partners in power” (55). The conceptual metaphor P O W E R I S E N E R G Y appears numerous times with a reference to the energy’s source. Writing about the African-American’s need to “transform his condition of powerlessness into creative and positive power”, King observes, “[o]ne of the most obvious sources of this power is political” (38). Noting that “power sources are sometimes obscure and indistinct” (146), King does, however, identify some sources of power explicitly: “[n]onviolent direction action” (147), “the political arena” (154), “[t]he growing Negro vote in the South” (155), and “political action” (162). Important to note in this context is that an absence of power reinforces the notion that P O W E R I S AN O B J E C T and P O W E R I S E N E R G Y . King characterizes the African- American individual as being “in dire need […] of legitimate power” (37) and needing to come to terms with a “lack of power” (37). By offering such a varied understanding of power, King masterfully constructs a detailed framework of power marked by important distinctions situating his understanding of power in his contemporary society. 6 Conclusion As seen through this analysis of power and anweald, the nuanced uses of a politically significant term like power demand sufficient context to understand properly what power is. This narrowly constrained study is part of a larger, ongoing diachronic study to chart the development of power from OE to PDE. The analysis of Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (2018) by Martin Luther King, Jr. provides a firm basis upon which to conduct further research, the first step of which is an in-depth study of King’s larger corpus of written and oral texts to delimit more clearly the borders of his power’s semantic field as initially demarcated here. While only briefly mentioned here, King’s use of synonymous terms for power will be a necessary element of this larger project. Outside the scope of this larger study but equally valuable would be the inclusion of other civil rights leaders’ understanding of power to provide a clear(er) picture of how they envision and express notions of American sociopolitical power. King’s invocation of contemporary and historical figures and their conceptualizations of power resounds more clearly with the elucidation of Alfred’s text that also invokes and re-imagines the power of power from Boethius. Further investigation into the other quotations by the figures King cites would bring greater understanding to how he crafts his own image of power using ideas from the past. Thus, not only is it necessary to chart the instances of power as defined in the past, but it is also imperative that their use in contemporary dialogues be situated in a diachronic context. 56 Christopher Blake Shedd Also of interest in contemporary language is the proliferation of other com‐ pounds or terms bearing the adjective black: black love, black trauma, black joy, black excellence. A linguistic analysis of these terms in light of how black-com‐ pounds like black power are used may serve to identify the conceptual structure used by language users to define and conceptualize blackness (e.g., see Lloyd 2019 for a discussion on black rage). Recent work by Baker-Bell (2020: 2) on Black Language considers the question of linguistic justice “to see how linguistic hierarchies and racial hierarchies are interconnected”. By acknowledging this interconnectedness and by situating these terms in the broader historical context of US American civil rights and contemporary usage considering the sociopolitical climate and treatment of African Americans, research can provide a basis of common understanding for productive, justice-oriented dialogue. In closing, King himself identifies the other major element to be considered in the larger diachronic study: “One of the most persistent ambiguities we face is that everybody talks about P E A C E A S A G O AL , but among the wielders of power peace is practically nobody’s business” (192, small caps mine). To King, the destination (peace) is clear—indeed, his book expounds how “the wielders of power” can arrive at the destination. In answer to King’s titular question, arriving at community necessitates identifying the intersection of power and peace. Acknowledgements My inspiration for reading King’s text lies with Dr. Gail Stratton, a dear friend whose wise counsel and sound, theologically-informed understanding of justice models a compassionate view of power purposefully used for positive change. The cultivation of my passion of Old English is owed to Prof. J.R. Hall, for whom I would like to express my longstanding appreciation and affection. Kind thanks to my colleagues at the Department of English (University of Klagenfurt) for offering feedback on this chapter and to Prof. Jeannette Littlemore (University of Birmingham) for giving helpful suggestions to improve my analysis. References Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Available at: doi.org/ 10.4324/ 9781315147383 Bieler, L. (ed.). (1957). Anicii Manlii Severni Boethii Philosophiae Consolatio. CCSL 94. Turnhout: Brepols. Concise Scots Dictionary (CSD) (2017). 2 nd ed., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Conway, M. (ed.). (1894). The Writings of Thomas Paine. Vol. 1: 1774-1779. New York/ London: The Knickerbocker Press, G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Martin Luther King as a Wielder of Power 57 Davis-Secord, J. (2016). Joinings: Compound Words in Old English Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dictionary of Old English: A to I online (DOE) (2018). Edited by A. Cameron, A. Amos, and A. di Paolo Healey et al. Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project. Harper, D. (n.d). Etymology of *poti-. Online Etymology Dictionary. Available at: https: / / www.etymonline.com/ word/ *poti- (accessed: 28 June 2022) Geeraerts, D. (2017). Lexical Semantics. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics: 1-18. Available at: doi.org/ 10.1093/ acrefore/ 9780199384655.013.29 (accessed: 28 June 2022) Godden, M. and S. Irvine (eds.). (2009). The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irvine, S. and M. Godden (eds. and trans.). (2012). The Old English Boethius with Verse Prologues and Epilogues Associated with King Alfred. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Joseph, P. (2006a). Black studies, student activism, and the Black Power movement. In P. Joseph (ed.), The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights—Black Power Era. New York: Routledge, 251-277. Joseph, P. (2006b). Introduction: Toward a historiography of the Black Power movement. In P. Joseph (ed.), The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights—Black Power Era. New York: Routledge, 1-25. Keyes, R. (2006). The quote verifier. The Antioch Review, 64 (2), 256-66. Available at: doi .org/ 10.2307/ 4614974. King, Jr. M. (2018 [1967]). Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Kunze, K. (1998). dtv-Atlas Namenkunde: Vor- und Familiennamen im deutschen Sprach‐ gebiet. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (2003 [1980]). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lloyd, V. (2019). The ambivalence of Black rage. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 21 (3), 1-11. Available at: doi.org/ 10.7771/ 1481-4374.3550. Magnus, B. (2022). Friedrich Nietzsche. Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: https: / / ww w.britannica.com/ biography/ Friedrich-Nietzsche (accessed: 31 October 2022). Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (2022). 3 rd ed., updated March 2022. Available at www. oed.com. Smith, A. K. and S. M. Kim (2018). This Language, A River: A History of English. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Wendt, S. (2006). The roots of Black Power? Armed resistance and the radicalization of the Civil Rights movement. In P. Joseph (ed.), The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights—Black Power Era. New York: Routledge, 145-165. 58 Christopher Blake Shedd About Attributions of Power and Political Control: Crititical Reflections on Populism and its Challenges from Linguistic Perspectives Marta Degani 1 Introduction Nearly twenty years ago, Mudde wrote that we were living in a “populist Zeitgeist” (2004: 542). That situation has not changed and populism has infil‐ trated the social tissue of Western democracies so deeply to become almost unnoticeable and thus be accepted and supported uncritically by many as the ‘new normal’. This populist fervor is signaled by the multiple examples of recent populist success on both sides of the political spectrum. Right-wing populist parties such as the French National Front, the British Independence Party or the Danish People’s Party rejoiced over the results of the European elections in 2014. At the same time, the left-wing populist party Podemos gained considerable popular support in Spain and other forms of left-oriented populism have been revived in Latin America. However, it was not until 2016 that the populist force in its rightist connotations took major control of politics in the Western world. This was the result of two extremely impactful events: the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth President of the United States and the outcomes of the British referendum (Brexit). These events, which occurred in the two powerful fortresses of the English-speaking world (Great Britain and the US), have transformed the political scene globally and posed new challenges for everyone. In view of this, the present study does not only intend to shed some light on the complex and evolving phenomenon of populism in politics but also empha‐ sizes the need to explore its discursive dimension critically. The next section will introduce the notion of populism by providing insights on its core conceptual elements, its recurrent features and the range of definitional approaches that have been put forward in the literature. Section 3 will offer a contextualization of populism that intends to locate it in different dimensions: historical (with reference to the temporal and spatial coordinates of populism), ideological (in relation to the beliefs supporting present-day right-wing populism), socioeconomic (through an emphasis on factors that have influenced the more recent rise of populism), and mediatic (in connection to the role of the news media for the spread of populist ideas). In Section 4, populism will be approached as a discursive reality that can be investigated and challenged through linguistic means. Populism will be presented as a specific instance of political discourse with its own aims, strategies and recurrent topics. Furthermore, the paper will provide an overall depiction of right-wing populist discourse that intends to represent its most significant discursive features. The usefulness of adopting the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Studies in linguistic analyses of populism will also be discussed. 2 Towards a definition of populism Tons of ink have been spent in the last fifty years for printing thousands of pages that revolve around the topic of populism and yet, sadly, the concept remains elusive or at best ambiguous to most of us. The fact that populism has attracted inter-and multidisciplinary research, including perspectives from history, po‐ litical philosophy, political theory, economics, communication science, and more recently also linguistics, has not helped clarifying the issue. Quite to the opposite, large consensus has been reached among scholars about the intangible nature and intrinsic ungraspability of this vague concept (see, e.g., Canovan 1999; Taggart 2000). Additional confusion arises from the fact that populism can neither be attributed to a specific political party nor associated with a welldefined political orientation. Indeed, populism has historically characterized the Left (especially in Latin America) and in more recent times it has been particularly associated with the Right, or far-right (most notably in Europe). Furthermore, depending on the cultural terrain where it developed, populism has been observed to co-exist with and nurture phenomena as diverse as clientelism and xenophobia. This pervasiveness, not to say ubiquity, of populism in the international political arena and its complex, multifaceted identity have stimulated several explanations. An interpretation of populism that has been put forward and promoted by journalists in recent years is the one of populism as a Kampfbegriff (‘battle term’), along with other concepts such as ‘globalization’, ‘multiculturalism’, and ‘masculinity’, to name just a few. Personally, I feel more inclined to embrace the classic definition of populism as an “essentially contested concept”, in line with the original formulation by Gallie (1964), who clarifies that a contested 60 Marta Degani concept is expected to generate some form of conflict or contest when it is used by people with different political affiliations, different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and belonging to different social classes. The vast literature on populism also shows the multiple attempts at encapsulating this notion into a ‘useful’ descriptor (see Rovira Kaltwasser et al. 2017). Thus, for instance, in the field of media and communication studies, populism has been considered as a matter of political strategy, the instantiation of a particular style of politics, or a type of mediatic performance (see Canovan 1999; Jagers and Walgrave 2007; Moffitt 2016; Moffitt and Tormey 2014; Weyland 2017). In all of these cases, the emphasis remains on behavioral and performative aspects of the populist politician, who is often characterized as a strong, charismatic, and outspoken (often also irreverent) leader, taking side with the grieving masses, attracting a lot of media attention, and inciting mobilization. My approach to populism is both discursive and “ideational” (cf. Mudde 2004; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013a, 2017). I align with an interpretation of populism as a form of discourse (see Section 4), while at the same time recognizing that this discourse is inevitably imbued with certain ideological contents. In this sense, I share Mudde’s (2004) and Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser’s view (2017) of populism as a “thincentred ideology”. As they make clear, while “thick-centered ideologies” (e.g. fascism, liberalism, socialism, nationalism) are fully-fledged and independent, a “thin-centred ideology” like populism is not self-sufficient and can only grow by developing symbiotic relations with other ‘stronger’ and more substantive ideologies. This nicely explains the malleability of the concept and its contingent nature. In the words of Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, populism is a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonist camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people. (2017: 6, italics in the original) Notwithstanding the varying temporal and spatial coordinates of populism and its flexible ideological connotations, all forms of populism share a central concern with ‘the people’. The fact that ‘the people’ represent a core element of populism is suggested first of all by the etymology of this word since populism derives from the Latin term populus (‘the people’), to be intended as ‘nation’ and ‘folk’ rather then ‘the sum of multiple individualties’. Another telling indication of the central (and in this case also instrumental) role that populist politicians assign to ‘the people’ is related to their habit of calling themselves vox populi (‘the voice of the people’) (see Müller 2017). Populists claim to be the sole moral representatives of the people and to stand for their interests; they speak for About Attributions of Power and Political Control 61 ‘the silent majority’. Populists emphasize that they really go to the people (i.e. meet them on the streets), listen to them, and work for them. They present themselves as part of the ‘pure’ people, speaking the same language, sharing the same values, knowing what people want and acting to their exclusive benefit. According to Laclau’s (2005: 69-71) philosophical perspective, populism has actually been able to deprive the word people of its denotational meaning by transforming it into an “empty signifier” that can be used strategically by politicians to attract different sectors of the populace and generate social identities. Discursive practices that are in use and in vogue among populists worldwide suggest, however, that this “empty signifier” tends to be filled with three specific meanings: people as sovereign, people as the common people, and people as the nation (see Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017). The idea of the people as sovereign is historically rooted in the ideals that spurred the French and the American revolutions and it revives memories of collectivities acting as the ultimate source of political power and subverting the status quo through revolt. This idea is also connected to the modern democratic principle according to which the people (in the sense of ‘demos’) are the rulers. When populists claim they will give power/ government back to the people, they ostensibly appeal to the notion of people as sovereign. A notorious example of such an appeal is to be found in Trump’s 2017 Inagugural Address when he asserts: “today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People”. The idea of the people as common people (in the sense of ‘ordinary citizens’) is founded on a broad class concept that groups individuals on the basis of their socio-cultural and socio-economic status. This notion is defined through opposition to the dominant culture since the common people are axiomatically excluded from power. Populist leaders strive to construct an image of themselves as close to the people. They exploit cultural clichés that make them appear as in tune with common people and their values, and hence, allegedly, shining away from mainstream power. To give an example, during the Brexit campaign, Nigel Farage had himself being photographed while drinking a pint of beer in a typical British pub, the suggestion being ‘I am one of you, an ordinary citizen’. The idea of the people as the nation originates from the belief that there is a national community who belongs to (and owns) the place by birthright, constitutes the ‘pure’ ethnos, shares and is united by some foundational myths. Here, ‘people’ coincides with a uniform, monolithic and virginal group forming a social unity. This resonates with Taggart’s (2000: 95-98) conception of “the heartland” as an imaginary territory inhabited by a homogeneous, virtuous and 62 Marta Degani unified population. The populists’ tendency in the western world to exclude certain groups (especially immigrants and Muslims) from the ‘true’ people (the ‘authentic inhabitants’) reflects this interpretation of the people as the nation. As hinted at in the above discussion, the populist notion of ‘the people’ is also defined by establishing Alterity relations. Admittedly, all forms of populism postulate a Manichean distinction between the idolized people and the disparaged elite. This opposition is justified on moral grounds since the people are considered honest and pure whereas the elite is accused of being corrupt and immoral. The fact that the people are conceived as ontologically good in contrast to the elite which is the incarnation of all that is bad, sheds light on the populist ‘moral’ fights against the elite as well as on the populist advocacy for following the wisdom of the common man (otherwise referred to as ‘common sense’). Additional expressions of more diffused Othering can be retraced in exclusionary populism (see Betz 2001; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasse 2013b), which presupposes a juxtaposition between ‘the people’ as the in-group and other out-groups that are excluded on the basis of race, religion, and gender. Outgroups represent ‘dangerous’ Others. For exclusionarist populists, both the elite and out-groups constitute ‘enemies’ but while the first group is located above the people (since they have more power), the second one can be either outside or inside society. Thus, the relation between the people and these two different Others can be interpreted, metaphorically, as occurring on either a vertical (up/ down) or a horizontal (inside/ outside) dimension (see Jagers and Walgrave 2007). Exclusionarist populists see the elite and out-groups as complicit because elites, in their views, favour outgroups and make alliances with them in conspirancies against the people. In addition to the concept of ‘the people’, another core element of populism is its professed struggle against power structures and its attempts at destabilizing hegemony. Populists depict themselves as powerless and victims of conspira‐ tional attacks, which make them adopt what Hofstader defined a “paranoid style of politics” (1964). In the populist rhetoric, power resides by definition in the elite, which comprises the political establishment, the economic elite, the cultural elite and the media elite. In line with the populist credo, this power is illegitimate because elites have abused the power they were given by taking possession and absolute control over democracy and hence over people’s rights and well-being. As supposed ‘invaders’ and ‘exploiters’ of democracy, elites are accused of patently acting against the sacrosanct will of the people (‘the volonté générale’). The elites are also held responsible for all the grievances and malfunctioning of democracy. In Mudde’s words (2004: 544), elites represent not just people’s enemy but their “nemesis” (in the sense of ‘victorious rivals’). About Attributions of Power and Political Control 63 Based on this logic, populists legitimize their challenges to and even fights against the ‘powerful’ elites. Accordingly, populists engage in multiple forms of anti-system/ anti-establishment rethoric and adopt an anti-elitist and antiintellectualist stance, which, in recent years, have turned mainstream media outlets into providers of “fake news” (Krämer and Holtz-Bacha 2020: 7-38, 181-200) and contributed to the spread of conspirancy theories (Bergmann 2018, Demata et al. 2022). 3 Contextualizing ‘new populism’ in politics Populism is a phenomenon which has existed since ever and it is indeed very difficult to try and retrace its origins. Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017) refer to the Populares in the ancient Roman Senate as possible candidates in their attempts to provide populism with a definite starting point. An unofficial faction of the Roman Senate, the Populares are remembered for their adoption of refer‐ enda as a democratic instrument to bypass the Senate and affirm the popular will. Even though a populist modus operandi is likely to be found thoughout all history, three major historical phases of populism can be distinguished (see Priester 2007; Taggart 2000). The first phase of populism is associated with the so-called agrarian populism of the late nineteenth century, which arose first in North-America in the aftermath of the American Civil War (e.g. the Populist Party of the early 1890s led by agrarian reformers) and a bit later in Russia (e.g. the Narodnik movement). A second wave of populism has characterized most of the twentieth century and coincided with leftist, progressive orientations of politicians and their parties or movements in both North-America (e.g. The Progressive Party of 1912 led by T. Roosvelt, The Progressive Party of 1924 led by M. La Follette, and the Share our Wealth movement by H. Long in 1933-35) and South-America (Perón and Kirchner in Argentina, Fujimori in Peru, Chávez in Venezuela, Moral in Bolivia as some of the most recent examples). Starting from the last quarter of the past century, populism has become a Western phenomenon, spreading well beyond the shores of the American continent and taking residence in many states all over Europe. In addition to the clamorous example of the former US president Donald Trump and his unprecedented form of populist leadership, populist parties have been propagating in many European states, including France (the National Front), Italy (the Northern League), Great Britain (the Independence Party), Austria (the Freedom Party of Austria), Germany (Alterantive for Germany), Poland (Law and Justice), the Netherlands (the Party for Freedom), and Hungary (the Hungarian Civic Union). As a researcher, I’m 64 Marta Degani 1 It is important to clarify that Taggart’s “heartland” differs from any kind of utopia because it is an imaginary territory that is projected to the past and not to the future in an “attempt to construct what has been lost by the present” (2000: 95). particularly interested in this last historical phase of populism, referred to as “new populism” (see Moffit 2016; Pauwel 2014), and in its manifestations as a right-wing (or far right-wing) political and social reality. The following discussion will thus chiefly concentrate on this specific expression of populism. Right-wing new populism has been nourished by a range of (dangerous) ideologies (see Pelinka 2013). A mixture of nationalism, nativism, anti-pluralism and xenophobia can explain why the new populist rhetoric of the right-wing so often celebrates a homogeneous populum, defined in blood-related terms, and inhabiting a homeland, which must be protected from the ‘threat’ of external and menacing intruders who could ‘corrupt’ the moral integrity of the ‘pure’ sociocultural milieu. In line with these ideological orientations, immigrants are all too often depicted as depriving the ‘true’ people of their rights, values, identity and prosperity. On multiple occasions, Trump has accused immigrants of either stealing the jobs of good Americans or living like parasites off the work of others. In the European context, populist far-right parties are notably Euroskeptic and resort to nativism when they claim that EU integration threathens national and ethnic identity. It is significant to recall that when celebrating the Brexit vote, Nigel Farage stated it was “a victory for the real people”. Anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism also feature as further ideological com‐ ponents of right-wing new populism characterizing certain common political practices. The disregard for or even contempt for scientific knowledge and factbased evidence in favour of an appeal to common sense and simple intuition can serve as an example of a (by now) familiar anti-elitist and anti-intellectualist attitude. After all, as pointed out by Albertazzi and McDonnell (2008: 1-2), populists prefer “straightforward and ‘common sense’ solutions to society’s complex problems”. Anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism also transpire in the right-wing populist replacement of “the Establishment’s politics of pragmatism” with a “politics of redemption” (ibid.) and a politics of emotions. As part of a more general right-wing populist habit of historical mythologizing, the politics of redemption involves looking back to the good old days and trying to regain a kind of paradise lost (Taggart’s “heartland” 1 ) where people are expected to live together in peace and harmony. This type of politics goes hand in hand with a politics of emotions in which moral sentiments such a fear, anxiety, anger, rage, shame, nostalgia and resentment are instrumentalized to create hope and generate political support. Performing and talking like an anti-elitist and anti-intellectual has also resulted in the proliferation of political About Attributions of Power and Political Control 65 incorrectness and bad manners among many new populists of the right-wing. A case in point, Donald Trump has become (in)famous for initiating shouted chants among his supporters such as “Get Them Out! ”, a battle cry to call out disruptive protesters, or “Lock Her Up”, an aggressive verbal attack directed at the Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton (see Macintosh and Mendoza-Denton 2020: 1-43, 63-73). In an attempt to provide some plausible explanations for the rampant rise of new populism, a few facts of deep socio-economic impact must be mentioned. First of all, globalization, with its huge social, cultural, economic, political and legal implications, can be seen to have functioned as a trigger of new populism (see Milner 2019; Rodrik 2018). It is an undeniable fact that globalization has rendered the world smaller by making it interconnected at all levels: it has led to greater interactions among populations, has fostered the exchange of ideas, values and artistic expressions, has made nations economically interdependent, has shifted attention to intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, and it has altered international law. At the same time, though, globalization has shaken the firmness of established concepts such as nation, culture, identity, and heritage and some people have become fearful of this change, nostalgic, and in need of founding myths that could restore a sense of security and stability. This scenario is very likely to have acted as a fertile ground in the last decades for the growth and development of the most recent populist wave. The 2008 financial crisis (also called the Great Recession), which was followed by the Eurozone debt crisis in 2011-2012, brought about not only huge economic costs, but also political disruptions that involved populist parties gaining new political space (see, e.g., Guiso et al. 2019). As a matter of fact, the 2008 economic crash, with many ordinary citizens losing their jobs, their life savings, if not even their homes, generated profound insecurity and diffuse fear that populists have been able to exploit to their personal benefit when pushing for antiimmigration and nationalist programs. The Eurozone crisis, on the other hand, coincided with the collapse of many financial institutions in Europe and resulted in very high government debt in several European countries, which led to rising unemployment, the introduction of so-called austerity measures and of additional measures to avoid that some EU member states would go bankrupt. Not surprisingly, the deriving frustration and disappointment made people lose trust in the Establishment, stirred Euroskepticism, and culminated with the emergence of Wutbürger (literally ‘angry citizens’), who protested vociferously against the unbearable situation and found solace in populist rhetoric. The results of the EU referendum in Great Britain (i.e. Brexit) echoed the potency of 66 Marta Degani 2 The term “culture war” was coined by Hunter (1991) in the context of US politics to indicate the moral and cultural cleavage between conservatives and progressives based on the opposition between their value systems. right-wing populist slogans (e.g. We Want Our Country Back) about taking back control from the EU and the elites. The 2015 migration crisis and the refugee migration surge have also been interpreted as important factors fueling the rise of populist right-wing orienta‐ tions (see, e.g., Campani 2018; Pirro et al. 2018). As discussed above, nationalist and xenophobic populists depict immigration and multiculturalism as sociocultural threats to national identity and security. The deriving need for protec‐ tion invoked by right-wing populist parties has made some of them call for the edification of physical barriers: fences, walls and ‘stronger’ borders (for a recent discussion on the epistemological relation between the concepts of populism and border see Olivas Osuna 2022). As an illustrative example, the Hungarian border fence that was built during the migrant crisis in 2015 remains today as a political symbol that Prime Minister Victor Orbán strategically employs to depict Hungary as a model fortress against illegal immigration. As pointed out by Moffitt (2015, 2016), crises, be they real or perceived, are inextricably linked to contemporary populism in democratic regimes. Crises act as a precondition for populism and populits perpetuate the perception of a sense of crisis by instigating social and political conflicts. In Moffitt’s view (2016), crises are always mediated and ‘performed’, and populist political actors are the ‘performers’ of crises par excellence. The perception of crises has obvious psychological repercussions and generates raising levels of collective anxiety, fear, and distrust. Populists exploit such conditions by appealing to social mobilization and fear mongering while at the same time presenting themselves as saviours and self-declared protectors of the people. Here, populist discourse can find legitimization and grow. Norris and Inglehart (2019) have also put forth insightful cultural explana‐ tions for the emergence of contemporary right-wing populist parties. They refer to an authoritarian “cultural backlash” that has been occuring among the older and less educated people as a counter-reaction to some important cultural changes of the last fifty years and as a revival of traditional conservative values. These citizens engage in a “culture war” 2 against the postmaterialist values (e.g. focus on the environment, sexual liberation, gender equality, respect for the rights of ethnic minorities and world peace) that have been promoted chiefly by the intellectual elites in rich postindustrial Western societies starting from the 1970s. Since what is advocated is a return to more conservative values in society, strong populist leaders of the (far) right-wing are currently seen by many older About Attributions of Power and Political Control 67 and less educated citizens as the most fitting political supporters of this cultural and moral (re-)orientation. The spread of populist ideas through the news media has also been interpreted as a factor that can explain the growing success of contemporary right-wing populism (see, e.g., Krämer 2014; Mazzoleni 2008, 2014; Müller et al. 2017; Rooduijn 2014). Mazzoleni (2008), for instance, emphasizes the complicity between tabloid press and populism and explains it in light of their shared interest in sensationalism and scandals. Other researchers (see, e.g., Chadwick 2013; Chadwick et al 2016; Engesser et al. 2017) observe that social media give populists more freedom in expressing their ideas, allow for a more direct (unmediated) form of communication between politicians and ordinary citizens by circumventing the journalistic gatekeepers, and encourage the use of a more informal/ colloquial type of language, which also creates an impression of proximity and reduced power distance between interlocutors. As a result, social media users can become an easy prey (and even perpetrators) of the populist rhetoric by sharing its narrative and the underlying ideological orientations. Moffitt (2016) also points out that populists use social network services and internet extensively not just to reach out to ‘the people’ but also to voice their bombastic attacks to the mainstream old media, which are accused of broadcasting ‘fake news’ and disinformation. The seeming paradox of that, indeed, lies in the fact that the news distributed by social media are subject to a markedly reduced editorial quality control in comparison to old media, thus being much more likely to present fake news as truth. 4 Populism as a discursive reality: linguistic approaches As anticipated in the discussion above, populism is not just a social phenomenon (deeply connected to conflicts and crises) involving diffuse psychological reactions (arousal of collective fear and anxiety). Populism is also a matter of discourse, it is a discursive reality. Since populist discourse is a specific type of political discourse, I will approach it first of all by providing a synthethic characterization of political discourse in general terms. According to van Dijk (1997) political discourse is a notion that has a vast applicability since it can theoretically refer to any of the multiple participants in the political arena (e.g. political institutions, politicians, citizens, voters, protesters, dissidents, grassroots organizations, pressure and issue groups) and it also includes forms of discourse that are simply produced in a political setting or by people who have a political aim in mind. Here, I am adopting a more focused interpretation of political discourse that considers politicians as its main actors or authors. 68 Marta Degani As the product of politicians, political discourse is a form of communication that is aimed at persuasion and consensus building. This type of discourse is intentional, manipulative and ideological since it intends to influence people’s opinions, it makes use of discursive strategies in order to reach certain political objectives, and it provides framings of facts/ realities that are in line with the moral values and the ideological stance of the speaker (the politician). Thus, political discourse is intended here as one among the multiple expressions of “text and talk” (see Chilton and Schäffner 2002) that are produced in a political dimension. It is the kind of “text and talk” that serves the purpose of articulating and protecting politicians’ interests by advancing certain political agendas in a political context. The notion of political context is also important since it represents that space of action which enables politicians to exert their agency. The political context, which can range from the government to the internet, functions as an empowering space where political agents act on the world in ways that (can) have an impact on matters of public interest and concern. Populist discourse of the right-wing shares this general characterization of political discourse and it can in turn be seen as comprising a multiplicity of sub-discourses. Wodak (2021: 71) distinguishes among 14 different types of such (sub)discourses: discourse 1: immigration, migrants, asylum seekers; discourse 2: cultural and family values; discourse 3: the ‘homeland’ - the nation and its grand history; discourse 4: gender politics; discourse 5: the ‘pure’ language - mother tongue; discourse 6: globalization; discourse 7: Occident versus Orient - Christianity versus Islam and Judaism; discourse 8: communism; discourse 9: citizenship and belonging - ‘pure’ people; discourse 10: security, law and order; discourse 11: EU and Euroskepticism; discourse 12: market economy; discourse 13: democracy and the people; and discourse 14: privileges and corruption. Wodak also explains that these (sub)discourses correspond to the range of topics that are part and parcel of right-wing populist agendas. Each of them presupposes a particular ideological positioning and a consonant political framing of the issue at stake. Thus, for instance, when right-wing populists talk about language, the discussion is framed in a way to support the idea that the mother tongue of the nation is the only ‘pure’ language in accordance with a nationalist ideological orientation. All of these (sub)discourses/ topics are talked about - as it is indeed the case for all types of political discourse - in a range of political (sub)genres including, among others, political speeches, election rallies, political debates, political interviews, posters, manifestos, slogans, tweets and facebook pages. Populists utilize these (sub)genres to engage in three distinct fields of political action: influencing public opinion and will, advertising and intervening in political control. About Attributions of Power and Political Control 69 As a way to complement previous analyses (Musolff 2019; Wodak 2021; Wodak et al. 2013; Zienkowski and Breeze 2019) and engage further in a critical discussion of discursive populism, here I propose a depiction of rightwing populist discourse that intends to be representative of its most relevant discursive features. This characterization is typological in the sense that it presents right-wing populist discourse as ‘an x type discourse’ and comprises the following core components: • Conflictual discourse: it constructs reality as dichotomous to legitimize conflict. The world is seen as made up of anthitethical binary oppositions be‐ tween subjects (us/ them, self/ other, people/ elite) and their contrastive value attributions (essentially positive/ negative as in good/ bad, pure/ corrupt, moral/ immoral, safe/ dangerous, legitimate/ illegitimate). This oppositional and antagonistic stance is expressed in a form of discourse that is conflictual and as such encourages constant confrontation and fight. • Aggressive discourse: the oppositional stance towards the establishment and its norms results in a non-mainstream (or anti-mainstream) form of communication that is characterized by political incorrectness and verbal aggressiveness. Forms of linguistic sensitivity towards marginalized social groups (i.e. political correctness) are rejected and replaced by an aggressive discourse which promotes marginalization, stereotypical representation and oppression of social minorities. Discourse is bold and confrontational and typified by the use of coarse language. • Simplified discourse: it is apparent in the use of plain, poor and unrefined forms of discourse expressed through an informal kind of language in which colloquialisms and linguistic simplification abound. Ideas are encoded in simple linguistic expressions and the overall message is straightforward. Linguistic simplification in the sense of reduced linguistic complexity as measured by certain textual features (e.g. sentence length, word length, number of complex words) has been observed as related to the gradual democratization of political language during the past century (Lim 2008). In populist discourse, this simplification has an additional ideological component and it is directly related to the populist anti-intellectualist stance. Simplified discourse also fits the kind of informal communication that occurs on social media platforms. • Categorical discourse: it is an either/ or type of discourse which is based on an essentialist understanding of reality and human relationships as either good or bad, right or wrong. Liminal spaces and grey areas are deprived of any ontological status. Categorical parameters, for instance, determine either inclusion or exclusion as members of a civic community. This view reduces 70 Marta Degani the complexity of the socio-cultural ecosystems in which people live and supports the kind of quick, black and white judgements, policy visions, and solutions that populists propose. Quite obviously, categorical discourse is divisive since it does not concede any real exchange of ideas and transforms political debate into a space for the growth of polarized opinions, which can then easily circulate on social media. This is particularly the case with social media whose affordances only allow for a limited number of words (e.g. Twitter) thus hindering any form of online political debate/ discussion and promoting the spread of categorical discourse. • Proximal discourse: it is a kind of discourse that is aimed at generating the perception of proximity/ closeness. This is done by creating the impression that the power distance which de facto separates the populist leader and his/ her audience is reduced to the point of becoming almost irrelevant. Thus, proximal discourse is based on the pretence of an egalitarian relationship between the politician and ordinary citizens. Populists engage in proximal discourse whenever they self-portray themselves as being on the same level with the people and when they assume to represent the vox populi. Populists’ professed concern with the people and their interests, which should supposedly come before anything else, is another expression of proximal discourse. The fact that social media allow for an unmediated form of communication in which a direct relation is established between participants in the ‘political conversation’ aligns with the usage of proximal discourse and makes social media into ideal platforms for the expressions of populist ideas. • Emotional discourse: it is a form of discourse that plays on and exploits human emotionality. This discourse is characterized by the strategic use of language to generate strong emotional reactions. It is common practice among populists to use language manipulatively in order to provoke collective negative emotions like fear, anxiety, anger or resentment and thus trigger the mobilization of the masses to support a particular cause. Populist language contains many provocative statements, catchy phases and rhetorical appeals to pathos. Emotional (rather than rational) associations to concepts such as ‘liberty’, ‘the people’ or ‘the elite’ are also exploited to promote political affiliation to, if not even identification with, the populist cause. Not coincidentally, the term liberty appears in the designations of several populist parties. • Deceptive discourse: it is a type of discourse that hides and manipulates reality by giving rise to alternative facts. Unsupported claims and lies about the media, immigration or the state of the environment create alternative About Attributions of Power and Political Control 71 discourse worlds and alternative truths. This is the case with immigrants portrayed as dangerous and threathening, journalism dismissed as fake news, the denial of climate change and the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Calculated ambivalence is also used to conceal discriminatory policies and obfuscate uncomfortable facts. Thus, the populist emphasis on security can be instrumental for hiding forms of illegitimate control on certain (marginalized) social groups. • Romanticizing discourse: it is a discourse instantiating a nostalgic relation to an idealized past, which is interpreted as a golden age of happiness, prosperity and security. The populist insistence on regaining the harmony and peace of the good old days is part of a strategic political maneuvering that traps people into false projections and reduces their actual political engagement as potential agents of social progress and change in society. This typology of general characteristics of right-wing populist discourse allows for putting an analytical lens on a multiplicity of aspects. At the same time, these different aspects very frequently co-occur to various extents in the political language of right-wing populists. On top of this, individual categories can be regarded as drawing upon each other as, for instance, categorical discourse contributing to simplified discourse, conflictual discourse using features of aggressive discourse, or romanticizing discourse as a specific kind of emotional discourse. Having accounted for populism as a type of discourse, it is now important to briefly illustrate how it can be studied from linguistic perspectives. So far, linguistic analyses of populism have relied substantially on the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (see Demata and Lorenzetti 2020 for critical analytical studies of populism in the field of English Studies; Wodak and Krzyzanowski 2017, for critical case studies on populist discourse in a broad range of Western countries). CDA, which is also referred to as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), is a research paradigm that is primarily concerned with the discursive reproduction of power, power abuse and domination, as well as the related forms of resistance or counter-power (see Fairclough 1989, 1995; Fairclough et al. 2011; Kress and Hodge 1993; van Dijk 2008; Wodak 1989). CDS investigate the relation between discourse structures and social structures with the aim of shedding light on conditions of social and political inequality by challenging dominant discourses. In this framework, power is interpreted as control of the discursive structures (context, text and talk) and control of the social structures (the people). Methodologically, CDS are characterized by openness and inclusivity. Instead of presenting one specific method of conducting critical analysis, CDS embrace all the methods of the humanities 72 Marta Degani and social sciences which are relevant for studying issues/ matters/ problems of social concern. In the specific context of politics, the approach of CDS translates into the analysis of political discourse from a critical perspective that focuses on the reproduction and contestation of political power through political discourse. Critical analysts are particularly intererested in deconstructing forms of power that are illegitimate and as such constitute instances of power abuse. Thus, the attribution of (il)legitimacy in the exercise of power/ control/ domination is of central importance when analyzing political discourse. A strong analytical focus is also put on the identification of ideologies, which are often latent or hidden in texts and are seen as related to the maintenance of power. As Fairclough et al. (2011: 371) put it, ideologies are “particular ways of representing and constructing society which reproduce unequal power relations, relations of domination and exploitation”. In the field of CDS, three distinct types of approaches appear as particularly relevant for investigating right-wing populism: the metaphor-analytical approach of Critical Metaphor Theory (Charteris-Black 2005; Musolff 2016; Semino 2008), the socio-cognitive approach (van Dijk 2017), and the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl 2017; Wodak 2001), which has gained most recognition so far. Additional linguistic approaches that can significantly contribute to our understanding of populism as a discoursive reality include the one of argumentation theory (van Eemeren 2018), that of rhetoric and argumentation (Kienpointner 2017) and the interdisciplinary approach of politolinguistics (Danler 2020), which brings together insights from political theory and analytical tools of linguistics. 5 Conclusion While populism has accompanied the development of democracy throughout history, the chapter has indicated how the more recent rise and spread of populism in its right-wing manifestations is menacing the well-being of civic society. This has been shown to be the case especially as right-wing populism attaches to and takes substance from nationalistic, nativist, anti-pluralist and xenophobic ideologies. Furthermore, the study has pointed out how the antiintellectualist stance of current right-wing populism has changed the conditions which affect our perception and understanding of (political) matters. The paper has also shown how populism is deeply imbricated in the fabric of the political, economic and socio-cultural ecosystems that we inhabit. In recent decades, populism has been growing as a reaction to complex phenomena (glob‐ alization, migration flows, economic recession), which have generated a diffuse sense of instability and fear and a concomitant need for security and protection. About Attributions of Power and Political Control 73 Crises and conflicts have proven to be the most fertile ground for the growth of populism and populism in turn has been observed to generate furher confrontations because it lives on the assumption that the world is made up of antagonistic factions (we/ them, self/ other, people/ elite) who need to fight against each other. This state of affairs calls for critical reflections on populism that can shed further light on the complexity of this evolving phenomenon. It also calls for active engagement in dismantling the dangerous populist contructions about society, social groups, and their power relationships. In this respect, linguists can offer a valuable social contribution through their analyses. As a linguist, I have focused specifically on right-wing populist discourse and described it as a type of discourse that is conflictual, aggressive, simplified, categorical, proximal, deceptive, emotional, and romanticizing. This characterization is intended as both theoretical and methodological in that it describes the object of study while at the same time it delineates possible lines of linguistic enquiry which could be particularly relevant for exploring current expressions of right-wing populism. The kind of critical engagement with right-wing populism that is envisioned here is an engagement that is expected to take shape in linguistic analyses of political discourse that can illustrate its highly manipulative nature by identifying the use of specific discursive strategies and relating lexical choices to underlying ideological leanings. The proposed typological characterization of right-wing populist discourse lends itself very well to a qualitative type of analysis as it is common practice in CDA. In other analytical traditions that are spread in the social sciences such as content analyses (e.g. Hawkins 2009; Roduijn and Pawels 2011), the approach is almost exclusively quantitative and lacks contextualization. However, a concept as malleable and flexible as populism requires to be explored in its specific historical, temporal, spatial, cultural and discursive dimensions. In this respect, studies accounting for the mere frequencies of certain key words (e.g. ‘people’) as indicators of populism might not be too accurate in their estimates. Thus, it is suggested here that quantitative investigations such as content analyses, which dominate research on populism in the social sciences, should be complemented by more qualitatively oriented linguistic explorations. Such a combination would characterize a holistic analysis that unites the quantitative methods and techniques of corpus linguistics with qualitative close contextual analysis. This is an area where there is a lot of potential for future developments and research advancement, especially in the field of English Studies where more engagement with critical discursive analyses of populism is needed. 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Assigning personalities and human qualities to inanimate and natural objects is a familiar technique in folktales and storytelling, and it is used in advertising to establish positive attributes and add value (Brierley 2002: 157). This paper focuses on the ontological metaphor INANIMAT E I S ANIMAT E , or more precisely, INANIMAT E I S H U MAN , in bank advertisements in two languages and cultures: the UK, an industrialised country, and Serbia, a country in transition. It aims to identify some of the most frequent patterns of personification, and to establish a correlation between the human qualities assigned to banks in English and Serbian. Two main sub-metaphors are further considered - A B AN K I S A P E R S O N and A B AN K S E R VI C E I S A P E R S O N . Banks and bank services are frequently presented as human beings because such a metaphor, regardless of culture, inspires positive attitudes and feelings, which are then associated with the institution and their services. The basic aim is to make readers and clients think that banks are generally trustworthy and reliable, ready to help in times of crisis and to provide reliable protection for their money. It thus follows that banks are usually presented in advertisements as reliable individuals who have the financial knowledge and experience to help their clients. For that reason, ontological metaphors have the power to enhance brand likability (i.e. preference towards a particular bank), and influence clients’ decision-making. 1 For a cross-cultural analysis of the use of wordplay in English and Serbian cf. Lazović (2018). As will be seen throughout the paper, these anthropomorphic metaphors are tightly connected to the concept of agency since they endow banks and their products with human power. The next section of this paper gives a brief introduction to the theoretical background to this study, addressing previous research on metaphor in adver‐ tising, and establishing its relevance. Section 3 describes the methodological steps and introduces the research questions and Section 4 analyses the examples from the corpus. The final section presents some concluding remarks and provides direction for future research. 2 Theoretical background Figures of speech, also known as tropes and rhetorical figures, are widely employed in advertising primarily because of their striking and memorable quality (Leech 1966: 183) and their ability to create effects, attract attention and arouse emotions (Dyer 1982: 152). They link emotive associations with the product or service and persuade potential customers to buy (McGuire 2000). Numerous studies have established that advertising language is characterised by deliberately ambiguous structures, wordplay 1 , metaphor and metonymy (e.g. Brierley 2002; Cook 1992; Goddard 1998; Myers 1994; Tanaka 1994; Williamson 1978). Using the theoretical framework of Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Meta‐ phor Theory (1980), this paper examines the role of the ontological metaphor INANIMAT E I S H U MAN in two languages (English and Serbian) in online bank advertisements and explores the ways in which this metaphor is used to persuade potential consumers. - 2.1 Metaphors in advertisements Metaphor is a communicative strategy which is at the heart of modern adver‐ tising (Leiss 1997: 289), since it is effective and persuasive (cf. Kitchen 2008). It is used extensively for various objectives, chiefly for gaining the consumer’s attention and influencing their beliefs and attitudes. Advertisers want the audience to establish a connection between the promoted product and the object or property featured in the metaphor (Tanaka 1994: 90), and suggest the right kind of emotive associations for the product by identifying it with an object of the consumer’s desires (Leech 1966: 182). These positive associations are not 80 Vesna Lazović 2 These two examples are taken from the corpus of online bank advertisements compiled by the author (Lazović 2015). entirely conscious but are designed to function on a subliminal level. Often, metaphors make implicit or explicit statements that a product or service is unique, whilst magnifying its importance and value. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Kövecses (2010) suggest that more than a mere device of the poetic imagination and a rhetorical flourish, metaphors are powerful tools in communicating ideas, as they actually structure our perceptions and understanding. These cognitive linguists define metaphor as a means for understanding one conceptual domain - the target domain in terms of another, an experientially closer conceptual domain - the source domain, i.e. A TA R G E T D O MAIN I S A S O U R C E D O MAIN . Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 10-32) classify metaphors according to the cogni‐ tive functions they perform and the ways they link concepts, distinguishing between three general categories of conceptual metaphors: 1. Structural metaphors, where the target concept is understood by means of the structure of the source concept (e.g. A R G U M E NT I S WA R , TIM E I S A R E S O U R C E ); 2. Orientational metaphors, where concepts are given spatial orientation: up-down, in-out, front-back, on-off, deep-shallow, central-peripheral (e.g. M O R E I S U P , L E S S I S D O WN ); and 3. Ontological metaphors, where events, activities, emotions and other intan‐ gible concepts are viewed as entities and substances (e.g. IN F LATI O N I S AN E N TIT Y , TH E MIN D I S A MA C HIN E ). For example, the conceptual metaphor M O N E Y I S A P LAN T starts from the source domain - A P LANT , which is used to understand the target domain - M O N E Y : (1) Secure your money and watch it grow. (2) Money doesn’t grow on trees, but it can grow like a tree. (3) Consider planting your money with our foundation. Viewing money as a plant makes it possible to transfer particular qualities of a concrete notion (a plant) to a more abstract notion (money), while at the same time helping us understand the abstract. Money is also frequently conceptualised as an animate entity. In phrases such as earnest money, mad money, dead money or smart money, human-like characteristics are attributed to money (Đurović and Silaški 2016: 39-40). The metaphor M O N E Y I S A P E R S O N can also be found in bank advertisements 2 : Wherever You Go, Your Bank Travels with You 81 3 All the examples in Serbian are translated into English by the author. • Kamate kojima Vaš novac neće odoleti. [Interest rates your money won’t resist 3 .] • …find the perfect home for your money In these two examples, money is represented as a person with desires and emotions, or a person who needs a safe place to stay. This anthropomorphism structures the way we comprehend the intangible concept of money. In financial advertising, several typical conceptual metaphors may be identi‐ fied, including (taken from Tanaka 1994: 90-91): 1. Structural metaphors: S AVIN G S C H E M E S A R E C O N TAIN E R S / P O S S E S S I O N I S HAVIN G S O M E THIN G IN O N E ’ S P O C K E T More in your PEP, not in our pockets. C HA R G E S / IN V E S TM E NT S A R E O B J E C T S Cut out the dealing charges on your investment. 2. Orientational metaphor: M O R E I S U P , L E S S I S D O WN Regular savings build up to a big sum. 3. Ontological metaphors: F INAN C IAL A C TIVITI E S A R E P E R F O R MIN G Flemings… offer a strong performance record. F INAN C IAL A C TIVITI E S A R E MA R K E T S How can a private investor get into emerging markets without going there? Conceptual Metaphor Theory has revolutionised research on the language of advertising, which has started to address the rhetorical role of metaphors in the discourse (e.g. Forceville 1996; Morgan and Reichert 1999; Phillips and McQuarrie 2002; Ungerer 2000). As Pérez Sobrino (2017) observes, metaphors and metonymy play a central role in advertising campaigns. Kövecses (2010: 65) notes that advertisements are a major manifestation of conceptual metaphors, and that if these are appropriately selected, they can immensely advance the promotion of an item and the selling power of an advertisement. Research has most frequently focused on metaphors in advertisements for general consumer products (e.g. cosmetic products, food and beverages). For instance, Pérez- Hernández (2019) offers an in-depth analysis of multimodal primary metaphors in fast food printed advertising. The metaphors most frequently identified in her research are IM P O R TANT I S C E N T R AL , IM P O R TANT I S B I G , and G O O D I S B R I G HT . Other, 82 Vesna Lazović more specialised, types of advertisements have also been analysed. Delbaere (2013) investigates conceptual metaphors in pharmaceutical advertising. Her findings reveal that metaphors based on the source domains of MA G I C , S P O R T S and J O U R N E Y are frequent in this type of advertising. Hidalgo-Downing et al. (2013), who based their research on Koller’s study (2004), explore creative recontextualisation of the conventional metaphors B U S IN E S S I S A J O U R N E Y and B U S I ‐ N E S S I S WA R / S P O R T S / A R A C E in ICT advertisements across time both in the verbal and visual modes. Research which is significant to the current study has been undertaken by Silaški (2010), who explores advertisements for financial services in Serbian and shows that the most widely used metaphors in advertisements for financial services are those of L O V E , J O U R N E Y , and S P O R T , as well as personification as a special type of ontological metaphor. To sum up, Conceptual Metaphor Theory is a theoretical framework that can be applied to study whether different languages and cultures share the same conceptual background for the ontological metaphor INANIMAT E I S ANIMAT E and its subtype INANIMAT E I S H U MAN . 2.1.1 Personification in advertisements Personification is a form of ontological metaphor where a physical object is specified as being a person, and where human qualities are attributed to nonhuman entities (Kövecses 2010: 39; Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 33). These human attributes can include any aspect or element of “intelligent, animated beings, like beliefs, desires, intentions, goals, plans, psychological states, powers, and will” (Turner 1987: 175). Personification is a powerful rhetorical device since it allows us to “compre‐ hend a wide variety of experiences with nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities” and “make sense of phenomena in the world in human terms” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 33-34). Of course, people’s view of the world and their existing knowledge can heavily influence their behaviour as consumers (Semino 2008: 174). For that reason, it is common to find instances of abstract concepts which are “given meaning through the use of conventional knowledge about the existence and behaviour of living things” (Charteris-Black 2000: 158-159). In bank advertising abstract concepts are usually presented as human beings with human qualities, which makes understanding them easier since “person‐ ification makes use of one of the best source domains we have - ourselves” (Kövecses 2010: 39). As Đurović and Silaški (2016) observe, anthropomorphism is deliberately exploited in the language of business and economics (e.g. Charteris- Wherever You Go, Your Bank Travels with You 83 Black and Musolff 2003; Đurović and Silaški 2011; Herrera-Soler and White 2012). Its primary function is to emphasise positive and desirable features by targeting consumers’ emotions, while cleverly disguising negative aspects of the product or service. In addition, human-like traits encourage target consumers to have affective associations with the product, increasing emotional attachment towards it (Aaker 1997; Fournier 1998; Park and Kim 2015) and strengthening the product-consumer relationship (Delbaere et al. 2011; Fleck et al. 2014). Delbaere et al. (2011), for example, focus on personification created through visual images in print advertising, i.e. by analysing pictures in advertisements that feature products engaged in a kind of human behaviour. They conclude that such personification seems to result in more positive emotions, increased attribution of brand personality and enhanced brand likability. This is in line with Forceville and Urios-Aparisi’s opinion (2009: 3) that an advert can be persuasive “in the sense of aiming for some sort of cognitive, emotional or aesthetic effect, or all three together, in its envisaged audience”. Since these effects are readily triggered through visual metaphors, previous research has mostly focused on visual strategies (McQuarrie and Phillips 2008; Phillips and McQuarrie 2002). Visual metaphors seem effective in engaging consumers to experience and elaborate their meaning (Lagerwerf et al. 2012) and lead to favourable attitudes towards the advertising stimulus (Gkiouzepas and Hogg 2011). Although metaphor analysis has often been employed in studies of adver‐ tising, few researchers have explored the primary research objective of this paper: linguistic manifestations of the ontological metaphor INANIMAT E I S ANI ‐ MAT E , and in particular, the use of personification in bank advertising in different languages and cultures (cf. Filipović-Kovačević (2013) for an analysis of the metaphor INANIMAT E I S ANIMAT E in several bank advertisements in English and Serbian). 3 Methodology The comparative analysis in this paper features a particular type of advertise‐ ment from a specific advertising sector - financial products and services (cf. Adams and Cruz García 2007; Albers-Miller and Straughan 2000; Lazović 2014). It focuses on bank advertisements, in part because advertisements for financial services are thought to be among the most boring and predictable of those from any sector (Myers 1999: 38) and hence usually neglected. Jewler (1992: 49) notes the problems copywriters face when they have to write a caption for a bank account and struggle to think of yet another way of saying that “our interest 84 Vesna Lazović 4 A certificate of deposit is a type of fixed-term, fixed rate savings account commonly sold in the USA. rates on long-term certificates of deposit 4 aren’t the worst in town”. In addition, it is very challenging for banks to compete, because from a consumer point of view there is not much that differentiates one institution from another ( Jewler 1992: 49). The challenge is further heightened by the fact that they do not sell objects, but intangible and abstract financial services, which are often difficult to understand. Our corpus consists of 60 British and 60 Serbian bank advertisements found on the official home pages of banks operating in the UK and Serbia, all of which contain examples of the ontological metaphor INANIMAT E I S H U MAN . The majority of the examples are taken from the corpus compiled for the author’s PhD thesis of online bank advertisements offering services on the official home pages of the 32 most prominent banks operating in the UK and 33 banks operating in Serbia at the time of corpus collection (Lazović 2015). All the advertisements are aimed and directed at individual customers rather than corporations. In addition, the product or service advertised belongs to the retail personal banking sector, not the private, business or corporate banking sector. This paper’s focus is on explaining how personification is exploited as a persuasion strategy in two languages, English and Serbian. Since banks strive to burnish their image and reassure disappointed and sceptical clients, especially during times of economic crisis, this paper further explores whether this form of ontological metaphor is similarly used in different languages and whether there are any culture-specific features which may be related to differences in economic circumstances and difference in living standards. In light of this, several research questions are addressed: 1. Is personification found in both British and Serbian bank advertising? 2. What are the ways that banks employ personification in their advertise‐ ments? 3. What is the main function of personification in bank advertisements in English and Serbian? 4. Are there any differences in the use of personification between the two languages? This study is qualitative and exploratory in nature, focusing on the ways banks seek to establish a relationship with potential clients and on the interpretation of the messages found in bank advertisements. Since the discussion centres Wherever You Go, Your Bank Travels with You 85 5 Only explicit examples in the singular were taken into consideration. Examples in the plural implying bank employees were excluded (e.g. Let us help you). on verbal metaphorical expressions, visual metaphors are excluded from any further discussion (cf. Forceville 1996; Phillips and McQuarrie 2004). 4 Findings This section focuses on the conceptual mapping of B AN K S AN D B AN K S E R VI C E S A R E H U MAN S found in online bank advertisements. In our corpus of British and Serbian bank advertisements, human characteristics and ability are assigned to physical objects and abstract concepts in both languages and cultures. The examples reveal recurring patterns, as, most commonly, banks and bank services (e.g. credit cards, loans, online banking) are anthropomorphised. Examples of this are illustrated and analysed in the following section. - 4.1 Metaphor A BANK I S A P ER S ON5 Metaphors have the potential to influence beliefs about the future and actions in the present (Nerlich 2012). Since people are generally cautious about claims and tempting messages in bank offers, personification acts as a useful means of persuasion, with the metaphor F INAN C IAL IN S TIT U TI O N S A R E P E O P L E dominating. Financial institutions and their services are presented as human beings with human characteristics and emotions, thus evoking feelings of trust, security and friendship (Silaški 2010). For example, financial security and reliability are foregrounded when banks are presented as guides (Filipović-Kovačević 2013: 166). The main aim is to make potential clients assume that banks are generally trustworthy, ready to help in crises and protect their money. For that reason, banks present themselves as reliable individuals that have the financial knowledge and experience to help their clients, as can be illustrated with examples (1)-(4) from the corpus: (1) JUBMES banka poseduje značajno iskustvo dugo dve decenije [ JUBMES bank has valuable two-decade-long experience] (2) Credit Agricole banka pripremila je veoma atraktivnu ponudu [Credit Agricole bank has prepared a very attractive offer] (3) Ulster Bank is committed to helping our customers (4) The Bank sets interest rates to keep inflation low As can be seen, the metaphoric load of the verbs ՙto have՚, ՙto prepare՚, ՙto be committed՚, ՙto set՚ is exhibited when used together with an inanimate noun 86 Vesna Lazović ՙbank՚. Banks are described as having personality characteristics, such as helpful, experienced, assertive and daring. This, as a result, can incite potential clients to develop positive attitudes towards the bank and can affect their actions. Further, financial institutions often use carefully chosen metaphors, where they are presented as benefactors, faithful friends, loyal partners or even teammates, ready to help their clients benefit (Silaški 2010). In this instance, the bank is also personified in online advertisements, but here the ontological metaphor A B AN K I S A P E R S O N can be sub-classified to include other, more specific, sub-metaphors, including: (1) A B AN K I S A P AT R O N , (2) A B AN K I S A S U P P O R T E R , or even (3) A B AN K I S A F R I E N D / C O M P ANI O N . These sub-metaphors can trigger a specific way of thinking about a bank and can have an impact on how people act when choosing banks or their services. Sub-metaphor 1 A BANK I S A PATRON : (5) Srpska banka poklanja 60 računara [The Serbian Bank is donating 60 computers] (6) Čačanska banka je uzela aktivno učešće u Programu finansiranja projekata [The Bank of Čačak has taken an active role in the Programme of project financing] (7) RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) Supporting Comic Relief In order to obtain a favourable public image and promote themselves, banks sponsor social projects - giving scholarships to talented children, donating computers or raising money for charities. In the Serbian examples (5) and (6), the banks donate computers and provide financial support to projects, while in the English example (7), the bank is promoting the charity as well as providing financial support. Banks are thus presented as socially-engaged individuals who care about others. Sub-metaphor 2 A BANK I S A S UP P ORTE R / HELP ER : (8) Univerzal banka ad Vaš oslonac [Univerzal bank ad Your support] (9) Imam podršku za ostvarenje svojih snova [I have support to fulfil my dreams] (10) The Bank contributes to protecting and enhancing the stability of the financial system (11) SGBL provides you with a convenient solution: the prepaid gift cards for all budgets Wherever You Go, Your Bank Travels with You 87 Financial institutions offer help and support and do everything for the benefit of their clients, who are encouraged not to worry about their financial stability. Banks promote themselves as ensuring reliability and protection to evoke a feeling of security. The Serbian banks in examples (8) and (9) are supportive and offer help to clients throughout their life and even make all their dreams possible. The British bank in examples (10) and (11) protects the financial system and provides solutions for all budgets. Sub-metaphor 3 A BANK I S A F RIEND / COMPANION : (12) Banka može biti uvek tamo gde ste Vi [Our bank can always be where you are] (13) Wherever you go, your bank travels with you Banks are also portrayed as faithful friends in advertisements. In example (12), the Serbian bank is portrayed as loyal, being always there when needed. In example (13), the British bank is directly associated with the pleasurable activity of travelling, evoking memories of stress-free and relaxed time spent with loved ones. In addition, the friendship metaphor is linked with the concept of loyalty and makes people less willing to replace objects or services (cf. Chandler and Schwarz 2010). As illustrated, different aspects of a person are emphasised in order to create a desirable image of a bank, which can further affect a future client’s financial decision, especially because loyalty, support and generosity are all highly ranked as attributes. Banks strive to establish a stable and long-lasting relationship with their clients and create an idealised version of the real world in which their customers feel happy and secure (Adams and Cruz García 2007: 132). - 4.2 Metaphor A BANK S E RVIC E / P RODUCT I S A P ER S ON The anthropomorphism of products and services is based on the metaphor IT E M S T O S E L L A R E P E O P L E (Kövecses 2010: 65). Human characteristics are attributed to bank services and this ontological metaphor helps, among other things, in the process of “setting goals and motivating actions” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 27). Personification allows us to better understand unfamiliar abstract concepts and even “change the way that we think and feel about something” (Charteris-Black 2004: 251). Services and products are frequently anthropomorphised in both British and Serbian bank advertisements, including bank accounts, online and mobile banking, savings, loans and debit/ credit cards as illustrated below. 88 Vesna Lazović 6 Paradoxically, the service becomes a person although there are no bank employees providing the service. 7 Older generations are still reluctant to switch to online and/ or mobile banking and prefer to stand in a queue in front of the bank. (a) Bank accounts (14) Devizni štedni račun, a odlično zarađuje! [Foreign currency savings account, which earns a high income! ] (15) Our current account lets you bank in your downtime, rather than your free time Since a variety of bank accounts are currently available on the market, banks seek unique ways to introduce their special offers. The savings account in the Serbian example (14) is presented as a successful individual capable of high earnings, whilst the current account in example (15) offered by the British bank helps us better organise our time. (b) Online and mobile banking (16) NetBanking štedi i Vaše vreme i Vaš novac [NetBanking saves both your time and your money] (17) Internet Banking helps you manage your money (18) Online Banking gives you control of your money day and night In the last decade there has been a switch from traditional visits to the bank to the use of online and/ or mobile banking. Banks have been promoting online and mobile banking in both the UK and Serbia because these are less costly to provide and easier to manage, while also providing additional data about their clients which they can aggregate for money-making insights. To convince clients to use their computers and mobile phones more, this bank service is anthropomorphised to ensure that a feeling of security and control prevails 6 . All the examples have a common thread — this service is outstanding, as it helps clients and gives them full control over their finances while saving them time. Although the offer is definitely tempting, in Serbia there is still a lack of trust in this type of banking 7 . (c) Savings (19) Štednja Vama na usluzi [Savings At your service] (20) BM savings concentrates on giving our customers the best Wherever You Go, Your Bank Travels with You 89 Even though the average savings rate in both countries has reached a historic low, banks can still find a way to advertise savings accounts by assigning them human characteristics. One advertisement from the Serbian corpus, shown in example (19), promises that their savings provision is ՙat your service՚ all the time, which implies that this service will always give clients a helping hand. The British savings provision in example (20) also provides their customers only with the best. (d) Loans (21) Kredit koji vraća dugove! [A loan which pays back debts! ] (22) Olimpijski keš kredit Spreman za vrhunske rezultate! [The Olympic cash loan Ready for the best results! ] (23) Naši gotovinski krediti za zaposlene i penzionere ispunjavaju Vašu 1001 želju [Our cash loans for the employed and retired make your 1001 wishes come true] (24) Our loan could help you get started Loans are one of the most frequently used bank services. In the corpus a loan is presented as a helper and a supporter, who pays back debts, as in examples (21) and (24). The Serbian examples also feature the Olympic cash loan, which is personified and presented as a sportsperson ready to achieve the best results, as in example (22), as well as a special cash loan for employed and retired people which has magical powers like a genie in a bottle and can make all their wishes come true, as in example (23). (e) Cards (25) Izvini, ali-… [Sorry, but… Ona je ta! She is the one! Raiffeisen kartica za Raiffesen card for za refinansiranje refinancing] (26) Kartica crno-belog srca [A card with a black and white heart] (27) Jedina koja vraća novac [The only one that returns money Prva kreditna cash back kartica The first cash back credit card] (28) Otkrijte Inspire, debitnu karticu jedinstvenih mogućnosti [Discover Inspire, a debit card with unique capabilities] (29) It’s the only card that says ‘hello’ with a 6-% welcome bonus (30) The card that gives you plenty of breathing space 90 Vesna Lazović Payment cards, both debit and credit, have slowly but steadily replaced cash as the principal means of making a payment. In bank advertisements cards are friendly individuals with unique capabilities. In the Serbian example (25), a card for refinancing is personified as female and the exclamation Ona je ta! [She is the one! ] suggests the idea of making the right choice for a lasting partnership, even with romantic overtones. The card in example (26) with the black and white heart is designed for fans of the ultra-popular Belgrade football club ՙPartizan՚, whose colours are black and white. In examples (27) and (28), the card has unique and desirable features, since it can give money back. In the English examples (29) and (30), the card is friendly, welcoming us with a bonus and, once more with romantic overtones, is a considerate partner — giving us breathing space. Because in Serbia cheques have for a long time been an extremely popular payment method, it was a great challenge for banks to convince clients that cards are better. Apart from producing financially attractive offers, banks have tried to make cards more popular by personifying them. In both Serbia and the UK market, there are many banks competing for the market, and one of their strategies for doing this is by trying to restore and retain trust by offering safety, security and reliability (Lazović 2018: 31). They employ a range of strategic communication methods to effectively promote their products and services to their target audience. Personification in bank advertisements rhetorically serves the purpose of achieving these goals and successfully engaging the audience while at the same time increasing the chances of the audience remembering advertisements and possibly reacting to them. As has been illustrated, the domain of human experience is mapped onto both banks and bank services, since different personality characteristics are assigned to them. Banks want customers to relate to their products and services in a similar way to how they relate to people (cf. MacInnis and Folkes 2017). This comes as no surprise since anthropomorphism plays a crucial role in determining how a person interacts with nonhuman agents (Epley et al. 2008). Advertisements play with our emotions and we become interested in and attached to the product when we experience it as human. The crucial goal of banks is therefore to attract attention in a busy market and create positive and favourable responses, which would in this case be choosing the bank or a particular bank service. By deploying personification, financial institutions present themselves as our life-long partners who can miraculously solve any financial problems. However, it seems that personification is sometimes designed to directly counteract banks’ least client-friendly practices. For example, such a conceptual mapping cleverly obscures the fact that bank services are frequently expensive. Wherever You Go, Your Bank Travels with You 91 5 Conclusion Personification is a valuable advertising strategy that activates consumers’ cognitive processes, sparks their interest and helps promote the product (cf. Phillips and McQuarrie 2004). The purpose of this paper was to analyse the use of personification in online bank advertisements in Serbia and the UK. It high‐ lighted the fact that assigning human characteristics and ability to inanimate objects and concepts is common in the banking sector. Financial institutions and their services are anthropomorphised primarily to evoke feelings of trust, stability, security, loyalty and friendship. These feelings reinforce a positive image of the bank and consequently, attract more clients. The ontological metaphor INANIMAT E I S H U MAN was found to be an important and useful device in both languages and this conceptual mapping did not exhibit any significant variations qualitatively. It was further revealed that the ontological metaphors A B AN K I S A P E R S O N and A B AN K S E R VI C E I S A P E R S O N are found in advertising for banks in both languages. As was shown, the bank advertising messages in the analysed corpus did not reflect any marked cultural differences as far as personification is concerned. This may be due to the globalisation process and internationalisation, which resulted in bank advertisements becoming more uniform in content, style and selling strategies. Personification also has a pragmatic role and contributes to the understanding of advertising discourse. This analysis has revealed how a message can be conveyed using personification to successfully engage the target audience and effectively promote the services in the financial sector. Such engagement can affect the audiences’ attitudes and emotions towards the advertised product. These emotions are likely to be positive and will most probably be manifested as a positive shift in brand attitude (Delbaere et al. 2011: 124). Several considerations should be taken into account when interpreting the results of this study. To accomplish the goal of the research, the analysis was limited to qualitative examination of the verbal messages. 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London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd. 96 Vesna Lazović The Use of Error Profiles in Applied Linguistics - Empowering Language Instruction by Cataloguing Rating-negative Performance at the English Department, University of Klagenfurt, Austria Nikola Dobrić & Günther Sigott 1 Introduction The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate the use of systematic error analysis, as embodied by error profiles, in improving rater training procedures, in constructing rating scale descriptors, in writing teaching materials, and in language teaching in general. The main assertion the study makes is that by identifying systematically occurring errors in one educational context, preva‐ lent competence-related problems in that context can be highlighted. An error profile, as proposed here, exemplifies one means to achieve a comprehensive insight into the systematic behaviour of errors attested as commonly made by a group of language learners. In a nutshell, an error profile represents the breakdown of the errors most particularly distinguishing among different groups of students in one setting, the groups in their turn being defined by a common categorization according to an awarded grade. In practical terms, the interest is in grouping errors commonly co-occurring with each of the grades assigned in one setting, where each grade represents a hierarchical level of relevant language proficiency. Two pillars need to be constructed as supports for the study premise. The first one is conceptual, and it requires a case to be built as backing for the assertion that errors can be linked to gaps in L2 competence in general. In other words, it requires addressing whether (and how) one can distinguish between a slip of performance and a deficit in competence. To do so, the paper offers an indepth discussion of the nature of errors and of their relationship with language learning and language competence. The second pillar is empirical, and it requires a practical demonstration of how to create and interpret error profiles. This involves a case-study focused on a high stakes exam taken by soon-to-graduate students at the English Department, University of Klagenfurt in Austria. In a broader sense, the study at hand is part of a wider effort to rekindle the once thriving academic interest in errors. In fact, focus on errors has always been evident in the teaching profession due to their obvious link to classroom work. Consequently, the field of Error Analysis (Corder 1974; Faerch et al. 1984) or Error Studies (Catalán 1997) was formerly a flourishing area of SLA research. It was the embracing of errors by the Creative Construction Hypothesis (Dulay and Burt 1974; Krashen 1981) as an integral part of the language learning process, rather than them being considered as something negative, as it had been till then, that caused the decline in popularity of Error Analysis as a distinct research field. This was further reinforced by the fact that the academic community had come to view a preoccupation with errors more negatively in relation to the provision of feedback and to their use as a basis for the assessment of productive language skills. The focus had switched more generally to positive aspects of language production. With that, the obvious usefulness of analysing errors was no longer given a prominent place in research. This is problematic because the extensive investigation carried out in the period between the 1940s and the 1970s had shown that looking at errors is, in fact, very beneficial in terms of insights they provide us regarding L2 learning processes. 2 Errors as indicators of competence Conceptually, an error is most commonly understood as an “infringement or deviation of the code of the formal system of communication through which the message is conveyed” (Catalán 1997: 66). This infringement is formally identified through reference to the codified norms and to expectations operating in a language. In similar terms, an error is also dubbed “the flawed side of the learner’s speech or writing that deviates from some selected norm of mature language performance” (Dulay and Krashen 1982: 139). A common problem is that defined in such a traditional manner, errors chiefly evoke a relation to accuracy, it being but only one aspect of the trio believed to make up the construct of language proficiency, comprising in addition complexity and fluency (Vercellotti 2017). This is because the focus in such a view on errors is placed far too much on the form which is being recognized as non-norm adequate, to the neglect of problems above the sentence level. Linking errors to (linguistic) complexity (as expectations of mature language performance (DeKeyser 2008; Weis 2017; Wolfe-Quintero et al. 1998)) and fluency (as expectations of smooth‐ ness or ease of speech or writing (Hilton 2008; Kormos and Dénes 2004; Tavakoli 98 Nikola Dobrić & Günther Sigott and Skehan 2005)) of a language performance involves considering them not only as observable via a reference to a codified norm. Rather, errors are thus seen as also involving problems which are visible in relation to expectations of appropriateness and acceptability of use, as anticipated in a particular setting. This indicates that a definition of an error needs to be expanded to include any and all qualities of a language performance which do not meet the full gambit of expectations of a proficient speaker for a specific context. EXPECTATIONS OF MATURE LANGUAGE PERFORMANCE ERRORS AS FAILURES to meet EXPECTATIONS COMPLEXITY non-norm adequacy norm ACCURACY EXPECTATIONS EXPECTATIONS CY FLUENCY Figure 1. Rough representation of the relationship between errors and complexity, accuracy, and fluency In addition, and having all this in mind, it would seem that when observed from an educational point of view, one more way to conceptually perceive errors is as all and any phenomena that would in an assessment situation be recognized as rating-negative (Dobrić 2022). This would mean that any textual quality or feature which would potentially negatively influence a reader engaged in evaluation (i.e., towards a lower grade) can and should be called an error. Such an understanding would require no distinction having to be made between the different types of ‘undesirable’ phenomena in a language performance. Use of Error Profiles in Applied Linguistics 99 In practical terms, from the perspective of this study, the most challenging aspect, ultimately, is not what can we call an error, which is a question often approached very preconsciously and intuitively in educational practice. Rather, it is how to practically code them and then reliably differentiate them from mistakes (Dobrić 2015). In general, the difference between the two is to be found in corrigibility and systematicity ( James 1998). A speaker/ learner would be able to self-correct a mistake, which is why they are also referred to as slips. This would not be a possibility for an error. In addition, mistakes, as slips, would be expected to appear haphazardly, while errors, as potential problems of language competence, would appear more uniformly and expectedly in learner performance. The distinction is a crucial one because the premise implies that errors, in contrast to mistakes, which are issues of performance, constitute char‐ acteristics related to language competence (Corder 1971; Lengo 1995). Telling the difference between the two is particularly difficult in contexts involving a lack of longitudinal data. In cases where a rater/ teacher (or annotator) is faced only by one writing performance produced by one learner/ test taker, there is little choice but to consider any feature of that language performance which can be seen as deviating from the norm and related expectations as, by default, an error, despite the fact that it could be a mistake. To clearly differentiate between the two, information on systematicity of occurrence of any such rating-negative textual quality or feature is necessary as concrete evidence of it really being a stable characteristic of the emerging competence of the learners at hand. This kind of systematicity-related evidence can be observed on two levels, individual and group. When related to individual learners, any frequently and systematically occurring rating-negative textual quality or feature in the language performance of one learner can be distinguished as an error and not a mistake. This can be facilitated by creating an error profile of one language learner. It can be revealing of the stage of learning of one individual and, as such, informal individual error profiles generated by teachers constitute a common approach to building feedback in most classroom settings. However, in cases where there is no longitudinal data available, such as separate exam situations, this kind of individual approach comes with many practical problems. They stem from the fact that individual writing performances produced in most assessment settings are usually too short (not often beyond 500 words), precluding the possibility of finding evidence of systematic occurrences of errors. The groupwise approach, drawing on multiple performances produced in a specific context and focusing on information on the distribution of one error across a collective language performance, holds more potential for highlighting systematicity even when longitudinal data is not forthcoming. The emphasis in this approach is 100 Nikola Dobrić & Günther Sigott on identifying errors which can be said to pose problems for whole groups of learners under observation rather than on individual learners. For example, we start by considering the collection of all of the performances produced in the context of interest as constituting a corpus representing the collective performance of that group of learners. Then, when engaging in coding it for errors, it goes without saying that only one or few occurrences of an error in such a corpus cannot be safely considered an indication of a particular stage in language learning representative of the whole group of learners. It is likely in such a case that only one or few learners had problems of the kind indicated by that particular error, other learners not displaying any or many errors of the type in question. Possibly, as discussed above, a solitary appearance of an error can also in reality only be a case of a mistake (slip). Likewise, low frequency of occurrence of multiple error types may also only indicate that they were made by a minority of students haphazardly across the corpus representing the population of learners under observation. A way is, hence, needed of distinguishing between potential issues embodied by errors which are nonsystematic for a group of learners (i.e., are individual or even only performancerelated) and those which are systematic and collective in one educational context, as sketched out in Figure 2. To address this need, establishing collective error profiles is proposed as a tool. They offer a comprehensive picture of errors characteristic of one educational context, and one group of language learners/ test takers can help focus on the most prevalent ones, and can reveal specificities of their behaviour. RATING-NEGATIVE QUALITY/ FEATURE MISTAKE (SLIP) non-systematic occurence ERROR A STABLE CHARACTERISTIC FEATURE systematic individual occurence FREQUENT AND WIDE COLLECTIVE OCCURENCE Figure 2. Wide and frequent occurrence of an error as a marker of stable characteristics of L2 proficiency Use of Error Profiles in Applied Linguistics 101 3 Methodology - building an error profile The learner corpus intended for demonstrating the construction and the subse‐ quent interpretation and use of error profiles consists of 60 writing performances produced by 60 test takers attempting their final language proficiency exam known as the Fachprüfung 3 (FP3) between 2015 and 2017. FP3 was the final language examination taken by soon-to-graduate students in the English Depart‐ ment, University of Klagenfurt in Austria. It involved a speaking and a writing component and was aimed at the CEFR C2 level of English language proficiency. The test takers were fully comparable to each other in the majority of relevant var‐ iables, including first language, age, and English language learning background. The writing performances were digitalized and made a part of the Austrian Learner Language Internet Corpus of English (ALLICE). The corpus represents the written performance of a high proportion of advanced undergraduate students at the English Department graduating between 2015-2017 (60 out of 110 in total) and, as such, can be taken to be representative of their collective L2 English language competence. The structure of the corpus is outlined in Table 1. The writing performances at the core of the study were rated following a procedure unrelated in any overt manner to error counting or to the study at hand (performed several years prior to it, in fact). The rating was conducted on the basis of an analytic rating scale informed by the CEFR, consisting of four dimensions, Task Achievement, Textual Competence, Grammar, and Vocabulary, as well as negotiated Aggregated ratings, stemming from the four individual dimensions. It was carried out, in a triple-blind procedure, by a team of trained raters, all of whom were practicing teachers with teaching experience at university level. The error profiles themselves were established separately for proficiency groups established on the basis of the Aggregated ratings. S IZ E 60 samples (approximately 30,000 words in total) A G E 22 (average) L E V E L (CEFR) C2 (expected) F IR S T LAN G UA G E German (Austrian) M E DIU M written L E A R NIN G C O N T E XT EFL/ ESL G E N R E Essays (argumentative) Table 1. Overview of the ALLICE learner corpus 102 Nikola Dobrić & Günther Sigott The corpus was annotated for errors using the SCOPE&SUBSTANCE error taxonomy (Dobrić and Sigott 2014). The error classification on which the tagset is based uses the grammatical hierarchy described by Quirk et al. (1985). Central to it is the distinction between scope and substance. SCOPE refers to the amount of textual or extra-textual context that is required for recognizing the presence of an error. SUBSTANCE, by contrast, refers to the size of the element that needs to be changed in order to correct the error. Both categories are observed on the hierarchical levels of word, phrase, clause, sentence or text, with the addition of punctuation (as an additional SUBSTANCE), which yields 20 possible combinations or error types, outlined in Table 2. To illustrate the application of the taxonomy in practice, the following example may help (Dobrić and Sigott 2014: 115): One solution to the problem of too high alcohol consumption is to simply not authorize everyone to sell it. If the error underlined in the example (‘it’) was to be marked using the SCOPE&SUBSTANCE error taxonomy, for its SCOPE we would identify ‘Sen‐ tence’ because the problem with the anaphoric reference on ‘it’ can only be spotted once both clauses are taken into consideration together. As the SUBSTANCE of the error we would claim ‘Word’ since this is the element of the performance that needs to be altered in order for the error to disappear. Hence, this error would be marked as SCOPE Sentence SUBSTANCE Word. - E R R O R T Y P E - E R R O R T Y P E 1 SCOPE Word SUBSTANCE Punct 11 SCOPE Sentence SUBSTANCE Word 2 SCOPE Word SUBSTANCE Word 12 SCOPE Sentence SUBSTANCE Phrase 3 SCOPE Phrase SUBSTANCE Punct 13 SCOPE Sentence SUBSTANCE Clause 4 SCOPE Phrase SUBSTANCE Word 14 SCOPE Sentence SUBSTANCE Sentence 5 SCOPE Phrase SUBSTANCE Phrase 15 SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Punct 6 SCOPE Clause SUBSTANCE Punct 16 SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Word 7 SCOPE Clause SUBSTANCE Word 17 SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Phrase 8 SCOPE Clause SUBSTANCE Phrase 18 SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Clause 9 SCOPE Clause SUBSTANCE Clause 19 SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Sentence 10 SCOPE Sentence SUBSTANCE Punct 20 SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Text Table 2. The tagset used for annotating errors in the study Use of Error Profiles in Applied Linguistics 103 1 This is calculated by dividing the sum of all error tokens by the sum of all the words in all texts of one grade and then multiplying by 100. The annotation of the 60 performances using the SCOPE&SUBSTANCE error taxonomy was performed by six trained annotators (all of them academic staff at higher education institutions working within the area of English studies) in the spring of 2019. In order to ensure the reliability and validity of the corpus data, all of the annotators received extensive annotation training (delivered through two workshops) in the months prior to the actual tagging. The control of interannotator agreement performed on two shared texts (annotated in addition to the original 60) showed 94 % and 99 % of error location agreement respectively (meaning that the annotators were almost uniform in identifying errors). 4 Results and analysis Tables 3 to 8 represent the profile of errors identified in the 60 performances in each of the five groups defined on the basis of the Aggregated ratings. The error profiles provide several important levels of data. Aside from just the information on the overall frequency of errors appearing, as occurrences of error tokens, the most relevant points start with the occurrences of error tokens per 100 words and occurrences of error types across the group of performances marked by a shared grade. In an error profile, occurrences of error tokens per 100 words 1 indicates the extent to which one category of learners/ test takers (as defined by a shared grade) was prone to committing errors in comparison to another. In a situation where the writing tasks demanded texts of the same length, the more error tokens occurring per 100 words, the less successful was the language performance displayed. This information is relevant for making comparisons among different groups of learners ordered hierarchically by awarded grades. In addition, and quite similarly, error types present (out of 20 possible) is one more such contrastive measurement. It shows how many error types, in total, are to be found in each group. Here any number of tokens is counted as one instance of error type. The higher the value of this measurement, the wider will be the range of issues in one category of learners. In contrast to error tokens, counts of error types can be interpreted in absolute terms because the possible maximum number of error types is 20. In fact, counts of error types indicate the range of error while counts of error tokens indicate error intensity. To take a hypothetical example, ‘learner 1’ could have made 7 out of the possible 20 error types. Of each of these error types, they may have produced 4 tokens. ‘Learner 2’ may have made 104 Nikola Dobrić & Günther Sigott 15 out of the 20 possible error types at the token frequency of 2 each. If we compare these two hypothetical learners, we will say that ‘learner 1’ displays 7 error types and 28 error tokens while ‘learner 2’ shows 15 error types and 30 error tokens. If we were to compare just the tokens between the two, coming up to 28 vs. 30, it would seem that there is not much difference between their performances. However, the difference in types is considerable. By committing twice as many error types (15 vs. 7), ‘learner 2’ has shown a much wider range of language problems in her/ his performance since each error type embodies a set of different kinds of textual qualities that can affect the rating negatively. This means that instances of error types are much more stable and revelatory indicators of the stage of learning at which learners find themselves than are tokens. When we expand this example to measurements conducted in groups of learners, we end up counting how many times one error type appeared across all of the texts belonging to one grade category. In essence, we are interested to see in how many texts of one category of learners, as defined by grades, we find each individual error type appearing, regardless of whether it is once or 10 times per individual test. This information shows how prevalent an error type is across a group of performances. To clarify consider, for instance, that if an error type occurs 7 times in one performance, it will be said to occur once in that performance. If it occurs once in each of a set of, for example, 7 performances, it will be said to occur 7 times. Ultimately, the higher the number of occurrences of error types in one group of learners, the more types of issues in their competence there may be. To appreciate the usefulness of such a measurement, one only needs to go into the texts themselves, look at the error types identified, and extract information on what precisely were the linguistic issues embodying them. Finally, the last bit of information found in error profiles as proposed and presented here, termed number of error types occurring most commonly in a grade, and deriving from the previous two points, tells us which particular error types appear most commonly with which category of performances. This is of particular practical importance because all errors encoded using an error taxonomy can be translated from the classification in which they have been recorded (in this case the ‘SCOPE&SUBSTANCE’ error taxonomy) into the concrete textual qualities and features which commonly instantiate them (encompassing thus a wide range of lexico-grammatical and pragmatic issues). This, in fact, represents the most useful set of information coming from any error profile. What becomes visible are the concrete linguistic problems which are most characteristic for a particular group of learners in one educational context and at a particular level of language proficiency. This is precisely Use of Error Profiles in Applied Linguistics 105 the information which could be most useful in both assessment and didactic practice. Aggregated ratings - GRADE 1 N = 60 performances No. of grade 1 performances 7 (11.7%) Occurrences of error tokens 97 Occurrences of error tokens per 100 words 3.09 Error types present (out of 20 possible) 15 Occurrences of error types across the 7 performances 42 No. of error types occurring most com‐ monly in ‘grade 1’ 2 The error types occurring most commonly in ‘grade 1’ - SCOPE Word SUBSTANCE Word spelling--- ---tense forms - ------------------------------ SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Text cohesion and coherence - Table 3. Error profile for FP3 exam ‘grade 1’ students Table 3 indicates that the most proficient of the FP3 test-takers identified on the basis of the aggregated ratings account for 11.7% of all of the students included in the analysis. This group of learners is responsible for 97 error tokens identified in the 7 texts they produced, which translates into an average of 3.09 error tokens per 100 words. This is indeed the lowest frequency out of the five groups as defined by the aggregated grades. Theirs being the most successful performance, in comparison to grade 2 to 5 FP3 test takers, is also confirmed by the 42 occurrences of error types across the seven texts, which is the lowest average error type occurrence per text in all 5 grades. Finally, the total of 15 error types out of 20 possible were featured in these ‘grade 1’ texts, which is also the smallest number of the five grade groups. Overall, looking at the group-wise comparison, ‘grade 1’ students seem to have shown fewest problems related to their performance, judging from the error tokens information, and their competence, following from the extent of the error types combined with the token counts. Looking at this group of learners individually, as a category, didactically the most relevant information comes from the two error classes identified as 106 Nikola Dobrić & Günther Sigott occurring with this group of learners more than with any other grade-defined group in the sample. The two most common errors made by this group of students (occurring more with ‘grade 1’ category than with any other) were recorded as ‘SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Text’ and ‘SCOPE Word SUBSTANCE Word’ error types. If we were to inspect the actual annotation of the 7 texts of ‘grade 1’, we would see that these two error types were most commonly instantiated as problems related to spelling and tense forms (the ‘SCOPE Word SUBSTANCE Word’ error type) and to text cohesion and coherence (the ‘SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Text’ type). To the relevant stakeholders related to the FP3 exam and the English Department at which it has been implemented (i.e., language instructors and students), this would mean that their most highly proficient learners have not yet entirely mastered these particular issues. What is more, since this was the case for the highest performing learners, chances are that these issues would likely be found in all the other, lower performing learner categories in this context (i.e., with ‘grade 2-5’ learners) as well. Ultimately, this would mean that more attention should be given in language instruction and in test design to these particular problems in order to remedy the situation and facilitate better acquisition. Likewise, preparation of testing material and the relevant rater training would also need to take heed of these findings. Table 4 collates the same kind of information for the ‘grade 2’ grouping of the FP3 test-takers. This second group of students makes up for 25 % of the grades or 15 out of the 60 for the aggregated ratings. They are responsible for 232 error tokens in total, translating into 100 occurrences of error types across their 15 texts, making thus 3.39 errors per text on average. In this respect, the ‘grade 2’ category of learners comes in as second, out of the five, in terms of the performance and competence problems they exhibit. Finally, all 19 of the error types found in the entire corpus have been identified in these 15 texts, two of them co-occurring more frequently with ‘grade 2’ than with any other grade group. This cluster of learners mostly exhibited problems with deictic expressions and cohesive devices in texts, word order in sentences, tense use in sentences, and agreement across sentences, evident in the two error types most strongly cooccurring with ‘grade 2’ (‘SCOPE Sentence SUBSTANCE Sentence’ and ‘SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Word’). Use of Error Profiles in Applied Linguistics 107 Aggregated ratings - GRADE 2 N = 60 performances No. of ‘grade 2’ performances 15 (25-%) Occurrences of error tokens 232 Occurrences of error tokens per 100 words 3.39 Error types present (out of 20 possible) 19 Occurrences of error types across the 15 performances 100 No. of error types occurring most com‐ monly in ‘grade 2’ 2 The error types occurring most com‐ monly in ‘grade 2’ - SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Word lexical choice--- ---agreement deictic expressions - cohesive devices - ------------------------------ SCOPE Sent. SUBSTANCE Sent. cohesion and coherence - word order - agreement--- ---tense use - Table 4. Error profile for FP3 exam ‘grade 2’ students Table 5 shows that the 19 students who received ‘grade 3’ made, on average, 3.89 errors per 100 words, hence a higher average number of error tokens than found with ‘grade 1’ or ‘grade 2’ performances. The ‘grade 3’ students also displayed 146 unique error types coming in at a total token frequency of 340. Their texts were also found to include all of the 19 attested error types. In the end, the most commonly occurring problems for this category of students included logical connectors, discourse markers, and lexical choices related to phrases and words produced in ‘text’ as context and ‘sentence’ as context, as well as, unexpectedly, the Saxon Genitive. 108 Nikola Dobrić & Günther Sigott Aggregated ratings - GRADE 3 N = 60 performances No. of ‘grade 3’ performances 19 (31.7%) Occurrences of error tokens 340 Occurrences of error tokens per 100 words 3.89 Error types present (out of 20 possible) 19 Occurrences of error types across the 19 per‐ formances 146 No. of error types occurring most commonly in ‘grade 3’ 3 The error types occurring most commonly in ‘grade 3’ - SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Phrase lexical choice - logical connectors - discourse markers - ------------------------------ SCOPE Sent. SUBSTANCE Word lexical choice - logical connectors - discourse markers - ------------------------------ SCOPE Word SUBSTANCE Punct. - Saxon Genitive - Table 5. Error profile for FP3 exam ‘grade 3’ students The nine FP3 test-takers (15 %) awarded the ‘grade 4’, presented in Table 6, also committed 19 error types, with a total of 82 occurrences of error types across the 9 performances. Error tokens were found at 4.89 items per 100 words, on average, totalling 209. Both total error types and tokens come at a lower value than in the ‘grade 3’ group, which is unexpected. This is most likely due to the smaller size of the ‘grade 4’ group with only 9 as compared to 19 students in ‘grade 3’. Nevertheless, the average number of errors per 100 words, as a relative value, still puts the ‘grade 4’ FP3 test takers, in line with expectations, as the second-most poorly performing group. Therefore, it is not too surprising that ‘grade 4’ learners exhibited the largest number of most strongly co-occurring error types, namely 8 classes. Given in the last row in Table 6, these translate into problems with cohesion and coherence in sentences and clauses, word order in clauses, commas, tense use in the context of ‘clause’ and ‘sentence’, anaphoric reference in clauses, use of prepositions in clauses, lexical choices at various levels of context of error generation (‘sentence’ and ‘clause’), as well as ‘clause-level issues’ with deictic expressions and agreement. Use of Error Profiles in Applied Linguistics 109 Aggregated ratings - GRADE 4 N = 60 performances No. of ‘grade 4’ performances 9 (15-%) Occurrences of error tokens 209 Occurrences of error tokens per 100 words 4.89 Error types present (out of 20 possible) 19 Occurrences of error types across the 9 performances 82 No. of error types occurring most commonly in ‘grade 4’ 8 - SCOPE Sent. SUBSTANCE Phrase lexical choice- ---agreement - logical connectors - discourse markers-..disjuncts - cohesion & coherence - ------------------------------ SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Clause word order - cohesion & coherence - tense use------agreement - ------------------------------ SCOPE Clause SUBSTANCE Word lexical choice---agreement - preposition use - deictic expressions - ------------------------------ SCOPE Cl. SUBSTANCE Clause word order - ------------------------------ SCOPE Cl. SUBSTANCE Phrase lexical choice------agreement - anaphoric reference - ------------------------------ SCOPE Phrase SUBSTANCE Punct. commas - ------------------------------ SCOPE Sent. SUBSTANCE Clause word order--- ---tense use - ------------------------------ SCOPE Text SUBSTANCE Sent. tense use - cohesion & coherence - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The error types occurring most commonly in ‘grade 4’ - Table 6. Error profile for FP3 exam ‘grade 4’ students 110 Nikola Dobrić & Günther Sigott Finally, as shown in Table 7, 10 FP3 test-takers (16.7%) failed the writing test, receiving a ‘grade 5’. With 209 occurrences of error tokens and 81 occurrences of error types across the 10 performances, Table 7 indicates how ‘grade 5’ learners have actually made fewer errors overall, when compared with the ‘grade 3’ and ‘grade 4’ groups. This lack of progression, where the expectation was that ‘grade 5’ students would have produced the highest number of errors across the different measurements, could potentially be explained by assuming that these students were not really risk-taking regarding the linguistic structures they used, hence not producing an opportunity for themselves to commit many errors. An alternative explanation might be that the acquisition of linguistic features does not always take place in a linear order (Bidik and Sigott 2016). Regardless of the reason, however, the important finding here is that there are only four error types most commonly occurring with the ‘grade 5’, with the most common problems instantiating them being commas, articles, use of prepositions in phrases, structural problems with noun and verb phrases, and lexical problems with noun phrases. Aggregated ratings - GRADE 5 N = 60 performances Number of ‘grade 5’ performances 10 (16.7%) Occurrences of error tokens 209 Occurrences of error tokens per 100 words 4.7 Error types of present (out of 20 possible) 19 Occurrences of error types across the 10 performances 81 No. of error types occurring most com‐ monly in ‘grade 5’ 4 The error types occurring most commonly in ‘grade 5’ SCOPE Phr. SUBSTANCE Word lexical problems with noun phrases - use of prepositions - article use - ------------------------------ SCOPE Sent. SUBSTANCE Punct. commas - ------------------------------ SCOPE Cl. SUBSTANCE Punct. commas - ------------------------------ Use of Error Profiles in Applied Linguistics 111 SCOPE Phr. SUBSTANCE Phr. structural problems with noun phrases - lexical choice - structural problems with verb phrases - Table 7. Error profile for FP3 exam ‘grade 5’ students In conclusion, Table 8 presents a summary of all the previously discussed findings outlined in Tables 3-7. The error occurrences overall rank up with grades in the expected manner, by which the anticipated trend was that of a decline in the categorization of text quality corresponding to a higher number of error instances. This progression goes largely as expected from ‘grade 1’ to ‘grade 4’, as seen in the shaded rows two and three in Table 8. However, it does not continue fully to ‘grade 5’, which shows a distribution pattern for which a plausible, though not empirically tested explanation, has been offered. GRADE 1 2 3 4 5 Share in total grades 1.70% 25% 31.70% 15% 16.70% Occurrences of error tokens 97 232 340 209 209 Occurrences of error tokens per 100 w. 3.09 3.39 3.89 4.89 4.7 Total types of er‐ rors 15/ 20 19/ 20 19/ 20 19/ 20 16/ 20 Error types present (out of 20 possible) 2 2 3 8 4 Error types occur‐ ring most com‐ monly per grade cohesion & coher‐ ence ----------spelling ----------tense forms -- lexical choice ----------deictic ex‐ pressions ----------agreement --------cohesive devices - lexical choice ----------logical connectors ----------discourse markers - commas --------------word order --------------tense use --------------cohesion & coherence -------------lexical choice --------------structural problems with noun phrases -----------structural problems with verb phrases -----------lexical choice 112 Nikola Dobrić & Günther Sigott preposition use --------------deictic ex‐ pressions --------------agreement --------------anaphoric reference --------------logical con‐ nectors --------------adverbials -----------use of prepositions -----------article use - Table 8. Summary of error profiles for all 5 grade categories In essence, Table 8 presents the full error profile of the 60 students who produced the writing performances at hand. It provides an insight into the overall behaviour of potential, more or less prevalent, developing aspects of the language learning process of the learners (test-takers) observed in the context of the English Department, University of Klagenfurt. Several trends become apparent: (1) firstly, it is observable that the ‘grade 4’ students expressed the highest number of systematically occurring error types, namely 8 (twice as many as the next-in-line ‘grade 5’ group). Since the proportion of both grade instances is similar (15 % to 16.7%, respectively), the cause could be sought in the fact that the ‘grade 4’ students, as the second poorest in terms of English language proficiency, showed more ambition in their texts, but lacked sufficient competence to achieve successful performance; (2) secondly, there is relative uniformity when it comes to the number of most strongly occurring errors (i.e., occurring more with one grade category than any other) when looking at ‘grades 1, 2, 3, and 5’. This can be explained by suggesting that neither of the proficiency-ordered groups, aside from ‘grade 4’ (showcasing 8 most strongly co-occurring types) attempted written performance much beyond their respective English language competence; and (3) thirdly, it is noticeable that certain errors (or rather the linguistic issues embodying them, appearing at different levels of linguistic context) occur distinctively with only certain grades, while others show presence across the whole gambit of grades. For instance, ‘cohesion and coherence’ (in Use of Error Profiles in Applied Linguistics 113 conjunction with linked issues of ‘cohesive devices’, ‘logical connectors’, ‘discourse markers’, and even ‘commas’) characteristically appears with ‘grade 1’, ‘grade 2’, ‘grade 3, ’and ‘grade 4’ students (though most widely with ‘grade 4’). The same could be said about ‘deictic expressions’ (in‐ cluding ‘article use’), appearing most strongly with the ‘grade 2, 4, and 5’ groups of learners. These would represent the most prevalent gaps in the English language proficiency of the whole student population, regardless of their relative level of language proficiency within that same educational context. The more unique errors, appearing most specifically with only one or only few grade levels, as given in Table 8, such as ‘word order’ or ‘use of prepositions’, should, in contrast, be considered as characteristic only of certain groups of learners, typified by the grade which they share as a marker of the relative level of proficiency. Familiarity with representative error profiles in a particular context, such as summarized in Table 8 and discussed above, can, as noted, have multiple uses. The practical application may include rater training, creating rating scale descriptors, language teaching methodology, and the design of teaching materials, as the following section illustrates. 5 Practical application The immediate purpose of the paper was to demonstrate how compiling an error profile, constituting a breakdown of the most systematically occurring errors in one educational context can help detect gaps in language competence of L2 learners. The purpose will be fully achieved by demonstrating how the information about the joint occurrence and individual appearances of different error types, presented and analysed in the previous section, can be practically employed in actual educational settings. As a start, having a catalogue of the systematic occurrence of specific error types at specific levels of mastery is valuable for the development of rating scales. If patterns of error occurrence for particular levels of proficiency are known, then it would seem possible and desirable to include a reference to them in the relevant rating scale descriptors. The transparency this could bring could significantly contribute to how reliably the rating scales are applied. If we take the study at hand, and we follow this line of argumentation, we can claim that the rating scale which was used to rate the 60 writing performances (or would be used in the future in the same educational context) should contain references, either direct or indirect, to the most frequently occurring errors identified at 114 Nikola Dobrić & Günther Sigott each of the rating levels. For example, any rating scale descriptor linked to ‘grade 1’ should, in some form, refer to the necessary absence of ‘cohesion and coherence’ problems as a precondition for suitable written performance. This could be done either via positively-worded statements (e.g., ‘Can produce coherent texts…’) or negatively-worded (e.g., ‘Shows absence of cohesion and coherence problems…’). Similar examples can be offered for each error type (and the underlying linguistic issue) which is found to strongly correlate with a ‘grade 1’ (or any other grade), under the assumption that the avoidance of such co-occurring error types would indeed lead to higher grades (Dobrić et al. 2021). In addition, a directory of error patterns characteristic of one assessment/ ed‐ ucational context should prove helpful in rater training. Knowledge of errors typically occurring at particular levels of proficiency would help raters to more reliably match the writing performances to levels defined in the relevant rating scales. For instance, telling future raters involved with the FP3 exam (covered in this study) how they will be able to tell a typical ‘grade 1’ student by an absence of most errors in general and specific ‘tense’ problems in particular, involving also a likely presence of ‘coherence and cohesion’ problems, would indeed constitute a very concrete and useful rater training point. Error profiles pertaining to all other grade levels can be similarly employed, all the better if they were previously integrated in the scales. Furthermore, information on the correspondence between error types and levels of mastery is equally relevant for teaching. As argued before, the infor‐ mation outlined in error profiles is significant for distinguishing between issues of performance and possible issues of competence (i.e., first between mistakes and errors and then between individual and collective issues) and, hence, allows for teachers to decide which challenges need urgent and more extensive attention. In addition, using error profiles allows for teachers’ decisions to be even more based on empirical data. It is quite clear how knowing that the most proficient students of English at the University of Klagenfurt (constituting the ‘grade 1’ group of test takers) have prevalent problems related to ‘coherence and cohesion’, ‘article use’, and ‘tense use’ can help in structuring further instruction for them, specifically targeted to address these particular gaps in their language competence. It goes without saying, of course, that knowing is only the initial step towards a successful didactic practice, the next step being to understand causes of the error, relay them via effective feedback (Sigott et al. 2019), tackle them short term via a stronger focus in the classroom, and, ultimately, systematically address them, long term, via teaching materials. 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Use of Error Profiles in Applied Linguistics 117 The Transformational Power of Questioning Practices in Coaching - Insights from Linguistic and Interdisciplinary Research Eva-Maria Graf, Frédérick Dionne & Melanie Fleischhacker 1 Questioning practices as powerful agents of change in helping professions - An introduction This contribution discusses the transformational power of questioning practices in the helping profession ‘coaching’ and addresses the following two aspects: How do questioning practices contribute to clients’ change, i.e., learning and development, as the underlying goal of coaching? And how can such power - in the sense of questioning practices’ local and global effectiveness - best be documented and analyzed? While we detail the linguistic means to do so using Conversation Analysis, we also sketch the limitations of such a bottomup, qualitative approach to assess the overall power of questioning practices and present an interdisciplinary solution in the form of the research project QueSCo (Questioning Sequences in Coaching) (I 4990 G). This project, which we briefly introduce and whose first findings we illustrate, combines descriptivephenomenological linguistics, addressing the local effectiveness, with theoryguided psychology, addressing the global effectiveness of questioning practices. Questions occupy a particular place in human thinking and (inter-)acting. They originate in the uniquely human capacity to initiate hypothetical imagi‐ nation and self-reflection processes; they entail a possible change in perspective and thus facilitate new experiences and attitudes. Questions help to localize knowledge gaps, express knowledge requirements, and make knowledge claims. They allow relating to the present, past, and future as well as to hypothetical scenarios (Köller 2004: 662). On the relational level, questions demonstrate interest in the communicative partner, their motivations and causes for actions etc., but they also indicate the questioner’s moral entitlement to carry out certain actions and attribute conversational responsibility. Questions thereby interactionally allow for initiating, pursuing, finalizing, but also repairing conversations and, more generally, for conversational development to unfold. In all of this, questions perform moment-by-moment informational, relational, and organizational management and thus constitute a powerful conversational tool. Recently, Stivers (2022: 36) elaborates that (w)hen a person asks a […] question, she sets the topic, agenda, and terms of the response. While these can be resisted in various ways through either not responding at all or the type of response, whatever follows will nonetheless be understood vis-à-vis the question because we have a shared understand-ing that when asked a question there is a norm of responding (usually with an answer) to that question. The epistemic and deontic authority to ask a question and the socio-cultural and moral obligation to respond thus mold the ongoing relationship between the communicative partners (Stivers 2018). Questioning practices thereby also depend upon their embeddedness in (larger) sequences of actions and interac‐ tional projects (Pomerantz 2021) within communicative encounters and on their contextualization in specific interaction types such as coaching (Graf and Spranz-Fogasy 2018a/ b; Graf et al. 2019; Kabatnik and Graf 2021; Spranz- Fogasy et al. 2019). As such, in addition to their omnipresence in everyday interactions (Pomerantz 2021; Steensig and Drew 2008; Stivers and Enfield 2010), asking questions represents a discursive core practice across many institutional and professional contexts: “Questioning is one of, if not the, central communicative practice of institutional encounters” (Tracy and Robles 2009: 131). Helping interactions, i.e., professional encounters initiated to address and solve clients/ patients’ physical, psycho-emotional, epistemic and/ or workrelated problems (Graf et al. 2014; Graf and Spranz-Fogasy 2018b; Graf 2022; Pick and Scarvaglieri 2022), constitute a case in point. They are based on a helping conversation between a professional helper and a help-seeking person as its primary means and method; the helping conversation is geared towards constructing relevant knowledge for the help-seeker and is embedded in a particular helping relationship or working alliance (Scarvaglieri et al. 2022). Helping professions include therapy, counseling, consulting, medical interac‐ tion, supervision, mediation, and coaching, the professional context under scrutiny here. The particular relevance of questioning practices in helping professions (see Tracy and Robles 2009 above) stems from their unique power to invite selfreflection and thus to induce change (Bercelli et al. 2008; Graf and Spranz-Fogasy 2018a; Moos et al. (in press); Muntigl and Zabala 2008; Spranz-Fogasy et al. 2019). As stated by Muntigl and Zabala (2008: 188), “(a)dequate reflection on one’s experience is often seen as a steppingstone to change because reflection 120 Eva-Maria Graf, Frédérick Dionne & Melanie Fleischhacker can allow the client to construe his or her life and social relationships in additional and alternative ways”. Additionally, questions function as powerful interactional devices for helping professionals such as coaches to both pursue their professional agenda across sessions and to locally steer the in-situ inter‐ action with their clients. As will be argued in more detail below (see Section 3), this interactional power hinges on the principle of conditional relevance (Schegloff 2007): by simply being asked, questions render a reaction necessary and the lack of one becomes a noticeable (and socially sanctionable) event. While questions are esteemed as primary interventions and stocks of inter‐ actional knowledge (Peräkylä and Vehviläinen 2003) across coaching practice literature and training manuals, up to this point neither their interaction-type specificities nor their actual transformational power have been empirically assessed. In Section 2, we first introduce coaching as a relatively recent, still under-researched helping profession and detail how the power of questions in coaching is practically and theoretically idealized, yet empirically hardly investigated. The interdisciplinary research project QueSCo, briefly introduced at the end of Section 2, aims to close this significant research gap by establishing coaching-specific question types and questioning sequences and by analyzing their local and global power in coaching. While we describe how linguistics, in particular Conversation Analysis, addresses questioning practices as local agents of change in Section 3, Section 4 elaborates on (the need for) interdisci‐ plinary analysis of questioning practices and their global effectiveness. Section 5 details the concrete interdisciplinary work and presents first findings as regards the transformative power of questioning practices in coaching. 2 Questions in coaching - Claiming power, but what about an empirical basis? A great coach doesn’t give answers. Instead, they ask powerful questions to unlock and surface a better way forward for their clients. But what should you ask as a coach to get better outcomes, help others deal with challenges, and grow? (https: / / positivepsychology.com/ life-coaching-questions) As outlined above, our contribution focuses on questioning practices in coaching, a bourgeoning, yet relatively new helping format compared to neighboring, more traditional formats such as psychotherapy. Its professional practice is (still) less standardized and regulated and its academic foundation is significantly less advanced (e.g., Graf 2019; Schermuly 2019). Coaching is broadly applied in the business context in organizations, departments, teams and, of course, in the context of the individual manager to support develop‐ The Transformational Power of Questioning Practices in Coaching 121 mental processes and optimize performances: “People come to coaching for lots of different reasons, but the bottom line is change” (Withworth et al. 1998: xix). Besides the work-related forms “business coaching” or “executive coaching”, “life coaching” and “health coaching” represent two major other types of coaching; along with face-to-face coaching, digital forms of coaching have recently gained ground. Overall, coaching as helping interaction has been advancing significantly as a (near) global phenomenon. Despite various consolidating developments (Peterson 2018), coaching practice still comprises a large number of diverse approaches and (more or less serious) coaching offers, a growing field of applications, as well as a great many theoretical frameworks, concepts, and specializations. Moreover, unlike the therapeutic or medical professions, coaching (still) lacks generally applicable professional standards, educational norms, and quality measures obligatory for coaching training and education, nor does it have a legally protected professional title or a clearly demarcated professional field of activity (Graf and Ukowitz 2020; Schermuly 2019). Across the various forms of coaching, but particularly in work-related/ busi‐ ness coaching, questions are proclaimed the most essential tool for coaches: Questions allow clients to release their potentials, to grow and change, to understand and optimize their performances. This shows in the myriad of books and manuals offering advice to coaches on what kinds of questions to ask. Across this practice literature, questions are portrayed as a guarantor for successful coaching (i.e., have a global change potential) and as the central and most powerful intervention tool (i.e., have a local change potential). Loebbert and Wilmes (2013) frame questions as the silver bullet for clients’ explorations, Fischer-Epe (2012) argues that questions are a central steering element, and Schreyögg (2012) characterizes asking questions as a coach’s most important task. These practical sources advance extensive lists of questions or question types, categorized via de-contextualized functions, illustrated via invented examples, and presented in a monological form, i.e., without considering their embeddedness in coaching conversations. It is implied that good coaching means asking many different questions (Geißler 2016; Wehrle 2012). Practice literature also advises practitioners on how to do questioning: e.g., to ask one question at a time or to use what-questions. Replicated across such normative practice literature and training manuals is a positive assessment of open-ended questions as inviting detailed answers, while closed questions are denounced as closing down the conversation and leaving no space for reflection (e.g., Fischer-Epe 2012; Schreyögg 2012). Such assessments regarding the relevance of questions alongside recommendations regarding types and forms of questions 122 Eva-Maria Graf, Frédérick Dionne & Melanie Fleischhacker stem from the respective authors’ practical experiences and/ or their personal evaluations, i.e., represent the practitioners’ stocks of interactional knowledge (Peräkylä and Vehviläinen 2003) and are circulated undisputedly across (most) practice literature. Yet, despite such strong normative claims regarding the importance and effectiveness of questions in coaching, so far neither coaching outcome nor coaching process research (see below) have yet systematically investigated questioning practices. Psychological coaching outcome studies exclusively address solutionvs. problem-oriented questions and their influence on the global effectiveness of coaching. While e.g., Grant and O’Connor (2010) or Braunstein and Grant (2015) have revealed that solution-focused questions enhanced clients’ positive affect, Theeboom et al. (2014) could also show that they decreased clients’ negative affect and positively impacted clients’ cognitive flexibility. Still, while all authors agree that “effective questioning lies at the very heart of the coaching conversation” (Grant and O’Connor 2010: 102; Theeboom et al. 2014: 461), the issue of “what constitutes ‘effective’ questioning in coaching? ” (Grant and O’Connor 2010: 102) remains unanswered. These existing studies relate predefined, isolated types of questions, whose exact wording is laid out in coding schemes, to certain effects on clients’ affect, cognition, or behavior, applying quantitative methods. They exclusively focus on the question, but do not consider the sequential and processual character of (questioning in) coaching. In coaching process research, only Deplazes (2016) addresses questions. Her qualitative psychological analysis on coaching interventions evinced that questions are indeed central and that the response length to closed questions does not significantly deviate from that to open questions. Besides this psychological research on questions, a few initial studies in linguistics - outside the current project QueSCo (see below) - compared certain question types such as ‘requesting examples’ and ‘solution-oriented questions’ as regards their forms, functions and interaction-type specificities in coaching and psychotherapy (Kabatnik and Graf 2021; Spranz-Fogasy et al. 2019). This striking dearth of research on questions must - however - be juxtaposed against the more general research situation in coaching (see Fleischhacker and Graf under revision a/ b; Graf and Dionne 2021a/ b for recent overviews). While coaching has been gaining a more and more evidence-based status over the last two decades (Grant and O’Connor 2019) and its overall effectiveness has been established in various quantitively operating, psychologically based metaanalyses, significant research gaps exist, particularly regarding the coaching process itself (Graf and Ukowitz 2020; Graf and Dionne 2021a/ b; Schermuly The Transformational Power of Questioning Practices in Coaching 123 1 Project website: https: / / questions-in-coaching.aau.at/ 2019). Fillery-Travis and Cox point out that “[…] with notable exceptions […], the coaching activity itself, the interactions of the dyad, including the elements of listening, questioning, clarifying, reflecting, challenging and thinking, have not been researched” (2018: 527). As one recent approach in the context of the emerging coaching process research, Linguistic Coaching Process Research (LCPR) (Fleischhacker and Graf under revision a/ b) dedicates itself to the micro-analysis of the locally co-constructed coaching conversation by coach and client. It draws on Conversation Analysis and its rigid and transparent procedure (Schegloff 2007; Sidnell 2010; Sidnell and Stivers 2013) to document, analyze, and describe the locally and turn-by-turn constructed, sequentially organized coaching interaction (see Section 3). A special focus lies on how client change locally emerges in the coach-client interaction based on interventions by coaches (such as questions) (see Fleischhacker and Graf under revision b). To sum up, though (psychological) outcome research has attested to coaching effectiveness regarding overall client change, the current research situation in coaching is characterized by major gaps concerning insights into the coaching process and into the concrete change-inducing interaction between coach and client. A particularly striking research gap concerns questions in coaching, which have received hardly any empirical attention despite their claimed status as one of the most powerful tools. The international and interdisciplinary research project QueSCo  1 aims to change this situation (Graf et al. 2020): It develops an empirically-based, systematic, coaching-specific typology of questions and questioning sequences on the basis of authentic coaching data collected in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Using videoand audio-re‐ corded (systemic solution-oriented, work-related) coaching processes, which are linguistically transcribed according to cGAT (Schmidt et al. 2016), the aim is to gain empirical insights into authentic (successful) questioning practices. The interdisciplinary research team (linguists and psychologists) investigates both the local transformative power of questioning sequences, i.e., how questions in their sequential, moment-by-moment set-up contribute to change (linguistic component), as well as the relation of successfully completed questioning sequences to global effectiveness, i.e., to the overall satisfactory coaching outcome, and to established phases of change (psychological component). The project goals are summarized in Figure 1. 124 Eva-Maria Graf, Frédérick Dionne & Melanie Fleischhacker Figure 1. Project goals and central research steps of QueSCo In what follows, we will zoom in on Linguistic Coaching Process Research (LCPR) and Conversation Analysis (CA) as the linguistic methodology to meet project goals 1 and 2, i.e., developing a coaching-specific typology of questions and questioning sequences and investigating their local transformative power. In Section 4, we expand our focus beyond linguistics towards interdisciplinary research to meet the QueSCo project goals 2 and 3, i.e., examining the possible relations between the local and global effectiveness of questioning sequences. 3 Researching the power of questioning practices in coaching - A conversation analytic perspective on their local effectiveness Conversation Analysis functions as a rigorous, systematic, and transparent qualitative method to document and research the conversational structure of mundane and professional talk-in-interaction and the discursive practices employed by the conversational partners (Sidnell 2010; Sidnell and Stivers 2013). Most research nowadays focusses on particular discursive practices in specific contexts such as interpretations in psychotherapeutic interaction as well as their sequential development and organization principles (Peräkylä et al. 2008). The ultimate goal of a CA-based analysis is to carve out participants’ own understandings of the practices under scrutiny (e.g., questions) and how their communicative behavior illustrates their understanding of what is happening in the interaction ( Janusz and Peräkylä 2021). While CA represents a newly established approach and method in LCPR (Fleischhacker and Graf under under The Transformational Power of Questioning Practices in Coaching 125 revision a/ b; Graf and Dionne 2021 a/ b), in the context of psychotherapy research it has been valued as the “best developed qualitative sequential process method” (Elliot 2010: 129) to document and analyze the local co-construction of (change) processes via discursive practices. Apart from researching the interac‐ tional unfolding of discursive practices on the conversational micro-level, the focus on the sequentiality of interactions, i.e., the consecutive organization of participant’s turns, as one of CA’s basic tenets (Sidnell 2010; Sidnell and Stivers 2013) provides linguists with “the microscope” to observe the moment-bymoment change processes (Peräkylä et al. 2008: 16), i.e., the local effectiveness of interventions. This focus on the raison d’être of helping professional interactions, i.e., client change, has recently gained momentum in applied CA (Graf et al. 2019; Pawelczyk and Graf 2019; Vehviläinen 2019). CA-based applied research is thereby geared towards gaining an understanding of changes in help seeker’s experiences, feelings, and attitudes by analyzing the observable part of their change processes, i.e., the concrete, sequentially unfolding conversation with the professional helper. The underlying axiom is that changes (of perception, feelings, thinking etc.) become visible on the language level as “topical and emotional shifts” (Vehviläinen 2019: 192), but also in changes of expressions, of relating to individuals, to objects etc., which all indexes a transformation in progress (Graf and Dionne 2021b; Pawelczyk and Graf 2019). In more detail, the local effectiveness of conversations refers to an interac‐ tionally accomplished process between helping professional and help seeker, i.e., coach and client, with moment-to-moment changes that impact the ensuing conversational flow. According to Peräkylä (2019) for psychotherapy, local change concretely transpires through three-part sequences of actions (i.e., transformative sequences) in which a target or initiating action creates the context (or slot) for a particular response and in which the third position con‐ stitutes the reaction to the response (e.g., follow-up question, ratification etc.), where the professional assesses its appropriateness. What is more, the actions prior to the target action create the necessary affordances and relevancies for the professional’s target action. In the course of such a sequential set-up, transformation is empirically observable in an expressed change of emotions, (coach-client) relations, and referents (or content) (see Figure 2). 126 Eva-Maria Graf, Frédérick Dionne & Melanie Fleischhacker Figure 2. Transformative Sequences (based on Peräkylä 2019: 267 and adapted to the coaching context) Based on the concepts of sequentiality and intersubjectivity, i.e., the continuous and mutual updating of understanding that results from such a sequential, retrospective and prospective organization of turns and actions, each utterance documents these three realms of experience. Each following turn again orients to and provides an understanding of the previous one, while concurrently some‐ thing has been transformed along the lines. A turn-by-turn mutual orientation towards each other’s understandings of content, relation, and emotion (which we understand as responsiveness, see below) promotes the local effectiveness both as regards the sequential fulfillment and the change project. The helping interaction and eventually the helping project is thereby brought forward (Peräkylä 2019; Peräkylä et al. 2008). It is this sequential set up of questions as questioning, i.e., transformative, sequences (“prior action(s) - questions - responses - reactions in third posi‐ tion”) which links CA interest in discursive practices to its more recent analytic interest in their transformative power as local agents of change in helping interactions. Focusing on questions thereby means analyzing a central, reflec‐ tion-inviting and thus change-inducing communicative practice in professional helping and particularly in coaching (Bercelli et al. 2008; Graf and Spranz-Fogasy 2018a; Graf et al. 2020b; Muntigl & Zabala 2008). The linguistic part of QueSCo builds on and adapts CA (core) assumptions on transformative/ questioning sequences: Questions as an initiating first pair part within a prototypical adjacency pair (Schegloff 2007) and as our target actions (Peräkylä 2019), make a The Transformational Power of Questioning Practices in Coaching 127 response as second pair part conditionally relevant. In professional interactions such as coaching, it is usually the professional who asks the questions and, thus, any question a coach asks makes a reaction by the client necessary. Due to the normative (social) pressure to respond, unanswered questions disrupt the conversational flow, i.e., create a relevant absence. Coaches’ questions, however, do not only make an answer conditionally relevant; due to their formal and functional set-up, i.e., depending on the form of the question, the action logic (e.g., requesting confirmation vs. requesting information), the topical agenda, and the presuppositions they contain (Graf and Spranz-Fogasy 2018a; Graf et al. 2020b, Hayano 2013; Läpple et al. 2021), questions systematically prestructure the kind of reaction they require. A polar interrogative such as ‘Have you been working on your professional vision? ’ sets a yes/ no-answer by the client relevant and formally creates a specific answer preference. Concurrently, the question presupposes that ‘professional vision’ is a familiar concept to both interactants, and that working on it has been mutually established as a goal. In contrast, wh-questions or content questions either ask for a particular piece of information (e.g., what, when, where), or invite much longer and detailed answers allowing for a broader range of responses (e.g., ‘What has changed since our last session? ’). Finally, declarative questions again restrict responses since they only require the client’s ratification or rejection of a proposition (e.g., ‘You have had less meetings with your team lately? ’). Structural and thematic projections of this kind create strong expectations for the client to react in a specific way. Clients, thus, are offered binary options such as yes/ no, answer/ no answer, accepting the presupposition or challenging it etc., whereby one is (socially and interactionally) preferred, and the other is usually dispreferred. Since knowledge, obligations, and responsibilities in coaching as professional interactions are asymmetrically distributed, questions also function as impor‐ tant steering elements (Steensig and Drew 2008). Via their questions, coaches can control the interaction and the thematic development of the unfolding interaction. Questions allow coaches to pursue their professional agenda, i.e., to take on a leading responsibility to support clients in reaching their goals (Graf and Spranz-Fogasy 2018a). What is more, questions help to topicalize delicate matters or express hypotheses and assumptions in a less direct way, since they entail a recipient-tilted epistemic asymmetry (Graf et al. 2020b; Läpple et al. 2021), i.e., only clients can answer them. This suggests that openness and interest are necessary for the overall goals of coaching. Since questions make a response conditionally relevant, an analysis must also consider how the respondents react (in the second pair part) to the multiple con‐ 128 Eva-Maria Graf, Frédérick Dionne & Melanie Fleischhacker straints that questions impose on them and how they address the informational and epistemic gaps suggested by the questioner, in our case the coach. While recipients are usually responsive, i.e., conform to social norms of solidarity and cooperation, and thus agree with the questions’/ coaches’ agendas and terms, there are multiple ways that clients may resist the constraints (Dionne et al. in prep.). Apart from providing no response at all or challenging the question per se (i.e., being fully non-responsive) and claiming the inability to answer the question (e.g., ‘I don’t know’) and thus fulfil its projected action (i.e., being partly responsive), various other responsive (or partly responsive) reactions are possible, not all of them representing answers which fully comply with the initial question (Läpple et al. 2021; Lee 2013). Stivers (2022) explains how recip‐ ients may push back against a question’s terms, agenda and constraint, or the position in which it places them. To illustrate, she explains how “transformative answers” indicate problems with the question and adjust it retrospectively, e.g., by replacing an unwanted term used by the coach. Respondents, i.e., clients in the context of coaching, may thereby claim epistemic authority, control, and independence, and by doing so may pursue their own agenda - thus being partly or even non-responsive to the coach’s projected action, all the while avoiding disrupting the questioning sequence. Finally, following Peräkylä’s (2019) model (Figure 2), the coach’s reactions to clients’ responses in the third position are essential for (the quality of) the transformative sequence with questions as the target action. Here, coaches must take a stance: the third position is the “place” for them to accept a client’s understanding or repair it thereby re-establishing intersubjectivity, to insist on an unanswered question, to align with or ratify an answer, or to flag it as inappropriate or insufficient (Sidnell 2010). Coaches have various options such as asking for an elaboration, changing the topic or the focus, or moving forward in the coaching process. These options depend on their professional agenda, i.e., how to work with the co-constructed coaching goal, the interactional needs, their working alliance with the client, and, more formally, whether the answer was preferred or dispreferred etc. (Fleischhacker and Graf under revision b). Both the coaches’ contributions in third position as well as clients’ responses in second position modify, elaborate, and transform previous coaching talk in ways that are relevant to the conversational goals by how they treat, select, or take up previous conversational, i.e., coaching, material and each other’s contributions (Sidnell 2010). Coach and client thus equally contribute to the conversation and drive the change process forward together by being mutually responsive in an interactional co-construction. The Transformational Power of Questioning Practices in Coaching 129 This inherent sequentiality of questioning sequences as carved out in CAbased LCPR, in which both coach and client play a substantial role, ensures their local effectiveness and transformational power. What is more, it also becomes a powerful motor for the process of change in a more macroscopic time frame, i.e., across coaching sessions and entire processes, as was convincingly argued by e.g., Voutilainen et al. (2018) for psychotherapy (see Fleischhacker and Graf under revision b; Graf and Spranz-Fogasy 2018a; Graf et al. 2019). While change represents the desired overall outcome of coaching, too, to this date, there is little linguistic research regarding how exactly such change is brought about on the local, interactional level in the context of discursive practices such as questions (see Section 2). To address this research gap, QueSCo set out to first establish coaching-specific question types (i.e., the target action) (Graf et al. in prep. a) followed by developing a typology of (successful) coaching-specific questioning sequences (Graf et al. in prep. b) and assessing their local power (see Section 5). However, as will be discussed in the next section, these CA-based investigations of conversational transformations both within sequences and beyond, do not link the local change potential of questioning practices back to the underlying professional agenda, the established phases of change (Deplazes et al. 2018) and the overall goal attainment, i.e., to the global effectiveness of the interaction. 4 Power to interdisciplinarity - Moving towards questioning practices’ global effectiveness with the help of linguistic-psychological research The last section has highlighted how LCPR with a CA-approach can document, describe, and analyze how change, i.e., local effectiveness, happens at the level of the questioning sequence. We argue that, by focusing on how the action that is promoted in the coach’s question in the first position is either furthered or problematized by the client in the second position, and how this response is then taken up by the coach in third position, it is possible to deliver insights into how the overarching goal-oriented project is advanced or hindered locally, but also across sequences, phases and coaching sessions (Deplazes et al. 2018). This spotlight on mutual (non-)responsiveness impacting the progressivity of action is nonetheless insufficient for the QueSCo project to fully explain the links between interaction and the client’s report on overall goal achievement, i.e., on the global effectiveness of coaching measured with conventional psychological instruments (e.g., Goal Attainment Scaling). We propose that a wider definition of responsiveness as the one conceptualized in classic works of CA is needed to explain this phenomenon and that it needs to be interdisciplinary in nature. As an orientation for the development of such a more encompassing definition, we 130 Eva-Maria Graf, Frédérick Dionne & Melanie Fleischhacker look to the concept of “appropriate responsiveness” (see below), which builds the basis for (therapeutic) good practice and possibly higher reported effectiveness (Kramer and Stiles 2015; Stiles et al. 1998 for psychotherapy). Despite its status as a fundamental concept in the organization of conversa‐ tion and, more generally, social structure, responsiveness remains vague and illdefined; conversation analysts work with different understandings which are generally left tacit. Schegloff (2007: 1) describes responsiveness as related to both the understandings of the first speaker’s turn (e.g., question) displayed by the next speaker, as well as to the suitability of the response (e.g., answer) regarding the just-prior action. However, such a focus on intersubjectivity and action organization within the sequence seems insufficient to grasp the concept of responsiveness for helping professional purposes, where actions are embedded in larger sequences-of-sequences or activities such as concern definition or solution generation (Graf 2019). These are themselves oriented towards an overarching goal that determines the interaction, i.e., the purpose of the coaching (Deplazes et al. 2018; Graf and Spranz-Fogasy 2018b; Pomerantz 2021). In the context of questioning sequences, Schwitalla (1979) defines different degrees of responsiveness based on thematic and social-normative expectations. A fully responsive answer, then, “addresses the topic and fulfils one of the intentions expected from the initiating turn” (Schwitalla 1979: 200). Though this approach also includes thematic development and addresses the quality of recipient turns, similarly to Schegloff ’s understanding (2007), this definition focuses only on the second pair part as responsive or not to the initiating action, but not on higher-level activities in which the sequence is embedded. Integrating the orientation to higher-level activities, however, is necessary for an adequate definition of responsiveness in coaching. Indeed, while coaches are responsible for steering the conversation and process, they are not the only participants who orient to such higher-level actions; clients do too. They do not always respond to the coaches’ just-prior turns, but rather orient to the ongoing activity’s purpose and might thereby disregard the just-proposed action to the benefit of an alternative course of action, which still moves the interaction towards goal achievement. That is to say that a coach’s question (position 1) does not occur in a vacuum but rather as a result of, for example, an element of interest for solution generation in the client’s previous turn (prior action); asking further elaboration on this element might result in the client’s elaborating their own understanding of what constitutes a good solution in the response; this action might in turn result in the coach making another request for elaboration in third position to further explore the idea that was introduced by the client, and so on, until the ongoing activity within solution generation can come to an end. This shows that courses of The Transformational Power of Questioning Practices in Coaching 131 action may be initiated by both coaches and clients and that in line with Vehviläinen et al.’s (2008: 188) findings, “[m]any actions […] are in fact, both initiatory and responsive” in nature. As such, for the coaching process to be effective, coach and client must - to some extent - be mutually responsive to one another in all positions, but also to their (also ideally) joint project, i.e., the coaching’s goal(s). Beyond the sequential and activity levels, an encompassing definition of responsiveness in coaching must also consider the theory of change which guides the coach’s interventions. This issue was first topicalized within psycho‐ logical research on psychotherapeutic interactions by Stiles and colleagues (e.g., Kramer and Stiles 2015; Stiles 2009; Stiles et al. 1998). In their work, Stiles et al. (1998) criticize classical research designs on success factors or factors of effectiveness which focus solely on the number of occurrences of particular factors. To them, these are inadequate to fully explain the equivalence in effec‐ tiveness of various psychotherapeutic approaches in which clinicians follow different theories, employ different interventions and methods etc. They suggest that this equivalence might be explained by the therapists’ responsiveness both at the onset and during the (therapeutic) process. Stiles (2009) describes responsiveness as behavior that is adapted to context and participants. Building onto such an understanding, appropriate responsiveness is conceived as the striving of the helping professional (and their client) “to do the right thing at the right time” (Kramer and Stiles 2015: 279). For the helping professional, this means that they “are attuned to their conversational partner and the locally transpiring interaction at hand all the while pursuing their respective professional agenda or theory” (Graf and Dionne 2021c: 67). Obtaining insights into appropriate responsiveness, then, means that an interdisciplinary approach integrating a focus on the co-construction of interaction (as CA allows) and an applied psychological understanding of the change theory and good practice is needed (Deplazes et al. 2018; Graf and Dionne 2021c; Graf et al. 2020a). Returning our attention to our target action questions: In view of appropriate responsiveness, this means that the number of questions asked by the coach alone may not be the only relevant factor inasmuch as they need to be the ‘right questions’ asked at the ‘right time’. Questions thus need to be responsive, i.e., questions inviting client reflection and exploration are effective if implemented by the coach at the appropriate moment in the process. In this sense, fully understanding the power of questioning practices in coaching, or indeed their potential for local and global effectiveness, requires both a close look at what happens in the interaction between coach and client and of what theoretically motivates coaches’ questions as an appropriate intervention. Working interdis‐ ciplinarily, then, is key to understanding appropriate responsiveness. 132 Eva-Maria Graf, Frédérick Dionne & Melanie Fleischhacker Such an interdisciplinary research design is at the core of QueSCo (see Figure 3). In addition to identifying coaching-specific question types and sequences as outlined above, the project aims to measure the frequency of their occurrence and discover formal, functional and interaction-type specific patterns which emerge along coaching activities/ phases, sessions, and processes (see Deplazes et al. 2018; Graf 2019). Finally, we seek to describe the potentials of questioning practices for local and global effectiveness and establish the link(s) between the two by considering what constitutes (less) successful questioning sequences. We hypothesize that a higher frequency of successful (i.e., mutually and theoretically responsive) questioning sequences (local effectiveness) adds to the overall or global effectiveness (goal attainment) of coaching (see also Figure 1). In the framework of the project, on the one hand, descriptive-phenomenological applied linguistics - working qualitatively - aims to inductively develop the above-mentioned typologies. Furthermore, the linguistic team seeks to provide a detailed description of interactional elements such as mutual (appropriate) responsiveness (Dionne in prep.). On the other hand, applied psychology, with its normative-theoretical perspective and quantitative methods, aims to classify what constitutes successful questioning (partially based on linguistic insights). Applied psychologists can relate the frequency of (less) successful/ responsive questioning sequences in the particular phases of change with the findings from clients’ self-reported goal attainment through the use of Goal Attainment Scaling (Spence 2007). Figure 3. Interdisciplinary research design of QueSCo The Transformational Power of Questioning Practices in Coaching 133 To sum up, fully outlining the nature and role of questioning practices in coaching as agents of change can only be achieved by combining descriptivephenomenological, qualitative, i.e., linguistic, perspectives on the local dimen‐ sion of change and normative-theoretical, quantitative, i.e., psychological, perspectives on the global dimension of change (see Graf and Dionne 2021c for a similar argument). In our final section, we will now move beyond these theoretical discussions and elaborate more concretely the interdisciplinary cooperation and the findings established so far. 5 Working towards the all-encompassing powerfulness of questioning practices The first QueSCo goal to address the above-mentioned research gap(s) consisted in developing a coaching-specific typology of questions and questioning se‐ quences. This process can be roughly distinguished into four recursive steps: (1) conceptualization, (2) in-depth data (re-)analysis, (3) establishing the typologies, and (4) transforming them into coding manuals (see Figure 4). In this section, we will briefly detail each step in this (interdisciplinary) process, provide first insights and end with an outlook on what is yet to come. Figure 4. Individual steps in the development of the typologies The conceptualization phase was defined by gathering and reviewing existing findings to generate first ideas on possible forms and specific functions of ques‐ tions in coaching interactions. These findings, from CA/ linguistic studies on psychotherapy (as neighboring, more established, and empirically well-founded helping context; see e.g., Peräkylä et al. 2008) and small-scale comparative (psychotherapy and coaching) investigations, served as sensitizing concepts (Blumer 1969) when approaching the data. Comparative studies had already 134 Eva-Maria Graf, Frédérick Dionne & Melanie Fleischhacker shown that similar question types exist in both formats but with interactiontype-specific differences and that question types themselves may differ (see e.g., Kabatnik and Graf 2021; Spranz-Fogasy et al. 2019). The in-depth linguistic data (re-)analysis motivated by these sensitizing concepts revealed what interaction-type specific questioning looks like, which led to progressively discarding most of the first ideas. To illustrate, whereas psychotherapeutic interaction is well served by a single question type for solu‐ tion generation (e.g., Kabatnik et al. 2019), systemic solution-oriented coaching interactions are characterized by a large amount of solution-focused talk, with a higher number of questions specializing in solution development. It was thus necessary to differentiate between various question subtypes focusing on smaller scale activities (e.g., discussing ideal solutions vs. discussing resources) within the overall solution generation (see Figure 6). As such, the in-depth analysis was an iterative and inductive process, which included extracting questions from the data, comparing and identifying similarities and differences between them within the linguistics team, forming adequate categories, testing, and fine-tuning them to establish the typologies. However, this process also involved the integration of other perspectives, namely, the coaching rationale as found in linguistic research (Graf 2019), in psychological research (Greif and Benning-Rohnke 2015), and in interdisciplinary research (Deplazes et al. 2018). We also considered insights from coaching practice, which, although mostly belief-based, reflects long professional engagement and stocks of knowledge (Schreyögg 2012). Following the successful development of the typologies, the final step involved transforming them into coding manuals, which enable independent and reliable coding. This entailed, for instance, in-depth descriptions of each type so as to allow for a clear distinction from others, indications for particular coding challenges encountered during the development and testing process and clear examples to illustrate each type. In applicable cases, as questions tend to fulfil several functions at the same time, coding rules were established. Lastly, inter-rater reliability was tested among project members from both the linguistic and psychological teams. Our coaching-specific functional typology of questions then consists of 12 question types distributed along seven higher-level functions (cf. Graf et al. in prep. a), as illustrated in Figures 5 and 6 with translated (cleaned) examples. The number of question types was negotiated (and continually further reduced) in cooperation with the psychologists to enable adequate coding and (significant) statistical results. The functions are thematically organized in accordance with the basic activities (Graf 2019) and/ or phases (Deplazes et al. 2018) of coaching. Apart from relationship-management (a continuous and ongoing activity to The Transformational Power of Questioning Practices in Coaching 135 maintain a fruitful working alliance) and agenda-thematizing (an intermittent meta-activity to negotiate and collaboratively frame next steps), the typology reflects an ideal trajectory of the coaching process from defining a concern, to identifying underling problems, discerning solutions, and transferring them into real world, i.e., clients’ professional contexts. Nevertheless, question types may occur in a different order, they may be totally absent, or they may re-occur in processual loops as is typical for “the thematically, interactively and discursively looping character” of coaching (Graf 2019: 70). As already stated above, the higher-level function “developing solutions” constitutes the core of the coaching process, which is reflected in the number of question types that attend to this activity (see Fleischhacker et al. under revision). With the help of these question types, the coach supports the client in formulating wishes and ideal solutions to their concern; they also assist coaches in establishing the resources already at a client’s disposal or still required for them to reach their goal; they furthermore seek to preempt the arising of obstacles on the path towards goal achievement; or promote the development of concrete action-strategies and contribute to establishing new ways of thinking and acting; finally, questions for solution generation also try to assess the client’s current status and feelings towards the progress of the ongoing activity or the coaching process at a particular point. Such evaluations, within but also at the end of coaching sessions or processes (‘questions evaluating the coaching’) constitute another coaching-specificity. These questions serve coaches to assess, among others, client satisfaction, the progress towards the goal, the appropri‐ ateness of methods, and the quality of the coaching interaction and relationship. 136 Eva-Maria Graf, Frédérick Dionne & Melanie Fleischhacker Figure 5. Typology of coaching-specific questions: Higher-level functions 1-4 Figure 6. Typology of coaching-specific questions: Higher-level functions 5-7 After carving out different types of the target action “question”, the (linguistic) team repeated the same procedure for the remaining sequential positions, i.e., prior actions, responses, and reactions in third position, to develop a coachingspecific typology of questioning sequences following the coaching project as outlined in Figure 2. The categories and descriptions for the various positions are illustrated in Figures 7 to 9. Since this is a work-in-progress, some categories are still preliminary. The prior action types (Figure 7) further detail the relation of the target action to coaches’ or clients’ prior actions. Questions can thus The Transformational Power of Questioning Practices in Coaching 137 constitute an immediate reaction to a client’s preceding input; they may be to some degree prepared (either more locally or over a longer stretch of talk) by the coach; or they may be neither prepared nor locally triggered but should then be responsive to the underlying change theory, i.e., the professional agenda to support clients in reaching their goal(s) (see Fleischhacker et al. in prep.). Figure 7. Typology of questioning sequences: Categories for prior actions Next, clients’ responses (Figure 8) are viewed in relation to the topic, (action) agenda, and (formal or structural) terms set by the coach’s question. This way, clients can be responsive (‘client participates’) or even more so (‘client does more’) or they may be partially responsive (‘client partly participates’) or non-responsive (‘client does not participate’). However, as detailed above (see “appropriate responsiveness”), clients may not be responsive in answering the question but may orient to the ongoing higher-level activity or the overall change project (‘client does something else’), thereby pursuing their own agenda but still driving the change-process forward. At this point, clients are (non-)responsive to different aspects of the goal-oriented coaching interaction (cf. Dionne in prep.). 138 Eva-Maria Graf, Frédérick Dionne & Melanie Fleischhacker Figure 8. Typology of questioning sequences: Categories for client responses In terms of possible reactions in third position (Figure 9), the coach must decide whether to advance in the coaching process (‘change’) or to pause it and/ or initiate a loop (‘exploration’). In either case, coaches have various possibilities to proceed or react to a client’s contribution in second position. When opting for ‘change’, coaches may initiate a new topic, activity, or phase; they may substantially transform previous input, e.g., via changes in perspective from problemto solution-talk; finally, they may re-focus on material which is particularly relevant or opt for important processual or methodological knowledge transfer. On the other hand, via ‘exploration’, coaches may want to get a more detailed picture of certain aspects of a client’s previous talk asking for clarification or elaboration; they may briefly halt the process by requesting an evaluation; or, in cases where clients are only partially or non-responsive or have misunderstood the initial question, coaches may initiate repair or insist on their original question. The Transformational Power of Questioning Practices in Coaching 139 Figure 9. Typology of questioning sequences: Categories for reactions in third position As these descriptive typologies show (see Graf et al. in prep. a/ b for detailed discussions and descriptions), the interactional relations between coaches’ and clients’ contributions and between the various sequential positions are intricate and complex. Equally complex are the different levels of mutual and theoretical responsiveness, which drive the coaching process forward and underly the local (as well as the global) power of questioning sequences (cf. Dionne in prep.). In any case, these categories make it possible to trace interactants’ activities from prior actions to third position and thus make change processes empirically observable. It is here that we begin to unravel the power of questions (i.e., particular question types in coaching) and their potential to spark reflection, invite changes in perspective, generate new knowledge etc. Based on the typologies, in a next step, the QueSCo team will (linguistically and psychologically) define (less) successful sequences inasmuch as some of them can be satisfactorily concluded in third position and/ or observe (to a higher degree) the various layers of responsiveness (see Section 4) and thus constitute ideal trajectories towards client change while others may not. This brings us back to the initial hypothesis (and underlying research goal) of QueSCo, i.e., that a higher frequency of successful questioning sequences might positively influence the overall coaching outcome. 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New Skills for Coaching People Toward Success in Work and Life. Boston: Davies-Black. The Transformational Power of Questioning Practices in Coaching 145 Part 2: Perspectives from Anglophone Literatures and Cultures 1 Roth’s example for a “hard neuronovel” is Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (1998). His list of “soft neuronovels” includes Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999), Mark The Power of Love: Reading The Silver Linings Playbook as Romantic Neuronovel Alexa Weik von Mossner 1 Introduction Matthew Quick’s The Silver Linings Playbook (2008) opens with its protagonist doing push-ups in the courtyard of a psychiatric clinic and staring at the pink toenails of his mother. She has come to sign him out of what he calls “the bad place” (1) and take him home. Pat Peoples, however, is unsure of what to do. On the one hand, he does not want to stay in the mental hospital, “where no one believes in silver linings or love or happy endings”. On the other hand, he is “afraid that the people from [his] old life will not be as enthusiastic as [he is] now trying to be” (4). Pat’s emotional health, it is suggested from the beginning, is fragile, and he feels easily threatened by third-person accounts suggesting that his own experience of reality does not correspond to factual reality. That is why he believes he needs to get away from the hospital if he is ever going to reach his singular goal: to win back his estranged wife Nikki and thereby bring their unfinished love story to its inevitable happy ending. The Silver Linings Playbook is a psychological novel about a man who suffers from the long-term consequences of physical brain trauma as well as from an unnamed mental condition that involves depression as well as manic mood states, anger and anxiety episodes, obsessive behavior, and memory loss. Pat is considered potentially dangerous, required to see a psychiatrist and to manage his emotions with the help of heavy doses of psychotropic drugs. The novel therefore belongs to the subgenre of the “soft neuronovel”, defined by Marco Roth as “neurological novels in which the author inhabits a cognitively anomalous or abnormal person and makes this character’s inner life the focus of the novel, soliciting our sympathies” (2009) 1 . Such novels feature narrators that are unreliable in ways that are different from their modernist precursors Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), and John Wray’s Lowboy (2009). 2 Lehrer argues that Roth is overstressing his point since “there is nothing new or trendy about novelists borrowing the language and theories of contemporary science” (2009). 3 Less stigmatizing than pathology, neurodivergence describes “people whose brains function differently in one or more ways than is considered standard or typical”. It includes autism and “chronic mental health illnesses such as bipolar disorder, obsessivecompulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, anxiety, and depression” (Resnick 2021). because they “load almost the entire burden of meaning and distinctiveness onto their protagonists’ neurologically estranged perceptions of our world” (2009) 2 . This is the case in Quick’s novel, which filters its narrative through Pat’s often delusional and highly medicated consciousness, forcing readers to rely on information given by an autodiegetic narrator who is misguided about events of the past and powerless over his own emotions. In Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction (2016), Marco Caracciolo notes that “strangeness is always a matter of experiental and interpretative negoti‐ ation between particular readers and particular texts” but that “feelings of strangeness” are not entirely unpredictable either, due to shared cultural assumptions and established “templates for defining ‘normality’” (1). In the case of neuronovels, such (a)normality is often thematized through “the problem of qualia: the (first-person) feelings of phenomenal experience and the question of their integration within a (third-person) materialist, neuroscientific account of the mind” (Geadtke 2012: 185). Working in the comic register, The Silver Linings Playbook gives readers a sense of what it is like to experience the world through Pat’s neurodiverse consciousness while at the same time challenging his subjective account through the critical voices of other characters 3 . It is for this reason that readers of the novel are unlikely to experience what Roth has called “the defeat of the metaphoric impulse” (2009) and which he considers a serious drawback of the neuronovel. The problem with focusing on the minds of people whose brains function in pathological ways, he suggests, is that such a narrative perspective makes it impossible for most readers to identify strongly with the protagonists and the goals they hope to reach. In other words, such protagonists are so strange that readers cannot build the empathic connection necessary for an engaged reading experience. However, as I will demonstrate, neuronovels can also feature central characters whose views of reality are idiosyncratic and sometimes outright bizarre, but who are nevertheless able to engage with the third-person perspectives that are provided by others. Such characters can evolve and develop, and they can even function as a convincing romantic hero in a comic love story. 150 Alexa Weik von Mossner 4 As Hogan points out, “Story prototypes are clearly not stories in themselves. They are, rather, very abstract outlines for possible stories” (2013: 27). Using the analytical tools of affective narratology, I will argue that Quick’s novel not only “elicit[s] feelings of strangeness” in readers (Caracciolo 2016: 1) but also leads them to develop hopes that increasingly diverge from those of the protagonist while their sympathetic allegiance to him remains largely unchallenged. In the words of cognitive narratologist Patrick Colm Hogan, the prototypical love story involves “two people [who] fall in love [and who] encounter an obstacle to their union, commonly in the form of some superior social authority” (2011b: 33). In The Silver Linings Playbook, however, it is not a superior social authority that stands in the way of the lovers’ union but the protagonist’s own mental condition, and so the main obstacle that must be overcome is inside him rather than some external forbidding power. 2 The romantic tragicomedy and the problem of neurodiverse qualia As Hogan has demonstrated in several of his books (e.g. 2003, 2011a, 2013), love stories are one of several story prototypes that occur in a wide range of cultural traditions across the world. Drawing on the insights of affective neuroscience, Hogan argues that the reason for this cross-cultural phenomenon is that story structures are built on literary universals and thus on universals in human emotion. In How Author’s Minds Make Stories (2013), Hogan offers the following description of the prototypical romance plot: It begins with two people falling in love. They encounter some representative of social authority who prevents them from being united in an enduring way […]. There is often a socially acceptable rival for one lover, a rival preferred by the social authority […]. Some significant accomplishment by or change in state of the demeaned lover (and/ or some failure by the preferred rival) may produce an alteration that allows for the lovers to be united. This is often accompanied by a larger social reconciliation. (31) While not all love stories will involve all these elements, many of them do 4 . It is indeed remarkable how frequently we find this pattern in romantic tragicomedies of all kinds, from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597) to the sentimental novels of Pearl S. Buck and romantic comedies such as Joel Zwi ck’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002). In all cases, there is a social authority with considerable power that (initially or permanently) blocks the lovers’ happy The Power of Love: Reading The Silver Linings Playbook as Romantic Neuronovel 151 union. Depending on the genre, the emotional power of love either overcomes the ensuing obstacles (comedy) or it perishes in the end (tragedy). Things are more complicated in The Silver Linings Playbook, and not only because the novel contains both a familial separation plot and a romance plot or because Pat’s declared love interest is his estranged wife and therefore a woman with whom he has already been in a romantic union. Pat’s first-person narrative nevertheless constructs a simple prototypical love story in which the romantic hero struggles against several blocking social authorities such as his family, his psychiatrist, and the police, who seem to be doing everything in their power to impede his reunion with his beloved wife Nikki. From the very beginning, however, the veracity of this story is called into question by the fact that Pat has limited awareness of the events that happened in his recent past and only a vague grasp of the occurrences that make up his present. He does not know how long he was in the psychiatric clinic, nor does he remember what got him there. And although his mother hopes that he will be able “to get on with [his] life finally” (Quick 2010: 4), he is not in a mental state that would allow him to get a job or to fully participate in the social life of his family, which is firmly circumscribed by football and his father’s drastic mood swings. Pat suffers from his father’s inability to relate to him in any other way than through their common passion for the Philadelphia Eagles, but what really preoccupies him is how he can win back his wife. To make that happen, Pat has developed a strategy that involves three key components: (1) losing weight and thus becoming more physically attractive, (2) reading all the novels on Nikki’s high school syllabus and thus show interest in her work as a teacher, and (3) practicing kindness and thus learn to become a more caring husband. He follows this strategy with single-minded purpose and resolve, having lost almost fifty pounds during his time at the clinic with no intention of slowing down. As soon as he returns home he goes “[e]agerly […] to work, alternating between sets of bench presses, curls, machine sit-ups on the Stomach Master 6000, leg lifts, squats, [and] hours on the bike” (7). In addition, he drinks “four gallons of water every day, doing endless shots of H2O from a shot glass for intensive hydration” (7) and wraps himself in a trash bag when engaging in “the ten-mile running portion of [his] ten-hour exercise routine” (19). He is just as obsessively determined when it comes to reading the books on Nikki’s old high school syllabus, but in this case, he experiences an unexpected problem. Already the first novel he reads, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), troubles him because its modernist love story lacks a proper happy ending, thus suggesting that not all love stories must have such endings. Pat’s initial reaction 152 Alexa Weik von Mossner 5 Howard Sklar has noted that, since empathizers take on the emotional experience of another as their own, empathy implies “a reduction of the sense of distance between the empathizer and the object of empathy—in other words, the minimizing of the ‘observer role,’ which is a form of aesthetic distance. By contrast, sympathy [which leads readers to feel compassion or even pity for a character] requires a degree of distance for readers to observe and then judge a character’s situation” (2009: 584). Sympathy therefore necessitates a greater degree of cognitive reflection. On the role of empathy in literary reading, see also Keen (2007). is fear but, as a primary emotion, fear is closely related to anger (LeDoux 1996: 128), so that is what soon dominates his emotional response: I feel like ripping the book in half and calling up Fitzgerald and telling him his book is all wrong, even though I know Fitzgerald is probably deceased […] you can tell Fitzgerald never really took the time to look up at the clouds during sunset, because there’s no silver lining at the end of that book, let me tell you. (9) For many readers, there will be a comical dimension to this outbreak as they read about Pat’s reaction to reading another novel. Narrated in present tense and in breathless immediacy, it records a frustration that might be familiar to them. Regardless of whether they have read The Great Gatsby, they likely have been confronted before with love stories that end tragically. The continued success of romance novels with their prescribed happy endings suggests that many (and especially female) readers prefer such endings over tragic ones, and so they might read along sympathetically as Pat vents his frustration with one of the most iconic novels in American literary history. It is a moment that invites readers to feel both with (empathy) and for (sympathy) Pat because it is so easy to understand his great desire for a happy reunion of the lovers 5 . According to Hogan, one of the reasons for the cross-cultural attractiveness of romantic tragicomedies is that they involve a particular intense happiness goal, namely the combination of emotional attachment and sexual desire (2011a: 129). It is attractive because stories invite readers to simulate and empathically relate to the happiness goal of their fictional characters. “We are creatures of desire”, writes cognitive psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley, and “so the desires and intentions of story characters resonate in us” (2012: 23). The mirror neuron systems in our brains allow us to feel empathy with fictional humans and to share their feelings of attachment and desire; as neurologist Marco Iacoboni explains, “[w]e have empathy for the fictional character because we literally experience the same feelings ourselves” (2009: 4). However, one way to make love stories compelling is to have sympathetic protagonists experience negative emotions, be it milder forms such as frustra‐ tion, sadness, or anxiety, or strong forms such as anger, grief, fear, or horror. The Power of Love: Reading The Silver Linings Playbook as Romantic Neuronovel 153 This is why “[t]housands of stories have started […] with […] a protagonist, who has a desire and plan, and confronts a difficulty” (Oatley 2012: 15). The engaged reader will develop a concern for the desires of the protagonists and will thus empathically suffer with them and feel compassion for them whenever new difficulties and obstacles put their achievement in question. This is exactly what happens to Pat when reading The Great Gatsby and learning that, instead of reaching his happiness goal with Daisy, Gatsby “is shot dead in his swimming pool the first time he goes for a swim all summer” (Quick 2010: 9). Since he has developed a concern for the character and empathizes with his romantic hopes and goals—recognizing their similarity to his own hopes and goals—Pat suffers greatly when the text ends up disappointing them, not only because he empathizes with Gatsby but also because he fears a similar outcome for his own love story. He worries that the fact that his wife considers The Great Gatsby “the greatest novel ever written by an American” might mean that she “doesn’t really believe in silver linings” (9) and thus in the power of love to overcome all obstacles. Although he keeps insisting that their happy romantic reunion is “inevitable” (9), he is greatly distraught by anything he interprets as suggesting the opposite. Pat’s fear further increases when he picks up the next book on his wife’s syllabus, A Farewell to Arms (1929), which she has advertised to him as “Hemingway’s best love story” (21). The disappointment could not be greater. In Pat’s eyes the novel is “nothing but a trick” (21) because it has the worst ending imaginable […]. It is the most torturous ending I have ever experienced and probably will ever experience in literature, movies, or even television. I am crying so hard at the end, partly for the characters, yes, but also because Nikki actually teaches this book to children. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to expose impressionable teenagers to such a horrible ending. Why not just tell high school students that their struggle to improve themselves is all for nothing? (22) Pat realizes that his tears are in part caused by his empathic concern for the characters and in part by his empathic concern for the actual readers of the novel, since he believes that “impressionable teenagers” will be so affected by the tragic love story that they will lose faith in their own power to bring about real-life happy endings. What he does not seem to realize is that it is his own mind that is easily “impressionable” and that cannot distinguish between fact and fiction. As usual when he finds his understanding of the world threatened, Pat reacts with anger. He is “mad at Nikki for teaching such pessimism in her classroom” and feels like writing Hemingway “a letter right now and threaten to strangle him dead with my bare hands just for being so glum” (22). 154 Alexa Weik von Mossner 6 Alignment, explains Murray Smith, results from our “access to the actions, thought, and feelings of characters”. Allegiance, by contrast, refers to the way in which a narrative elicits sympathy towards that character (2022: 6). Such responses are triggered—though not determined—by the “moral structure” of the narrative (84). 7 Film scholar Carl Plantinga calls this “conditional realism” (2009: 240). 3 Neurodiversity, narrative power, and readers’ double-binds Pat’s extreme reactions put readers into a double-bind. On the one hand, his subjective experience is central for their understanding of the story. As David Herman explains, “unless a text […] registers the pressure of the events on an embodied human or at least human-like consciousness” the text “will not be construed by interpreters as a full-fledged narrative” (2007: 236). And not only are readers aligned with Pat’s consciousness, but they likely will also have started building allegiance with him 6 . It is hard not to like Pat or his stubborn belief in the romantic idea that love conquers all. On the other hand, readers will likely decide that Pat’s angry response to the unhappy endings of the modernist novels he reads is vastly overblown. While the negative emotions (sadness or disappointment) we experience when encountering a tragic ending are real, healthy minds have a cognitive understanding that what happens in fictional texts has no repercussions for their own lives 7 . Pat, however, is unable to qualify his response in that way, and it is this very inability that fills the narrative with humor in ways that may not be apparent to Pat himself but helps endearing him to readers. As Jeroen Vandaele explains, “humor is narrative when it creates and/ or exploits incongruity and superiority relations between the participants […] of narrative texts: author, narrator, reader, spectator, character” (2010: 721), and in The Silver Linings Playbook, readers are constantly invited to explore such incongruities. This is one of several ways in which Pat’s neurodiverse mind registers in the text. Although he is aware that he suffers from mood disorders, he is powerless when confronted with a trigger. When a specific region of the brain recognizes an emotionally competent stimulus, explains neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, “the result is the triggering of a cascade of events, enacted in other parts of the brain and, subsequently, in the body itself, the result of which is an emotion” (2010: 255). The intensity of the emotion and the resulting feelings and actions depend on the intensity of the trigger, but in the case of neurodiverse minds the relationship may not always be immediately obvious. When Pat enters the office of his new psychiatrist Cliff Patel, he hears the first few chords of Kenny G’s “Songbird” and reacts violently: “I’m out of my seat, screaming, kicking chairs, flipping the coffee table, picking up piles of The Power of Love: Reading The Silver Linings Playbook as Romantic Neuronovel 155 magazines and throwing them against the wall” (Quick 2010: 12). Arguably, this is an incongruent (and thus comical) response to the sound of smooth jazz, and so readers are once again invited to sympathetically share Pat’s qualia without being able to fully understand it. As it turns out, Cliff has triggered the anger attack on purpose to test his new patient’s emotional reaction to the song, but when he tries to discuss the incident, Pat is unable to confront the issue. Instead, he “hum[s] a single note and silently count[s] to ten, blanking [his] mind” (13). This total disengagement is repeated whenever Kenny G is mentioned, and since Pat is the narrator, it remains unknown to the reader why he reacts so violently to the actual or imagined stimulus of the song. It is just as unclear to Pat, who tries to work his way around such threatening incidences. For him, they are just obstacles within the romantic movie that is his life as he does everything in his power to work his way to its happy ending. Problematic as it may be in Pat’s particular case, the idea of experiencing one’s life as a movie that is “always on” (15) is not that far fetched. Damasio explains that consciousness indeed functions like “a ‘movie-in-the-brain,’ provided we realize that in this rough metaphor the movie has as many sensory tracks as our nervous system has sensory portals—sight, sound, taste, and olfaction, touch, inner senses, and so on” (1999: 9). Furthermore, he suggests that “the images in the movie metaphor are […] made of qualia” (9) and links the notion of qualia to emotional experiences, explaining that it “refers to the feelings that are an obligate part of any subjective experience—some shade of pleasure or its absence, some shade of pain or discomfort, well-being, or lack thereof ” (2010: 253). It is only in a small range of real-life situations that such feelings are missing. Among them is the “common pathological situation” of depression as well as “the effect of any drug capable of shutting down emotional responsivity” (255). The psychotropic drugs Cliff Patel prescribes in the novel are meant to precisely have such effects on Pat’s qualia, and once he starts taking them, they dampen the emotional valence of his experience. Pat’s first-person account of his romantic quest is therefore doubly unreliable, according to Roth a typical feature of the neuronovel (2009). Since Pat’s emotional experience of the world is anomalous, both because of the underlying mental disorder and the drugs that manage it, readers cannot trust that his nar‐ ration adequately represents the storyworld. Yet, because he is an autodiegetic narrator and thus the character they are aligned with, Pat’s cognitively and affectively estranged perspective frames their impressions of other characters and story events from beginning to end. Gaedtke has argued that “it is this perspectival problem of qualia that structures both the form and the content of the contemporary neuronovel” (2012: 187). His main interest, however, is in 156 Alexa Weik von Mossner the ways in which such novels nevertheless attempt to move between firstand third-person perspectives, thereby transforming “philosophy of mind’s ‘hard problem’ of qualia into a distinctly literary problem of narrative style” (187). Quick addresses this by allowing readers to understand that the romantic plot of Pat’s movie-in-the-brain is a pathological fantasy and that the comic love story of which he is the actual hero is in fact taking an entirely different course. Despite the dominance of Pat’s perspective, the narrative thus offers compelling reasons to question not only his cognitive powers and reliability but also his ability to understand his own emotions. 4 Mental simulations, fantasies, and true romantic heroes Several difficulties stand in the way of Pat’s romantic desire to be reunited with his wife, and the reader’s desire to find out what it was that drove them apart. One of these difficulties is time. More than four years have passed since Pat last saw his wife, a fact he finds difficult to accept since he has no memory of those years. In his mind, “apart time” began only a few months ago, and he finds it terrifying to “figure out what the rest of the world believes about time” (Quick 2010: 102). When his family informs him how long he has been in the neural health facility, he once again reacts with anger, expressed in the uncontrolled raising of his voice: “I realize I am screaming, but I can’t help it […]. I hear my mother scream, I feel the back of my head hit the refrigerator, and then my mind goes blank” (32-33). This is one of many moments in the novel when Pat’s subjective experience of the world is challenged by the third-person accounts of other characters. Feeling deeply threatened by their implications, Pat is so disconnected from his own emotional response that he cognitively monitors the fact that he is screaming but is unable to do anything about it. As so often, he moves from fear to helpless anger and from there straight to denial. This not only concerns the amount of time he has spent in the clinic, but also the nature of his relationship with Nikki. It is remarkable how much Pat’s narration is focused on the imagined mind of his wife. Whether he is being nice to his mother or feels bad about something he has done—he always measures his actions against his sense of how Nikki might react. To bring about the desired happy ending, he unceasingly simulates Nikki’s likely responses to adjust his behavior accordingly. Hogan reminds us that such forms of mental simulation necessarily have an emotional dimension (2013: 4). And if they are to be helpful, they cannot only engage pleasurable outcomes. While it is important to imagine future happiness conditions to have goals “and envision ways of pursuing them” (9), a failure to imagine a full range of possible The Power of Love: Reading The Silver Linings Playbook as Romantic Neuronovel 157 8 The claim that reading literature can improve empathic abilities has been made by psychologists like Martin Hoffman (2000) and philosophers like Martha Nussbaum (2001). Empirical studies suggest that literary fiction does indeed have empathyenhancing qualities of literature (Mar, Oatley and Peterson 2009; Johnson et al. 2013). outcomes “remains at the level of fantasy” (9). It is only when we distinguish “between what’s possible and what is not possible, what is dangerous and what is not dangerous” (9) that we truly engage in the evolutionarily important process of simulation. Pat is obsessively concerned with what might further or hinder his future reunion with Nikki. At the same time, however, he believes in the inevitability of a happy ending because considering the alternative is too painful for him. He is stuck at the level of wish-fulfillment and thus in the realm of fantasy. The narrative allows readers to understand this point although it is mediated through Pat’s consciousness. In addition to his family members, there are two characters that provide not only Pat but also readers with alternative perspectives on the factual reality of the novel’s storyworld. One of them is the psychiatrist Cliff Patel who gains Pat’s trust because they are both fans of the Philadelphia Eagles and because, unlike Pat’s previous psychiatrist, he acknowledges that “a trip through this world can be a wildly different experience, depending on what chemicals are raging through one’s mind” (Quick 2010: 127). Cliff says this in response to Pat’s complaint about the depressing ending of Sylvia Plath’s modernist classic The Bell Jar, another book on Nikki’s syllabus. Psychological novels such as The Bell Jar, Cliff suggests, are valuable because they can teach their readers to be “sympathetic to others” who “have it harder than they do” (127). This makes sense to Pat who realizes that he has a lot of sympathy for [the protagonist] Esther, and if she were a person in my life, I would have tried to help her, only because I knew her thoughts well enough to understand she was not simply deranged, but suffering […] because she was depressed, due to the wild chemicals in her mind. (128) This suggests a direct relation not only between literary and real-life forms of mental simulation and empathic relation, but also that reading literature can improve readers’ empathic abilities in the interaction with real-world people 8 . The important lesson for Pat is that gaining insight into another person’s subjective experience can change our understanding of that person’s character and help us develop sympathy for their mental states and actions. This is of course exactly what The Silver Linings Playbook offers its own readers by telling 158 Alexa Weik von Mossner its story from the perspective of first-person narrator who, like Plath’s Esther, is “not simply deranged, but suffering” from mood disorders. As Howard Sklar has demonstrated, a narrative can “structure […] its readers’ feelings and attitudes” toward its characters with great subtlety even in cases where the first-person narrator and focalizing consciousness is unreliable (2009: 562). While this does not mean that the narrative determines individual reader responses, it does “structure the parameters of readers’ responses” (563) so that most readers will be led to develop certain attitudes and feelings towards its central characters. Importantly, those attitudes and feelings can change over the course of the story as a result of its narrative properties. As Sklar explains with reference to Meir Steinberg, “a narrative leads readers to form impressions of a particular character (the primacy effect) and then strengthens, modifies, or reverses those impressions by the subsequent […] revelation of expositional detail ([…] the recency effect) within the sequential unfolding and processing of the narrative as a whole” (567). In the case of an unreliable narrator, the reported voices of other characters are of central importance in the gradual correction or even reversion of readers’ primary impressions of both narrated events and individual characters, including that of the narrator. Even though the narrator might judge those voices to be incorrect or lacking in understanding, as Pat often does, they do present readers with alternative perspectives that help them form independent interpretations that might diverge from those of the narrator. 5 The remedial power of alternative perspectives The second character outside Pat’s immediate family that provides readers with an alternative interpretation of Pat’s reality is Tiffany, a young woman who has her own set of traumatic experiences and mental health issues. Pat believes that, apart from Cliff Patel, she is the only one who can really understand what is going on in his mind, “since she seems to have a similar problem and is always exploding” (Quick 2010: 115). Even more important for the narrative, she also provides a radically different perspective on his wife. “Fuck Nikki”, she blurts out, “if Nikki won’t support you when you’re feeling down, then I say fuck her […] All you ever think about is pleasing Nikki, and yet your precious Nikki doesn’t seem to think about you at all” (118). With her outburst, Tiffany gives voice not only to her own frustration about Pat’s obsessive fixation on his estranged wife, but also makes a claim for the sympathetic allegiance of readers who at this point themselves might feel frustrated with Pat’s stubborn insistence on the inevitability of a happy ending to his love story with Nikki. Tiffany becomes a central character in the second half of the novel as she The Power of Love: Reading The Silver Linings Playbook as Romantic Neuronovel 159 pretends to act as a messenger between Pat and his wife, carrying back and forth letters between the estranged couple and secretly writing Nikki’s part of the correspondence herself. She benefits in two ways from this betrayal: in exchange for her messenger services Pat agrees to become her dance partner in the Dance Away Depression competition, and, since she has fallen in love with him, she constructs a version of Nikki’s mind in her letters that conflicts with Pat’s. Already the first letter states the truth that everyone has been hiding from Pat: that Nikki divorced him soon after he was admitted to the psychiatric clinic because he committed a crime he does not remember, and that she has taken out a restraining order against him because she is “a little afraid” of him (181-182). Pat is shocked that he might have committed a crime. In the end, however, he chooses to focus on what he constructs as the “silver lining to the letter”: the chance to get in touch with his ex-wife. Consequently, he agrees to all of Tiffany’s conditions, which involve a total abstinence from football as well as regular dancing sessions in preparation for the competition. The rigorous dance practice that follows forms a bond of trust between Pat and Tiffany as they release their penned-up emotions. It also introduces readers to an alternative love interest for Pat, one that everyone seems to notice except for Pat himself, who remains focused on Nikki even after learning that the reconciliation he is hoping for “is not going to happen” (217) because she is happily remarried. This information, while unacceptable for Pat, structures the parameters of readers’ responses in a way that leads them to develop hopes for the ending of the story that increasingly diverge from Pat’s. As Bernaerts et al. remind us, the dynamics of narrative “depend on the absence of information and on discrepancies between the reader’s knowledge and the knowledge possessed by narrators and characters” (2013: 3). Since readers do not yet know at this point in the narrative that what appears to be Nikki’s letters are in fact written by Tiffany herself, they are invited to develop a new happiness goal for Pat: a romantic union with Tiffany rather than with Nikki. Pat, however, is undaunted. Through his own letters, he asks his ex-wife to meet him on Christmas Day and even after she writes him that she “won’t be coming ever” (Quick 2010: 239), he still hopes that she will show up, because “in the movies, just when the main character is about to give up, something surprising happens, which leads to the happy ending” (240). Even though the storylines of modernist novels have disappointed him, he continues to trust in the romantic story paradigm of Hollywood movies and their promise that true love will conquer all. It is not Nikki, however, who shows up at the arranged meeting place but Tiffany, who ruefully confesses what she has done. 160 Alexa Weik von Mossner In this climactic moment, Pat finally can see that he has “been completely delusional” (245) and, for the first time since his release from the clinic, changes his understanding of reality as he realizes that he has been living a fantasy. There is, however, one obstacle that still stands in the way of recovery: the traumatic event in Pat’s past that he has so thoroughly repressed. When he finally finds his long-lost wedding video, this “objective” account finally allows him to access his memories. Hearing his wedding song—Kenny G’s “Songbird”— “something in [his] mind begins to melt” (271). He remembers the night when the same song played as he was finding his wife in the shower with another man. Unable to control his emotions, he attacked his wife’s lover and tried to strangle him. It is this moment of marital unfaithfulness combined with his own act of violence that Pat had banned from his consciousness. Now that he can again remember it, he is able to ask his brother to drive him to his old house, where he watches his ex-wife play in the snow with her new husband and their two children and decides that he is “just going to remember that scene as the happy ending of my old life’s movie” (287). The Silver Linings Playbook thus ends with the protagonist’s initial happiness goal being thoroughly disappointed. As Oatley has remarked, “an essence of stories […] is that they are studies of how plans don’t work out” (2012: 23), and to learn how characters deal with such problems is one of the enduring attractions of fiction. However, the conclusion of Quick’s novel nevertheless suggests that - unlike in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Hemingway’s A Farewll to Arms - there actually is a silver lining to Pat’s ambitious plans and his various acts of self-improvement. After reconciling with Tiffany, he notes that “while Nikki is gone for good, I still have a woman in my arms who […] knows just how messed up my mind is, how many pills I’m on, and yet she allows me to hold her anyway” (Quick 2010: 289). Long after the reader has been led by the narrative to come to that conclusion, Pat finally realizes that he needs Tiffany, and that it is their love story that has found its happy ending. His life’s romantic movie, then, turns out to be comic after all. Rather than challenging the romantic idea of the power of true love, the novel thus ends up confirming it—it is only the object of affection that changes over the course of the story. And instead of a blocking social authority it is the neurologically estranged perceptions of Pat’s mind that for a good part of the narrative prevent the union of the “true” lovers in The Silver Linings Playbook. As Damasio explains, “[m]emory, tempered by personal feeling, is what allows humans to imagine […] individual well-being […] and to invent the ways and the means of achieving and magnifying that well-being” (2010: 297). This is exactly what Pat aims to do throughout the narrative, but as long The Power of Love: Reading The Silver Linings Playbook as Romantic Neuronovel 161 9 Quick has “worked with kids diagnosed with severe autism and […] at a locked-down facility with people who had brain trauma and mental illness”. He has also battled depression and anxiety issues himself and declared that “those experiences helped [him] come up with Pat” (Pomerantz 2012). Putting on “the mask of fiction” allowed him to return to his memories and “to explore a lot of this in a way I felt was safe” (Allen 2013). as his memory and his understanding of factual reality are impaired, the ways and means he invents to achieve well-being remain inadequate. It is only when this information is made available to his consciousness that the resulting shift in qualia allows him to see the true silver lining, providing readers with an ending that is emotionally satisfying and uplifting precisely because the narrative has allowed them to notice that potential silver lining much earlier and because it ultimately reinforces the belief in the power of love. 6 Conclusion In his deliberations on the “neuronovel” Marco Roth claims that “by comparison with most 19th-century novels, and even with most 20th-century modernist novels of the ‘stream of consciousness’ school, the neuronovels have in them very little of society, of different classes, of individuals interacting, of develop‐ ment either alongside or against historical forces and expectations” (2009). While this may be true in general, it is not true for The Silver Linings Playbook, which combines its exploration of the qualia of a neurodiverse mind with an investigation of the social context from which such a mind emerges and in which it is embedded. As Quick has explained, “[w]hen you’re a man growing up in a blue-collar neighborhood, you’re taught to hide feelings, to suppress things”, and so many men do, leading to all sorts of psychological problems, among them the ones he has depicted in his novel (Allen 2013). While Pat’s subjective experience is in part the result of “the chemical explosions that light up [his] skull like the Fourth of July” (Quick 2010: 109), it is also the result of social and cultural conventions. Furthermore, the novel suggests that greater acceptance of deviant subjective experiences of reality might help integrating individuals with mental health issues into their families and communities rather than locking them away into psychiatric wards 9 . Quick’s achievement in his “minding” of the comic love story is that he has imagined a romantic hero who, despite his mental health issues, evokes sympathy in readers, keeping them engaged in the narrative and rooting for him. The novel manages to do that in part by allowing readers to understand the potential social causes for Pat’s ailment but also by creating an attractive happiness goal for him, namely that of fulfilled romantic love. 162 Alexa Weik von Mossner Although Pat’s hopes are out of touch with reality, they are relatable for most readers. And even as they begin to hope for a different ending, the nature of the happiness goal (a romantic union) and their sympathetic allegiance to Pat remains unchallenged. Remarkably, this remains true during the climax of the novel when Pat’s brutal attack on his wife’s then-lover is revealed. This is because the revelation happens at a point when Pat has spent many months trying to become a better person, thus taking advantage of the primacy effect (Sklar 2009: 567). One could argue that the protagonist of this neuronovel is idealized in the sense that he overcomes part of his ailment, even though he is not completely cured from the perspective of the “materialist, neuroscientific account of the mind” (Gaedtke 2012: 185) that is provided by other characters. Accordingly, Pat signals his convalescence at the end of the novel by openly acknowledging “how messed up [his] mind his” (Quick 2010: 289). The Silver Linings Playbook is therefore indeed, as Quick hopes it is, “decep‐ tively simple and funny” while making “readers think a little too” (Eldaly 2012). How attractive this mixture can be is not least evidenced by David O. Russell’s Oscar-winning film adaptation (2012), which is less edgy and more conventional than the novel but nevertheless aims to preserve its essence. As psychologist Skip Dine Young has observed, the film is “fairly accurate about a number of elements related to mental health” and “misleading about other elements”, but it is ultimately about “the redeeming power of love” and the feeling of hope, offering “an inclusive vision of that feeling that is that much more universal and powerful” (2013). This is important because, as scholars of disability studies such as Ralph James Savareses have affirmed, “physiological distinction becomes disabling in a society that refuses to welcome and accommodate difference” (2014: 329). Their inevitable shortcomings notwithstanding, the novel’s best‐ seller status and the film adaptation’s critical and commercial success remind us that neuronovels do have the power to deeply move us while also familiarizing us with neurodiverse minds in the process. References Allen, N. (2013). Interview with Matthew Quick. The Telegraph, 24 February. 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Available at: http: / / www.sixersreview.com/ InterviewMQ.html Fitzgerald, F. S. (1925). The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner. Gaetdke, A. (2012). Cognitive investigations: the problems of qualia and style in the contemporary neuronovel. Novel, 45 (2), 184-201. Haddon, M. (2003). The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. New York: Doubleday. Hemingway, E. (1929). A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner. Herman, D. (2007). Cognition, emotion, and consciousness. In D. Herman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 245-258. Hoffman, M. (2000). Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hogan, P. C. (2003). The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hogan, P. C. (2011a). What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hogan, P. C. (2011b). Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structures of Stories. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press. Hogan, P. C. (2013). How Authors’ Minds Make Stories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iacoboni, M. (2009). Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others. New York: Picador. Johnson, D. R., D. M. Jasper, S. Griffin, and B. L. Huffman (2013). Reading narrative fiction reduces Arab-Muslim prejudice and offers a safe haven from intergroup anxiety. Social Cognition, 31(5), 578-598. Keen, S. (2007). Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Lehrer, J. (2009). The Neuronovel. The Frontal Cortex, 29 October. Available at: <http: / / scienceblogs.com/ cortex/ 2009/ 10/ 29/ the-neuronovel/ > Lethem, J. (2011). Motherless Brooklyn. New York: Vintage. 164 Alexa Weik von Mossner Mar, R. A., K. Oatley and J. B. Peterson. (2009). Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy: ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes. Communications: The European Journal of Communication, 34 (4), 407-428. McEwan, I. (1998). Enduring Love. New York: Anchor. Nussbaum, M. (2001). Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press. Oatley, K. (2012). The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories. New York: Oxford University Press. Quick, M. (2010). The Silver Linings Playbook. New York: Picador. Plantinga, C. (2009). Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pomerantz, D. (2012). Interview with Matthew Quick. Forbes Online, 27 December. Avail‐ able at: http: / / www.forbes.com/ sites/ dorothypomerantz/ 2012/ 12/ 27/ silver-linings-pl aybook-author-matthew-quick-on-hollywood-happy-endings-and-loving-the-eagles Resnick, A. (2021). What does it mean to be neurodivergent? VeryWell Mind, 6 October. 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New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Young, S. D. (2013). Accuracy, distortion and truth in Silver Linings Playbook: the power of love in the movies, all audience members included. Psychology Today, 11 February. Available at: https: / / www.psychologytoday.com/ us/ blog/ movies-and-the-mind/ 2013 02/ accuracy-distortion-and-truth-in-silver-linings-playbook The Power of Love: Reading The Silver Linings Playbook as Romantic Neuronovel 165 Ecosocial Harm, Grief, and Communal Empowerment in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans Marijana Mikić 1 Introduction Science fiction has long been dominated by stories of white, Western power. There are countless narratives that feature a white, male protagonist “mas‐ tering” the world, including both human others as well as nonhuman nature. African American science fiction and fantasy writers - among them Octavia E. Butler, Andrea Hairston, N.K. Jemisin, and Sherri L. Smith - write back to such storytelling and worldmaking practices by reimagining narratives of power. This chapter turns to Smith’s Afrofuturist young adult novel Orleans (2013) to examine, on the one hand, how it directs its critique at the ways in which intersecting forces of racial, gendered, and environmental oppression produce grief in the novel’s Black female protagonist. On the other hand, and perhaps even more importantly, it interrogates how Orleans foregrounds the radical potential that grief and grieving hold for empowering individuals to contest ecosocial injustice by caring for both inand outgroup others. Grief, Smith tells us, while painful and enduring, can also be a catalyst for imagining and practicing more communal and liberating ways of engaging with the world. Drawing on cognitive psychological research on grief as well as work in (cognitive) narrative theory, this essay argues that there is much to learn from the Black speculative imagination about both the consequences and possibilities of grief in the context of multiple and enduring crises. While Orleans prompts readers to engage with a speculative near-future setting, it simultaneously demands them to register the fictional future’s rootedness in the real-world past and present, in which marginalized communities have long experienced and resisted the uneven exposure to ecosocial harm and its physical and psychological repercussions. First, I will discuss how Orleans juxtaposes the Black female protagonist’s grief with the environmental destruction of the space she is forced to live in, thereby inviting readers to empathize with her grief, to read it as a critique of environmental injustice and, more broadly, to understand the production of grief in the context of environmental racism. Second, I will consider how the novel highlights the protagonist’s marginality as what bell hooks described as a “site of radical possibility, a space of resistance” (1990: 149). Even as the protagonist grapples with the pain of grief, it is precisely the cognitive and emotional disruption caused by enormous loss that opens up oppositional space and moves her to protect others from ecosocial harm. The depiction of the grieving protagonist’s ethics of care therefore centrally informs Orleans’s emphasis on the importance of community as power. 2 Environmental injustice and Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011: 3), Rob Nixon asks: “How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time? ” When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it unveiled the intricate links between spatialized racism and environmental vulnerability with dramatic urgency. On the one hand, the disproportionate consequences suffered by predominantly lower-income and Black communities brought to light the racism that was already baked into New Orleans’s built environment. On the other hand, the negligence that the most severely affected spaces and people experienced in Katrina’s aftermath further emphasized how intersecting axes of discrimination - including race, class, gender, and power - determine the politics and ethics of what Judith Butler has called “grievability”. In Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009: 38), Butler distinguishes between grievable and ungrievable lives: “An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all”. In his psychological account, Richard Gross similarly distinguishes between “grief that is recognised by others as ‘legitimate’ and ‘reasonable’” and “disenfranchised grief ”, which refers to “a situation where a loss is not openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned, or publicly shared” (2016: 3). Throughout American history, grievability has been allocated along racial lines. Racialized politics of grievability, however, not only determine whose grief is worth listening to, but also whose living space is worth saving and thus the ethics of environmental justice. Orleans takes Hurricane Katrina only as a starting point and speculates about how anthropogenic climate change will further decrease the grievability of Black life and Black space, whereby the perspective of the sixteen-year-old Black female protagonist, Fen de la Guerre, is central to the novel’s imaginative 168 Marijana Mikić 1 In Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014: 2), Houser suggests that “contemporary novels and memoirs deploy affect in narratives of sick bodies to bring readers to environmental consciousness”. She argues that by “[u]niting earth and soma through the sickness trope […] ecosickness fiction attests that an array of stories and narrative affects is necessary for apprehending the material and conceptual relays between the embodied individual and large-scale environmental forces” (ibid.: 3-4). Orleans, then, can be defined as an ecosickness narrative that gives readers insight into the experiences of a character, who is part of a disenfranchised community that bears the brunt of the general society’s environmental pollution. depiction of a toxic and violent post-disaster New Orleans in the year 2056. The prologue describes how after a series of increasingly deadly hurricanes between 2005 and 2019, a disease called “Delta Fever” spreads across the U.S. South and “all storm-affected areas of the Gulf Coast region” are quarantined - to protect the rest of the nation from what Heather Houser calls “ecosickness” (2014) - before the senate entirely withdraws governance of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Two fictional legal documents, the 2020 “declaration of quarantine” and the 2025 “declaration of separation”, state that while “the disease runs its course” in the most affected areas, “Man must follow suit in order to protect the inalienable rights of the majority” (Smith 2013: prologue) 1 . The language used in relation to the disease evokes the common spatiotemporal metaphor “grief runs its course”, which, according to Janet B. Ruscher, centers “a time-moving perspective” that implies “waiting for negative affect to pass” (2011: 227). However, the time-moving perspective of American progress has always entailed a blatant disregard for how violence, disease, and grief run their course for excluded others, while a select group of privileged citizens “move forward”. According to Nixon, “environmental slow violence, materializes temporal as well as spatial denial through a literal concretizing of out of sight out of mind” (2011: 20). In Smith’s storyworld, the separation of Orleans (the “New” has long been dropped from the city’s name) from the so-called Outer States of America through the construction of a wall establishes a literal spatial boundary between ungrievable and grievable lives. Elizabeth A. Wheeler points out that the wall is one way in which the “novel makes literal the invisible walls that surround many communities of color” (2020: 131), highlighting how spatial separation protects “(ir)responsible parties not only from environmental risk but from the obligation to care for those trapped inside” (134). Since “everyone left behind seems to be black or mixed race in the postflood world of Orleans” (133), the lack of care signifies a lack of racial/ Black grievability. Orleans primarily critiques the absence of grievability that is entwined with racial subjugation, while it also more implicitly critiques the lack of eco-grievability for nonhuman urban environments. Ecosocial Harm, Grief, and Communal Empowerment in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans 169 Moreover, the narrative’s depiction of a future marked by a systemic denial of Black grievability is rooted in an understanding of racial oppression as cyclical. By disenfranchising Orleans and its Black population - disproportionately subjecting them to physical as well as emotional long-term consequences of environmental change and disaster and denying them access to the care and safety reserved for its white citizens - the government affirms its strategic disregard for Black lives. Like Octavia E. Butler, Smith “exploits the distinctive temporality of extrapolative science fiction in order to capture the novel forms of inequality spawned by global capitalism” (Dubey 2013: 357). In doing so, she encourages an understanding of today’s environmental racism as a continuation of historical forms of systemic grief production. Smith invites readers to engage with her speculative storyworld through the prism of U.S. racial history, but she also defamiliarizes the ways in which inand outgroup categorization takes place. The system of social division in Smith’s fictional Orleans rests centrally on blood as people with different blood types seem to be affected differently by the Delta Fever. Fen herself is O-Positive, which means that the disease does not destroy her blood like that of other carriers who need transfusions to survive. This, in turn, increases her vulnerability of becoming a “blood slave” (Smith 2013: 17). Even though the categorization into blood tribes decreases the spreading, the novel makes clear that the scientists at the “Institute of Post-Separation Studies” - instead of researching a cure for the fever - actively “encourage tribalism in the postapocalyptic society and study its effects” (Wheeler 2020: 132). Fen’s parents belonged to a small group of scientists who had voluntarily moved to Orleans after the separation, hoping to contribute to the fight for ecosocial justice, but severed their ties to the institute after they learned about its real goal of using Orleans and its non-white population as a lab for “study[ing] intergroup relations […] social bias and hate crimes” (Smith 2013: 74). While the differences between the fever’s effects on different people appear to be actually rooted in biology, Smith’s portrayal of the way in which these differences are framed by the researchers also interrogates the historic usage of the “one-drop-rule” as a mechanism of asserting the fiction of race as a biological category. The practices of the research institute in Orleans interrogate the history of racism in science and medicine - evoking the U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis study at Tuskegee - which one of Smith’s characters directly addresses: “It’s like Tuskegee all over again. They never wanted a cure” (2013: 207). Additionally, the novel foregrounds that the social categories of race and class were central to the transformation of New Orleans into Orleans, which entailed cutting off and rendering invisible those who were already disproportionately disempowered 170 Marijana Mikić by ecosocial inequalities. Smith therefore prompts readers to bring their knowl‐ edge of racial hierarchies and scientific as well as environmental racism into their reading of the narrative. Consequently, the protagonist’s grief experiences must be understood in relation to the immediate context of the speculative storyworld as well as real-world contexts of historical and ongoing violence and oppression. 3 Black female grief, empathy, and critique of environmental injustice Orleans aligns the Black female protagonist’s negative emotional experiences with the dysfunction and violence of her environment, thereby inviting readers to empathize with her grief and to read it as a critique of environmental injustice. The first loss, revealed through the use of flashbacks, is that of Fen’s parents, who were killed by blood hunters when she was only nine years old. Their death is a direct result of the fight over clean blood which is “the principal commodity in the toxic economy of Orleans”, in which “people survive by harming themselves and others” (Wheeler 2020: 137). However, the root cause for inter-Orleanian violence is the government’s economic, social, and ethical abandonment of the space and its citizens. In their discussion of key causes of African American grief, Paul C. Rosenblatt and Beverly R. Wallace emphasize that a “shorter life expectancy for African Americans means that proportionately more African Americans than Euro-Americans will not be adults when a parent dies” (2022: 2), which is exactly what Fen experiences as a consequence of environmental racism. When close relationships are suddenly disrupted, individuals are deprived of someone they have always taken for granted as a means of operating in the world. Research on grief, loss, and attachment suggests that this can have “a dramatic impact on that person’s identity and cognitive understanding of the world” (Bonanno et al. 2008: 798) as well as their emotional engagement with others. Katherine Shear and Harry Shair observe that “the set goal for the attachment system is a physically accessible and emotionally responsive caregiver who provides a sense of security that facilitates exploration and learning and minimizes fear” (2005: 257). While grieving individuals may consequently “refrain from becoming attached to others” (257), one “prevalent idea [is] that grief is the process by which one detaches from a lost loved one in order to free up energy to reconnect with a new attachment figure” (260). Following her parents’ death, Fen goes through an intense grief experience when a little girl invites her to join her family: “Something move sideways in my chest, and all of a sudden I start to cry. I can’t make it stop and don’t want to. Like, if I Ecosocial Harm, Grief, and Communal Empowerment in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans 171 try to hold it in this time, I like to drown” (Smith 2013: 88-89). Hearing the word “family” uttered by the other girl makes Fen realize the irreversibility of loss caused by her parents’ death and activates a “deep-seated need to feel connected, to be trusted and loved, and to trust and love in return” (Hutcherson et al. 2008: 720). Fen’s yearning to regain a sense of security and safety prompts her to join the stranger, but her vulnerability also makes her susceptible to exploitative attachment relationships. As the narrative depicts Fen’s entry into the “family” of a woman named Mama Gentille, who “take care of all the little kids, and when we grown, we take care of her” (Smith 2013: 88), it interrogates the racialized and gendered space of the Black female body. In an “old mansion that been a plantation long ago” (89), Mama, a Black woman herself, reinstates and reinvents the gendered and racialized geographies of slavery that assume the Black female body to be “naturally submissive” (McKittrick 2006: 44). The language Smith employs to describe blood slavery explicitly likens it to Black female rape during antebellum slavery and its aftermath: “When he enter me, it be through the skin” (2013: 96). After Fen becomes one of Mama’s profitable commodities, sold to a man who “rapes” her by harvesting her blood, and later also sexually, she burns her body “near to the bone” to make it impossible to get a needle into her skin ever again without killing her (98). This act of self-mutilation, which decreases the profitability of her body and enables a way out of bondage, is rooted in a long tradition of enslaved subjects’ self-harm and suicide in the Black Atlantic and the American South as a form of resistance against violence and extraction. Whereas Fen’s attachment to Mama Gentille produces even more grief, her subsequent relationship with Lydia, the chieftain of the O-Positive tribe she joins, demonstrates how newly formed attachment can also mitigate the effects of trauma and loss. Fen repeatedly emphasizes her deep connection to Lydia who “done saved [her]” (34) after she escaped Mama Gentille’s bondage, and she often expresses her admiration for Lydia who she thinks “could talk the trees into walking if she wanted” (33). After Lydia’s death following childbirth, Fen mobilizes her grief to fulfill her last promise to Lydia; namely, to provide her baby girl, Enola, with “a better life than this” (43). According to Shear and Shair, “continued bonds that are symbolic can be integrated into the bereaved person’s sense of identity […] [when] the deceased is remembered as a role model” (2005: 261). As Fen’s mentor and close attachment relation, Lydia therefore “play[s] an historic role in the emotional life of the bereaved person” (2005: 261). Additionally, Rosenblatt and Wallace’s study reveals that in the case of bereaved African Americans who seek to meet “the standards of the deceased […] relatively often the person whose standards are referred to as being very 172 Marijana Mikić 2 The mothers of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin, Black boys who were killed by white police officers, have used their “grief as a tool of systemic change”—expressed in the form of an open casket funeral for her son, in the case of Till’s mother, and in the formation of the “Circle of Mothers”, an organization that seeks to practice healing through communal empowerment, in the case of Martin’s mother (Meadows-Fernandez 2020). 3 Hazel M. Johnson - often referred to as the mother of environmental justice - powerfully exemplifies the radical potential of Black female environmental thought and practice. Johnson, who lived on the South Side of Chicago, extended her concern about her own family to her entire neighborhood. Krauss notes that “Hazel Johnson’s important is a parental figure but not a parent” (2022: 77). This also applies to Fen’situation since Lydia was a central presence in the protagonist’s life after her parents’ death. Directing her hopes and actions toward generating a way out of Orleans for Enola and thereby carrying out Lydia’s wishes lessens the enduring and painful effects of Fen’s own loss, while eventually also protecting Enola from the pain and suffering that caused her mother’s death. Much like outrage, grief can be revolutionary in the sense that it functions “as an activating force toward social justice goals” (Granek 2014: 66). Such expressions of grief may “range from the personal sphere to the national one, but underlying both is the principle that grief and loss can be a powerful catalyst toward demanding and instituting positive social change” (66). Butler theorizes the relationship between grief, outrage, and social justice: “Our grieving is bound up with outrage, and outrage in the face of injustice or indeed of unbearable loss has enormous political potential” (2009: 39). Black mothers’ public grieving following the death of their sons and daughters at the hands of law enforcement is a pertinent example of how “the grief of ordinary citizens” is used “as a political tool of social change” (Meadows-Fernandez 2020) 2 . Indeed, as Celene Krauss notes, the outraged grief of Black women and mothers has also played a pivotal role in the environmental justice movement: [Black] [w]omen’s reflection on their experience as mothers and protectors of the communities […] led them to uncover the problem of toxic waste and challenge the environmental destruction of their families and communities. Their environmental knowledge, derived from mothering under conditions of racial injustice, became a resource of resistance in their political challenge. (2009: 66) While Smith’s Fen is not a mother herself, she represents what Patricia Hill Collins has termed “other mothers”. Collins suggests that “[i]n many African American communities these women-centered networks of community-based child care have extended beyond the boundaries of biologically related individ‐ uals to include ‘fictive kin’” (2000: 179) 3 . It is important to note that fictive Ecosocial Harm, Grief, and Communal Empowerment in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans 173 concern about her children and others in her neighborhood led to her leadership role as a ‘community mother’ […] [who] reflect[s] the nonbiological concepts of mothering immanent in the African American community as resources of survival” (2009: 71). kinship is rooted in a traumatic history of family separation, but it is equally important to recognize this alternative form of attachment as an embodiment of Black women’s radical resistance and their transformation of pain into possibility. In her 2018 article The Black feminist spatial imagination and an intersectional environmental justice, Kishi Animashaun Ducre foregrounds that Black women in environmentally degraded environments must be seen “not simply as victims, but as resilient agents that thrive and actively engage in placemaking despite multiple challenges” (33). As Orleans demonstrates, Black speculative eco-fiction can be a powerful tool for representing “Black women as critical agents in environmental justice” (Ducre 2018: 22). Not only does Smith’s storyworld depict how the protagonist’s grief impels her other mothering, but it also highlights her formation of an alliance of care with a community outsider who aids her in the pursuit of taking Enola across the wall. 4 Grief as empowerment to care: environmental justice ethics across ingroup-outgroup boundaries The first four chapters of Smith’s Orleans are focalized through the protagoni‐ st’s perspective, whereupon the novel continuously switches back and forth between Fen’s first-person, present-tense narration and a third-person, pasttense account by Daniel, a scientist from the Outer States who illegally crosses the wall into Orleans in the hope of finding a cure for the Delta Fever. Even as the novel does not explicitly pronounce the ingroup-outgroup difference between Fen and Daniel as racial, a consideration of textual cues and narrative strategies suggests that Smith nonetheless prompts readers to construct Daniel as white. First, Daniel’s class and/ or racial privilege is immediately established through the so-called encounter suit that he wears and that shields him from the ecorisk and -sickness to which Fen is continuously exposed. Moreover, the novel contrasts the ‘standard’ English in Daniel’s chapters with the African American Vernacular English prevalent in the chapters focalized through Fen. Most importantly, Smith’s narration of Daniel strategically taps into the tendency to read characters as white in the absence of explicit racial and/ or ethnic markers. In order to deconstruct notions of white normativity and superiority, Smith nudges readers into assuming a white identity for the racially unmarked Daniel, only to then establish the character as lacking competence—especially environmental knowledge and survival skills. 174 Marijana Mikić 4 See Donahue’s “Focalization, Ethics, and Cosmopolitanism in James Welch’s ‘Fools Crow’” (2014) and Chapter 1 in his Contemporary Native Fiction (2019a). Not insignificantly, this subversion is also enacted on the level of narrative form. Smith mobilizes the alleged objectivity of third-person narrative situa‐ tions, an objectivity often associated with the assumed neutrality of whiteness itself, only to subvert it. James J. Donahue (2019a) has insightfully written about how narrative voice itself can be used for the purpose of racial critique. In his analysis of Percival Everett’s 1994 novel God’s Country, he argues that Everett’s choice of telling a story about a Black character through the perspective of a white, first-person narrator is central to his satirical exposure of the racism that is inherent in the genre of the Western. Donahue notes that “just as male narrators were once believed to possess objectivity due to sexist beliefs about female irrationality, racist notions of minoritarian irrationality […] might lead many readers to believe that white narrators possess a greater degree of rational objectivity” (2019a: 77). This also applies to third-person narrative situations whose “distancing qualities” (83) may even more strongly suggest the narrator’s objective authority. Smith’s own usage of a third-person perspective to represent how Daniel cannot measure up to the heroic constructions of whiteness and maleness that are typically promulgated in mainstream science fiction narratives, then, might be read as a critique of science fiction as another “vehicle for the narrative transmission of American racist self-definition” (84). Not only does Orleans withhold authority from Daniel until he proves his “merit”, but as the narrative moves back and forth between Daniel and Fen’s chapters, his lack of competence only serves to accentuate the Black female protagonist’s aptitude and far superior understanding of the environment. The use of shifting focalization, even more importantly, reveals how Daniel and Fen develop a relationship across ingroup-outgroup boundaries. Again, Donahue’s (2019b) critical race narratological work is instructive. In his analysis of James Welch’s Fools Crow (1986), Donahue asserts that the way in which the novel uses focalization to espouse cosmopolitanism “highlights the ethical work of interracial communication” (2019b: 1) 4 . In Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (2017), Alexa Weik von Mossner makes a similar argument with a specific focus on the environmental ethics of form that are especially important for my purposes here. Drawing on Suzanne Keen’s (2006) concept of authorial strategic empathy, Weik von Mossner considers how environmental justice narratives by ethnic American writers “use readers’ empathy strategically to make a moral argument about people who have been Ecosocial Harm, Grief, and Communal Empowerment in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans 175 wronged” (2017: 78). She identifies the centrality of narrative perspective for readers’ empathic engagement with environmental concerns: There are at least two ways in which authors can employ strategic empathizing to help readers to imaginatively experience the situation of a victim of injustice: They can align them with the victim himself—what I have called the insider perspective—or with someone who isn’t directly affected but learns to care for the victim and his situation—this I have called the outsider perspective. (Weik von Mossner 2017: 83) Weik von Mossner reads Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) as a novel which provides readers with an insider perspective on envi‐ ronmental injustice, and Percival Everett’s Watershed (1996) as one that offers an outsider perspective. I want to suggest that by using shifting focalization, Smith’s Orleans combines both perspectives, inviting readers to empathically engage with a Black female insider protagonist as well as a white, male outsider character who gradually starts caring for Fen and Enola. Crucially, the narration foregrounds how Daniel and Fen’s formation of an alliance of care across ingroup-outgroup boundaries functions both as a mode for coping with their own enduring feelings of grief as well as a mode for protecting Enola from future grief experiences. Like in Fen’s case, personal loss drives Daniel’s actions. After his brother died of Delta Fever - likely one of the fever’s casualties in the Outer States before the construction of the quarantine wall - he dedicated himself to creating a cure. However, Daniel bioengineered a vaccine that eradicates both the disease and its host. Because he is not ready to give up, directing his hopes and goals toward “unlock[ing] the doorway to a cure”, he does not destroy it but takes it with him, when he “break[s] through the quarantine, into Orleans” (Smith 2013: 47) to “collect environmental samples” (73). Much like the scientists at the research institute, Daniel approaches Orleans as a lab. The irresponsibility of bringing the deadly vials into Orleans only strikes him when he realizes that the city was not “a necropolis” (109) as he had assumed prior to his mission, but “very much alive” (111). The narrative that exists outside of Orleans about Orleans once again confirms the disregard for environmentally sacrificed non-white geographies and populations. After Fen learns that he not only brought his vaccine vials, but also lost them in the ruins of Orleans in an unlucky accident (they remain unbroken and he is unable to retrieve them, which makes it unlikely that anyone else will), she calls him out on it: “You come into my town, my home, with this mess and be looking to do Lord knows what” (264). By associating Daniel with a longstanding tradition of white male discovery that is focused on accumulating power and extracting resources without regard for the consequences for human 176 Marijana Mikić 5 See Martin L. Hoffman’s Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice (2000) and Jesse Prinz’s “Is Empathy Necessary for Morality? ” (2011). and nonhuman life, Fen critiques white Western practices of colonization and likely also problematizes readers’ empathy with Daniel. Even as Daniel’s irresponsibility disinvites empathy, by aligning readers not only with Fen’s but also with Daniel’s perspective, the novel emphasizes that it is not callousness that guides his behavior. His personal history and grief bring him to Orleans, but he gradually becomes invested in the plight of the environmentally wronged. When a character in the novel points out that Orleans has a “fragile ecosystem”, but one that “is healing itself ” despite its pronounced death and the U.S. government’s disregard, Fen takes note of Daniel’s guilt: “‘No thanks to me,’ Daniel say bitterly, and I hear his guilt. Good. Guilt be the start of knowing right from wrong, Daddy used to say. But that all it be. A start” (265). As Weik von Mossner, drawing on psychological research, notes, “feelings of guilt and the related empathetic distress can be tremendous drivers of prosocial action” (2017: 91) 5 . Daniel’s guilt and his attachment to Fen and Enola operate in connection to his own grief, as the image of “Enola’s little face, so delicate and tender” (Smith 2013: 291) brings Daniel’s continued bond with his brother into focus. In parallel to the protagonist’s motivations, protecting Enola is a way of making a lost loved one live on not only in his memories but also through his actions. Whereas Daniel’s grieving alliance of care with Fen inspires him to help, his storyline also serves to emphasize Fen’s ingenuity. Wheeler notes that “Fen seems miraculous to Daniel, and Daniel seems helpless to Fen because she knows survival strategies he never had to learn” (2020: 143). Writing about Black female geographic experience, McKittrick asserts that “the ongoing geographic struggle of and by black women is not simply indicative of the adverse effects of geographic domination, but that geography is entwined with strategic and meaningful languages, acts, expressions, and experiences” (2006: xxxi). The same forces of domination that relegate Black women to the margins also provide them with important forms of knowledge. Fen’s environmental knowledge and her survival skills act as a reminder to both Daniel and readers that, as Black feminist theorist Chelsea M. Frazier points out, “[b]lack women are not, and have never been, passive victims of environmental degradation”, which is central to Black feminist ecological thought (2022: 316). Indeed, Smith’s Orleans highlights how her Black female protagonist’s emotional pain - the grief caused by intersecting forces of racial, gendered, and environmental oppression - functions as a resource for envisaging alternative worldmaking possibilities. Ecosocial Harm, Grief, and Communal Empowerment in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans 177 Fen exploits the revolutionary power of her own grief in order to protect Enola from the consequences (both physical and psychological) of being unjustly trapped in an environmentally hazardous space. Combining a speculative and environmental imaginary, Smith’s storyworld counters the unjust disregard of Black female ecological perspectives in both science fiction and environmental discourse. In countless science fiction novels, Daniel would have been the white male hero, ingenious and adept at survival. Orleans, though, repeatedly demonstrates his incapability, thereby “remind[ing] readers that such notions of racial superiority were always constructions, and not based on merit” (Donahue 2019b: 84). To survive, Daniel, in fact, needs to trust the protagonist and rely on her knowledge of the world, since as Fen herself puts it, “[h]e ain’t got no tribe, no decent map, and nothing but me” (Smith 2013: 174). Because Daniel also “done put his neck out for me like nobody but Lydia’d ever do” (247), a relationship of mutual care develops between them. The two bereaved characters find trust in each other, and they use their personal grief as a catalyst to protect Enola from eco-risk and -sickness. When they finally reach the wall, Fen distracts the guards by tucking Daniel’s coat into her arms to make it look like she is carrying a baby, as Daniel takes Enola into the Outer States. The plan works, but Fen’s assumption that “[t]hey won’t shoot a woman carrying a baby” (320) proves to be wrong, as the novel reveals through Daniel’s perspective: “A shot rang out. The bundle fell from her hands” (323). Wheeler points out that the “slow violence of toxic water leads to sudden death from a gun […] While an act of heroism, Fen’s death also embodies a toxic economy in which care of others requires hurting oneself ” (2020: 140). Orleans not only negotiates the ongoing disregard of Black lives in the context of environmental racism, but it reveals that even when ingroup-outgroup alliances are successfully formed in the pursuit of justice, Black subjects still bear the brunt of suffering and sacrifice. As the narrative demands readers to come to terms with the injustice of the Black female protagonist’s death, it urges them to direct their moral indignation toward practices of environmental injustice that continue to (re)produce the ungrievability of non-white individuals, communities, and their living spaces. 5 Conclusion Orleans, much like other environmentally concerned Afrofuturist storyworlds, such as N.K. Jemisin’s triple Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth trilogy (2015- 2017), interrogates both the repercussions and empowering potential of grief. Black speculation, science fiction, and fantasy narratives can therefore be valuable sources for examining how grief operates in the context of social and 178 Marijana Mikić environmental injustice, while also helping us to think about grief in more systemic and collective terms. As Orleans makes clear, grief experiences can push individuals to not only find ways of ameliorating their own enduring pain, but empower them also to care for others who are unevenly subjected to grieftriggering events as a result of systemic violence. References Bonanno, G. A., L. Goorin and K. G. Coifman. (2008). Sadness and grief. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones and L. Feldman Barrett (eds.), Handbook of Emotions. 3 rd ed., New York: Guilford Press, 797-810. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Collins, P. H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Donahue, J. J. (2014). Focalization, ethics, and cosmopolitanism in James Welch’s “Fools Crow”. Journal of Narrative Theory, 44 (1), 54-80. Donahue, J. J. (2019a). Voicing his objections: Narrative voice as racial critique in Percival Everett’s God’s Country. African American Review, 52 (1), 75-86. Donahue, J. J. (2019b). 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Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Meadows-Fernandez, R. A. (2020). The unbearable grief of Black mothers. Vox, May 28. Available at: https: / / www.vox.com/ first-person/ 2020/ 5/ 28/ 21272380/ black-mothers-g rief-sadness-covid-19 (accessed: 29 August 2022). Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Prinz, J. (2011). Is empathy necessary for morality? In A. Coplan and P. Goldie (ed.), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 211-229. Rosenblatt, P. C. and B. R. Wallace. (2022). African American Grief. New York: Routledge. Ruscher, J. B. (2011). Moving forward: The effect of spatiotemporal metaphors on perceptions about grief. Social Psychology, 42 (3), 225-230. Shear, K. and H. Shair. (2005). Attachment, loss, and complicated grief. Developmental Psychobiology, 47 (3), 253-267. Smith, S. L. (2013). Orleans. New York: Penguin. Viramontes, H. M. (1995). Under the Feet of Jesus. New York: Plume. Weik von Mossner, A. (2017). Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Welch, J. (1986). Fools Crow. New York: Penguin Books. Wheeler, E. A. (2020). Runoff: Afroaquanauts in landscapes of sacrifice. In I. Lavender III and L. Yaszek (eds.), Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 128-148. 180 Marijana Mikić Feeling for Others: Environmental Justice, Emotion, and Moral Imagination in Lina Hogan’s Solar Storms Carina Rasse 1 Introduction “What weighs thirty tons, has as much radiation as 200 Hiroshima bombs, and is projected to pass within a half-mile of your home? The answer”, asserts Winona LaDuke, environmental activist and scholar, “is a canister of highlevel radioactive waste, travelling from one of 109 aging U.S. nuclear power plants to Yucca Mountain, Nevada - the proposed final resting place for America’s most deadly garbage” (2002: 25). Yucca Mountain has been selected as the location for disposal of high-level nuclear waste from US commercial nuclear power reactors, and the native people who lost their land to the federal government are unable to combat it. For more than forty years, Western Shoshone tribes have been victims to environmental pollution and cultural genocide. Their lands have been destroyed by “hundreds of craters and tunnels that are no more than unsupervised nuclear waste dumps”, and the exposure to radioactive gases has caused “unusual animal deaths, human hair loss, the soil in the area turning a dark black color, along with increases of cancer and birth defects” (Council 2013). Politically weak, socially and economically isolated, the Shoshone people are engaging in active protests to protect their land and their community from US oppression and abuses. Struggles like the one fought by the Shoshone community may be said to have contributed to what we today recognize as an environmental justice movement, where activists “call attention to the ways disparate distribution of wealth and power leads to correlative social upheaval and”, as Joni Adamson et al. (2002: 5) put it, “the unequal distribution of environmental degradation and/ or toxicity”. The aim of such activists is to spread the notion of an environment equally shared by all people and justice integrated in all our doings. No community should be dumped on just because it is poor or a community of color as it has happened countless times throughout American history and is still happening now. Instead, it has to be made sure that every individual has the right to equal protection of the environment, which is defined as the place where we “live, work, and play” (Bullard 2002) and of health, employment, education, housing, civil rights laws. Over the past four decades the American environmental justice movement has been trying to address inequities and imbalances. It has, as Robert Bullard, known as the father of environmental justice, once claimed in an interview, “basically redefined what environmentalism is all about” (2002: 61). While mainstream middle-class white environmentalists predominately deal with people’s impact upon the environment, and have, for the most part, failed to include the voices of ethnic minorities, people of color, indigenous persons, and low-income communities, environmental justice advocates are “concerned with the impact of an unhealthy environment thrust upon a collective body of life, both human and non-human” (Rasmussen 2004: np). These concerns have also found their way into university departments, informing the work of scholars in fields such as sociology, political theory, critical race studies, and environmental literary and cultural criticism. Environmental literary and cultural criticism, often referred to as ecocriti‐ cism, emerged with the aim of turning the attention of literary and cultural studies toward the environmental crisis and uniting scholars showing interest in the relationship between cultural texts, humans, and the environment. In 1962 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a non-fiction narrative that displays the dangers of pesticide exposure, had first introduced a large American readership to the concept of ecology. Six years later the publication of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness has set the first parameters for the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. Firstwave scholarship of the early 1990s focused almost exclusively on traditional nature writing and the wilderness experience, and held that the proper response of environmental criticism should be to help protect the natural environment from the depredations of human culture. Second-wave scholarship, by contrast, has shown greater interest in literatures pertaining to the metropolis and industrialization. Well-known exemplars of this phase include Laurence Coupe’s collection The Green Studies Reader (2000) or Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace’s Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (2001). These works have favored a sociocentric approach and became in many aspects a very broad field. Questions of race and class, however, as they have been posed by environmental justice scholars, were rarely raised at this point. Only in the late 20 th century ecocriticism has begun to study literary and cultural representations of social, political, and environmental justice issues that affect planet earth and all people, regardless of class, race, or ethnicity. Scholars have 182 Carina Rasse borrowed methodologies and approaches from a range of fields, including the social and the natural sciences. The current study builds on previous works that combine ecocritical ap‐ proaches with theories from psychology, philosophy, narratology, evolutionary theory and cognitive neuroscience to go beyond the exploration of humannature interactions and their representations in works of fiction (e.g., Easterlin 2012; James 2015; Weik von Mossner 2017). A combination of these approaches invites researchers to examine the interplay between readers and literary nar‐ ratives, suggesting that stories may have emotional impacts on their audiences. To explore the relationship between fiction, feelings, and the motivation for justice, the current study presents close-readings of Linda Hogan’s novel Solar Storms (1995). This novel fictionalizes the history of Cree and Inuit resistance to the Canadian government’s massive hydroelectric project at James Bay in the 1970s. Following Angel’s story, a young mixed-blood Cree and Inuit woman, readers are invited to accompany the girl on her search for self-healing and salvation, to empathize with her feelings of fear, anger, and helplessness, and to later root for her when she joins her community in a violent struggle for environmental justice. While Solar Storms is widely recognized as a powerful narrative of environmental (in)justice, the novel has not yet been studied from a cognitive-ecocritical perspective with a focus on readers’ engagements with the story characters. This chapter aims to fill that gap. Building upon the theory of embodied simulation, it will make a theoretical argument about how Hogan’s Solar Storms may engage its readers cognitively as well as emotionally and calls attention to the injustices imposed on minority groups and people of color. The theory of the mind being embodied suggests that “we understand language by simulating in our minds what it would be like to experience the things that language describes” (Bergen 2012: 13). Even if people are not engaging in overt action, they automatically employ their bodily resources to create an interpretation of a given text or speech sample (e.g., Colston 2019; Gallese 2016; Gibbs 2006; Rasse 2022). Various studies have shown that readers may simulate actions, intentions, feelings, and emotions of fictional characters which, in turn, may enhance their empathetic feelings towards these characters (Gallese and Wojciehowski 2011). Such findings may give an explanation for why readers often find fictional stories to be so enjoyable, powerful and engaging. The main portion of this article will be divided into three parts, following the structure of Solar Storms. Each part will be dedicated to close-readings and discussions of selected passages of Hogan’s novel. The first part of the novel displays Angel, the main character, as a broken girl full of anger and Feeling for Others 183 hopelessness. I will illustrate that Hogan’s mode of narration encourages readers to experience sympathetic concern for the protagonist who, as a child, was abused and abandoned by her mother. In the second part of the novel Angel gradually learns to cope with her traumatic experiences as she understands that the scars on her face and body not only mirror the crimes of her mother, but also, in broader sense, the social and environmental injustices imposed on the people of her community. Here, I will suggest that readers are invited to share Angel’s feelings of compassion and concern for her community as well as her motivation to preserve the natural environment. In the third part of the novel Angel joins her relatives on a dangerous canoe journey to seek her mother and join the native peoples’ resistance to the James Bay hydroelectric project. I suggest that readers are invited to share the young woman’s hope that resistance and concerted action can preserve Native Americans and their interconnection to the natural world despite all the onslaughts. - 1.1 Feeling the Pain: First-Person Narratives and Readers’ Ability to Embody Characters’ Emotions, Actions, and Sensations Linda Hogan was born on July 17, 1947, in Denver, Colorado, to Charles Colbert Henderson, a Chickasaw, and Cleona Bower Henderson, a descendant of Nebraska Territory Settlers. Her heritage gave her access to both worlds; that of the dominant Euro-American culture as well as the more marginalized realm of American Indian culture. However, it also gave her the feeling of not truly belonging to either of these cultures. “As a light-skinned Indian person I am seen as a person of betweens, as a person of divided directions” (1995b: 445), she recounts. With the growing awareness of the injustices imposed on minorities, on “the light ones, the mixed ones or the dark ones”, as Hogan says, she began “a fight toward growth and integrity” (443). These topics are also central to Solar Storms. Hogan starts her novel with a prologue, giving voice to Angel, who, in just three lines, prepares her readers for Agnes’s flashback, in which she describes the mourning feast Bush had given years before to express her grief at losing Angel. What becomes immediately apparent is that Bush suffered immensely when Angel was taken away from her. What may leave readers puzzled, however, is that it is sometimes unclear whom Agnes is addressing in her narration, as the following scene displays: Your mother entered my dreaming once, not floating upward that way, but crashing through, the way deer break through eyes […]. Bush, the wife of your grandpa, had struggled with your mother’s cold world. She tried to protect you from her, to protect you from the violence that was your mother. (Hogan 1995: 12-13) 184 Carina Rasse 1 Sympathy is feeling for somebody; it is feelings of concern about the welfare of others, while empathy - feeling with somebody - describes the ability to appreciate the emotions and feelings of others with minimal distinction between self and other (Decety and Michalska 2010). Who is meant by ‘you’? , readers might ask themselves. Is Agnes talking to a spirit? Angel must be alive, though, as she opens the narrative by telling the reader that the following lines represent the words she remembers. Catherine Kunce argues that “a prologue serves in part to situate a play’s action between past and future. But Solar Storms’s prologue provokes more questions than answers” (2009: 52). While it is reasonable to claim that the purpose of the prologue is to encourage readers to “keep turning pages as they struggle to solve the mystery” (Kunce 2009: 55), I think there is more than pure curiosity to find out who said what to whom, and who, if anyone, has died, that keeps readers going. My assumption is that Hogan, from the very beginning of her novel, encourages her readers to strongly feel for and with the protagonists, which, in turn, makes them eagerly stay with the characters till they have reached the end of the book, or maybe even beyond that. The fact that readers hear the voice of Angel before they move to Agnes’s recount of her personal memories allows them to ‘stay with’ Angel and judge, from her perspective, the experiences Agnes recounts. This enables readers to act as a “judicious spectator” (Nussbaum 1995), who is emotionally involved but keeps a certain distance from the action and from the interaction of the involved parties. When readers, for instance, learn from Agnes that Bush “tried to protect [Angel] from the violence that was [her] mother” (Hogan 1995a: 13), they will, most likely, sympathize with Bush 1 . They might feel for the woman when they learn how much she suffered when Angel was taken away from her. At this stage, though, they probably not yet empathize with her. This most likely changes in the last part of the Prologue in which Agnes describes her own feelings: “[Bush] handed me my gloves and hat. I left unwillingly. I felt terrible leaving her in all that emptiness. I guess it was her sadness already come over me. I wanted to cry […]” (18). Despite the fact that readers actually stay - with Angel - outside of the actual events, they will most likely, unconsciously experience feelings of empathy as Hogan’s depiction of the character’s emotions evokes processes of embodied simulation. This effect gets reinforced when - in the first chapter - the story moves back in time to the moment Angel returns to her ancestors, and readers are invited to share Angel’s first-hand experiences of her journey towards self-healing and wholeness. The first picture readers get from Angel when she arrives at her homeland - a fictional place called Adam’s Rib, located in Cree and Inuit people territory near Feeling for Others 185 the border between United States and Canada - is her depiction of the natural environment. “It was the north country”, she recounts, “the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water so that the maps showed places both bound and, if you knew the way in, boundless” (Hogan 1995a: 21). While she observes the natural landscape, Angel immediately realizes that the environment mirrors human action. Angel will only understand later that white Americans’ destruction of the natural world, the settlers’ exploitation of the land, the tribes, and the animals, is very similar to her own traumatic history. At the beginning of her journey Angel is reserved like her mother and grandmother. She is constantly trying to hide her scars behind her hair and her feelings behind words that communicate strength and elusiveness. The more she gets involved in her family’s culture and tradition, however, the easier it becomes for her to reflect on the mistreatment her people suffered at the hands of white people and to recognize the implied injustice. As a result, she is overrun by emotions. At a family feast Frenchie, who lives at Adam’s Rib, asks Angel the “forbidden question” (Hogan 1995a: 51); she wants to know what happened to her face. “No one had asked it in a long time”, thinks Angel. “I had hit people for asking that question when I was younger” (51). Angel tries to ignore it, her heart racing and her hand shaking, when she suddenly cuts her finger, “a deep bite off the tip” (52). Agnes jumps from her seat and drags Angel to the bathroom, where the girl breaks down: I nearly collapsed against [Agnes], as if the cut had been deeper, but it was the words that had hurt me, not the knife. Agnes knew it. She opened the medicine cabinet and took out gauze and adhesive tape and when I smelled that odor, something inside me began to move around, the memory of wounds, the days and weeks of hospital, the bandages across my face, the surgeries […]. I felt weak, my chest tight. I saw myself in the mirror, and suddenly, without warning, I hit the mirror with my hand, hit the face of myself, horrified even as I did it by my own action […]. Glass shattered down into the sink and broken pieces spread across the floor. I heard my voice yelling “Damn it! ” and it was me, my own voice, raging and hurt. (Hogan 1995a: 52) This passage marks one of the strongest moments of the first part of Hogan’s novel, not only on the level of character-to-character interaction but also on the level of text-to-reader interaction. Following Angel’s very personal recount of her own breakdown, readers are encouraged to go beyond their sympathetic feelings and share the character’s emotions by simulating what Angel is experiencing. Readers, most likely, will not only be moved by the girl’s verbal expression of anger and sorrow, but also empathize with her when they simulate the strong physical components of those emotions as Angel 186 Carina Rasse experiences them. The following section of this essay will take a step further and suggest that Solar Storms not only invites readers to feel along with the protagonist’s very personal experiences, but also encourages them to care about the larger history of Angel’s community. - 1.2 Broken Bodies and Embodied Histories: The Interconnectedness Between Parental Abuse and Environmental Injustices When the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that the protagonist’s fates reflect the author’s concern for issues of environmental injustices. For a long time, we learn, Angel’s scars “had no memories” (Hogan 1995a: 34). She knew that they were from her mother, but there was no one who could give her any reason, any justification for the physical wounds on her face and body. Only when she re-establishes the bond between her and her ancestors she gradually comes to understand that her mother’s behavior, as Matthew Cella puts it, “is a manifestation of a larger cycle of personal, cultural, and ecological exploitation and violence perpetrated by the Euro-American settlers who colonized the Boundary Waters region” (2013: 859). For Hogan, writing about the environment is a deeply self-reflective act. In an interview she notes that “people who write about wilderness and the environment are going away from themselves to do it. They don’t look at the inner wilderness and what motivates people to be destructive. I think everything is connected, that I’m part of the destruction; we all are. Investigating why we’re sometimes apathetic is probably the best work we could do” (1995b: 192). Writing fiction that displays the consequences of human-made destruction of the natural environment on the psychological lives of Native peoples, Hogan urges her readers to reflect on their own attitudes and behaviors, and to recognize that all too often they show too little compassion. In Solar Storms, Hogan creates characters who embody the social and environmental injustices imposed on their community. With the growing acceptance of her body Angel feels reinforced to face the truth of both her personal and communal destinies. “I felt free of something I couldn’t name” (Hogan 1995a: 54), recounts Angel when she thinks back to the family feast, to the day she lost control of herself but grew from that experience. “What Angel learns about the complex origins of her mother’s violence”, explains Cella, “imbues her wound with a deeper historical significance, as she comes to understand that her mother’s behavior is a manifestation of a larger cycle of personal, cultural, and ecological exploitation and violence perpetrated by the Euro-American settlers who colonized the Boundary Waters region” (2013: 589). Angel now clearly sees the interconnectedness between humans, Feeling for Others 187 animals and the environmental landscapes. “I began to feel that if we had no separate worlds for inside and out and there were no boundaries between them, no walls, no skin, you would see me” (Hogan 1995a: 54). As in the Prologue, Angel addresses her readers directly, asking them to reflect on their own roles in the destruction of the natural world and the people who inhabit these places. “What would meet your eyes”, she continues, “would not be the mask of what had happened to me, not the evidence of violence, not even how I closed the rooms to the doors of anger and fear. You would see how I am like the night sky with its stars that fall through time and space and arrive here as wolves and fish and people, all of us fed by them” (54). Angel calls upon the reader to think, feel, and experience with her as she recounts her growing awareness of the injustices imposed on her and her community. Before Angel goes with her grandmothers on the canoe trip to Fur Island to search for her mother and to join the native peoples’ resistance to the James Bay hydroelectric project, she tells her readers that she “gave up on the pieces of mirror” (Hogan 1995a: 85). Angel no longer wants her traumatic past to dominate her life, and day after day she feels how she “grows strong, her hands rough, her arms filled out. It happened gradually”, the girl recounts. “I don’t know how it is that people change, or what is required, or how it moves. I know only what it feels like to change; it’s in the body, in the stomach, in the heart” (89). Hogan not just simply names the character’s state of being, claiming, for instance, that Angel now feels stronger than she did before the instance with the mirror. What she does, instead, is to offer her readers a vivid description of Angel’s body that has changed over the weeks she spent with her ancestors. The vivid description can, in turn, awake bodily memories in readers’ minds. Hogan invites readers to share the experiences of her first-person narrator and to imagine what it feels like to grow stronger. Through the parallel structure of Angel’s personal transformation and her engagement in her people’s struggle against the hydroelectric power project, Hogan depicts her narrator’s growing awareness of the injustices imposed on her community and their traumatic psychological outfall. Already at the beginning of the novel readers learn from the recount of a tribal elder about the fatal consequences dam buildings have had on the native people as well on the fragile ecosystem on which they depend: In the first flooding, the government and the hydroelectric cooperation had killed many thousands of caribou and flooded land the people lived in and revered. Overnight many of the old ones were forced to move. Dams were already going in. These men’s people had lived there forever, for more than ten thousand years, and had 188 Carina Rasse been sustained by these lands that were now being called empty and useless. (Hogan 1995a: 57-58) As the narrative proceeds, Bush serves as the main source of informing Angel - and the readers - about the incidents that marked the girl’s and the Cree peoples’ lives. Following Angel’s recount of Bush stories, we travel back in time and are once more urged to see that the native peoples’, Angel’s and Hannah’s “beginnings were intricately bound up in the history of the land” (96). Native people, especially women, were exploited; abused by white men, forced to eat the poisoned meat of wolves and foxes as the colonialists had destroyed all their sources of life. The bodies of Native women, as Desiree Hellegers notes in her essay, “bear the marks of that long legacy of patriarchal violence, inscribed as they are with the marks of their rapists and batterers” (2015: 9). And these traumatic personal and communal histories, as Hogan displays through Loretta and Hannah, lead to self-destruction and child abuse. Hannah, for example, disfigured her child, left Angel behind as mentally and psychologically impaired, ready to be adopted. When Native children were adopted into white families, however, their nightmares continued, as Angel convincingly displays: The social workers were unable to do what they should have done. But what was there to fight, she said: a caseworker with an office full of abused and neglected children she’s picked up late at night, a locked file cabinet, lost papers, a hierarchy of administrators and secretaries? It was systems we ended up fighting. But it went even farther back than that, to houses of law with their unkept treaties, to the broken connections of people to the world and its many gods. (Hogan 1995a: 96) Ultimately, Angel is the embodiment of the horrors of colonial history; of Native orphans that, during deliberate campaigns, were forcefully taken from their families and put into white foster homes. However, the girl also, as Elisabeth Kella notes, “is presented as a turning point in a long history of environmental exploitation, sexual victimization, and internalized self-hatred” (2011: 105) as she gradually learns to claim her difficult past. - 1.3 Reconnection, Reconciliation, and Resistance: A Step Towards Environmental Justice In the last section of the novel the struggle against environmental justice takes on new force. Angel has found the source of her wounds and succeeded in combating her traumatic memories that have, for many years, dominated her life. This, in turn, helps her to reconcile with her mother. The reconciliation has strongly been influenced by Bush’s effort to encourage Angel to feel compassion Feeling for Others 189 for Hannah. As mentioned earlier, several pages of Hogan’s novel are dedicated to the depiction of Agnes’s, Dora Rouge’s, or - as in this case - Bush’s memories. In Chapter 8 of the novel readers follow Bush’s first-hand experience of Angel’s “beginnings” and learn that Bush encourages Angel to sympathize with Hannah. She, for instance, recounts that Hannah’s “mind and heart had nothing to offer. It had already abandoned you [Angel]” (Hogan 1995a: 110). With these words, Bush tries to give Angel to understand that Hannah was not capable of bringing up a child because she had been a victim herself and is still suffering from the devastating experiences of being abused and abandoned. The disruption of Hannah’s spirit, which was caused by the deeds of White Americans, is the reason for Angel’s scarred face. In Chapter 9, when the story again is told from Angel’s perspective, readers realize that the girl indeed shows compassion and understanding and is able to forgive her mother. She tells her readers that “a person can’t blame the wind for how it blows and Hannah was like that. She [Bush] wanted me to know that what possessed my mother was a force as real as wind, as strong as ice, as common as winter” (1995a: 115), and encourages them to sympathize with Hannah as well. Neuroscientist Jean Decety and Keith Yoder explain that “in order to feel compassion with somebody’s suffering, you first need to understand that the other is suffering” (2016: 6). And this, exactly, is what Angel does. She realizes that like the entire tribe and their lands they are victims of an oppressive dominant culture. Angel’s feelings of hatred, fear and despair, which, for years, she has associated with her mother, gradually diminish. “It came to me”, says Angel, “that I was all Hannah had. Not in the way of love. Not to care about. But I was what she could use to barter a place in the world” (Hogan 1995a: 124). With this growing sense of understanding, Angel feels ready to accompany Bush, Agnes and Dora Rouge on the journey to the land of the Fat Eaters to meet her mother, and to join the Cree and Inuit struggle against the James Bay hydroelectric development. Angel takes up the quest towards self-healing and wholeness which, ulti‐ mately, will give her the power to resist against the exploitation by white Americans. More than forty pages of Solar Storms invite readers to accompany the women on their journey through land and waters of Canada and Minnesota. The pace of reading slows down as images of the natural landscape emerge in readers’ imagination while they follow the black dots on a white page. “The world was a color of copper”, remembers Angel, “a flood of sun arrived from the east, and a thick mist rose up from black earth […]. Inside the clean water we passed over, rocks looked only a few inches away. Birds swam across lakes. It was all one thing” (Hogan 1995a: 177). Passages like Hogan’s depiction of the 190 Carina Rasse natural environment encourage readers to simulate the characters’ experiences themselves. “My canoe went into the water first”, says Angel when she is thinking back to the dangerous path the women took to reach the land of the Fat Eaters. “My arms shook as I held in, the spray hitting at my face as I watched Bush lift Dora Rouge and, kneedeep in water, carry the old woman toward the rocking canoe. I was soaked to the skin already and shivering and the strong current pushed against my legs even where it was shallow” (Hogan 1995a: 194). Following these lines, readers are encouraged to adopt Angel’s first-person visual and sensorimotor experience so closely as to see, in front of their eyes, a picture of how Bush lifts Dora Rouge into the canoe, or to feel the wet clothes on their skin, or to share her emotions when Angel confesses that her “heart beat with fear” (194). Like at the beginning of the novel, readers see that Hogan’s depiction of the environment often mirrors the state of being of the characters. It also, however, informs readers about the strong bond between the indigenous peoples and the natural world. As the narrative proceeds, readers learn that Angel’s reconnection with her Native land helps the girl to overcome her traumatic experiences, and empowers her to fight for the preservation of the landscape, the rivers, the flowers, as they are the source of their all existence. “Now our arms were strong and we were articulate in the language of land, water, animal, even in the harder language of one another. I’d entered waters and swamps, been changed by them”, recounts Angel (1995a: 193). “For me it was as if there had been no years in school learning numbers, no fights, no families who wouldn’t keep me. Gone were the times my hands were tied down so I wouldn’t hurt myself ” (1995a: 204). The four women feel calm and peaceful, and invite readers to share their ease. This sense of contentment vanishes immediately, however, when Angel, Bush and Dora- Rough record Agnes’s death. Readers probably suspect that Agnes would not survive the end of the story. For the individuals in the novel, however, Agnes’s death occurs totally unexpected. “It was supposed to be me”, Dora-Rouge cries (1995a: 209). Bush tries to give her family strength and encourages them to complete their journey. “Bush held my hand”, recounts Angel. “I buried my face against her, arms tight around her, and wept” (211). Several pages display the tremendous grief of the women and encourage readers to feel compassion and to share the sorrow of Angel, Bush and Dora-Rouge. The journey, in the end, strengthens the bond between the women and brings them closer to land, water, plant and the animals they want to protect. It also, however, caused the death of their beloved Agnes and dug a deep hole into the women’s hearts. When they arrive at the land of the Fat Eaters, they all carry feelings of guilt as they could not save Agnes, which, in turn, evokes Feeling for Others 191 feelings of sympathy in the readers. At the same time, though, Angel expresses her deep urge to help her community who desperately suffers under the acts of injustices. She feels “a sympathy with the ragtag world of seemingly desolate outlying places and villages”, and identifies with the river that had “become strengthened by desperate and hungry needs” (1995a: 224). “The world seemed to embody us”, Angel notes. “We were shaped out of this land by the hands of gods. Or maybe it was that we embodied the land. And in some way I could not yet comprehend, it also embodied my mother, both of them stripped and torn” (228). Reinforced by her ultimate reunion with her tribe, her traditions, and the natural environment, Angel now sees that her tribe is connected to the land in a positive way and performs another act of liberation. She starts to fight for social and environmental justice: I had stepped out of my rational mind along with my sweater and jeans, as if it were just another article of clothing. In the cold water, my feet hurt. I hoped the water would clean all the pasts, remove griefs. Inside it, naked and alone, I held my breath past my own limit. I saw my body as from a distance; it was an unwavering flame in the dark room of water, a wick of warmth holding fire in a cold chill, holding light in the vast, immense darkness. I floated in what wanted freedom, in what white men wanted changed. (Hogan 1995a: 229) This passage marks a particularly interesting and powerful mode of cueing readers’ emotions and imagination. It makes readers feel very close to the girl as she seems to be very open, very sincere in describing her emotional condition. Her bodily movements are narrated from a first-person perspective, which “makes them a vehicle of presence and immersion” (Kuzmičová 2012: 29). Hogan’s use of adjectives of movement and sensual perception helps to make readers feel bodily as well as mentally present in the scene. What is striking, though, is the fact that Angel, after holding her breath and diving into the lake, sees herself from the outside. Like in a dream or a near-death-experience Angel describes how she sees her body interacting with its environment, inviting readers to take up her view-point but, at the same time, distance themselves from the protagonist. My assumption is that this scene prepares readers for the anticipated first meeting between mother and daughter, a scene in which we feel close to Angel, but are unable to fully engage emotionally in the described event. Up to this point, Angel’s mother is only evoked through bits of reconstructed memories of the past events witnessed by Agnes, Bush and Dora-Rouge. Only in Part Three of the novel we get a first-hand account of Angel’s meeting with her mother. They see each other for the first time we learn that the girl hoped for 192 Carina Rasse a reunion. She wanted to see whether there still is a bond between her and her mother, Angel recounts. Hannah, however, shows no love, no understanding for her daughter, and the girl realizes that “any path between [them] had long since been closed” (Hogan 1995a: 230). When Hannah asserts that she has never hit her child, Angel’s hopes finally turn into disappointment and “futile anger” (231) because, doubtlessly, Hannah abused her daughter. “I looked at her for a long time”, remember Angel. “I was no longer numb from the water, but I still felt cold. I saw her. For her, I was the accuser, the sign of her guilt. I wore the wounds of Hannah on my face. They were evidence of what had happened to me” (231). From this recount we see that Angel seems to react apathetically to her mother’s lies. Throughout this narration readers never get a deeper insight into Angel’s thoughts or feelings, which makes the event more “unspeakable”. Readers, however, might nevertheless feel for Angel. They probably even experience stronger emotions than, as we learn in that scene, Angel experiences when they use their moral imagination to put themselves into the shoes of the girl and realize that the way her mother is and has been treating her child is wrong. Philosopher Mark Johnson calls these conscious realizations of unjust treatment “moral understanding”, and explains its concept as follows: To be morally insightful and sensitive requires of us two things: (1) We must have knowledge of the imaginative nature of human conceptual systems and reasoning. This means that we must know what those imaginative structures are, how they work, and what they entail about the nature of our moral understanding. (2) We must cultivate moral imagination by sharpening our powers of discrimination, exercising our capacity for envisioning new possibilities, and imaginatively tracing out the implications of our metaphors, prototypes, and narratives. (1993: 198) While the first point that Johnson describes is more relevant to the study of moral laws, the second point can very well be applied to readers’ imaginative engagements with fictional narratives. Johnson suggests that through our em‐ pathetic imagination, through taking up the position of someone else, through performing acts of perception and discrimination - as we do in the text passage above when we claim that Hannah’s behavior is wrong - we may become more morally sensitive. The ability of a fictional story to trigger moral emotions in the readers without the character undergoing any similar experiences gets reinforced when Angel adds more details to how her mother treated her when she was a child. “She had used weapons against me”, recounts Angel. Hot wire, her teeth. Once she’d even burned me with fire. And it was only later that a rage uncoiling inside me at her words, but even that was a rage built on sadness and loss” (Hogan Feeling for Others 193 1995a: 231). As we see from Angel’s statement, it is very hard for the girl to talk about her feelings. Nevertheless, readers, most likely, will experience concern and sympathy for the girl as they not only know how humiliating Hannah’s actions are, but they can also imagine how painful it is to get bitten and hit with a hot wire with their own bodies. This emotional engagement with the character is reinforced when Angel meets her mother a second time shortly before Hannah’s death. Unlike during their first meeting, the scene I have discussed above, Angel’s thoughts and feel‐ ings are now readily accessible to the readers, encouraging them to empathize with the girl. Moreover, Angel’s depiction of Hannah - the way she describes her mother’s body, “small and vulnerable, her eyes forlorn, her breathing rough” (1995a: 249) - makes readers not only empathize with Angel, but also with her mother. This, in turn, reinforces Johnson’s idea that fiction provides a platform where readers can perform moral judgments and experience moral emotions without being afraid of real-world consequences. Interestingly, scholars from both the natural sciences and the humanities have taken a step further and asserted that sometimes works of fiction may even be more powerful in evoking our emotional engagement and empathetic involvements with others than real-world interactions (e.g., Caracciolo 2014; Gallese and Wojciehowski 2011). Marco Caracciolo, for instance, states that “fiction creates the illusion that we penetrate more deeply into the mental life of characters than we could ever penetrate into that of real people” (2014: 29). In other words, our fellow beings in the real world can consciously hide information from us and thus make it inaccessible, while a narrator of a fictional story authenticates the experiences of characters that readers are supposed to simulate. “Some filling-in might be necessary in special cases”, adds Caracciolo, “but in general internally focalized texts make available all the relevant information regarding a character’s conscious states” (2014: 32). Moreover, to use Suzanne Keen’s words, “fictional worlds provide safe zones for readers’ feeling empathy without experiencing a resultant demand on realworld action” (2007: 4). Thus, readers may experience emotions without being afraid of any actual consequences. In Solar Storms, readers know that Hannah must be condemned for all the mental and physical violence she did to Angel. However, since literature provides a safe zone and we do not have to be afraid of any real world consequences, and since Angel emphasizes that she identifies with Hannah, that she forgives her, that she touchingly calls her ‘mother’ and begs her to not leave, we are encouraged to sympathize with Hannah and be moved by her sorrow as well. Readers, once again, use their moral imagination to take up the 194 Carina Rasse position of a mother who is afraid, helpless and traumatized. This time, trying to understand the mother’s decisions and actions, instead of convicting her. “Even where moral laws exist”, as Johnson puts it, “we learn what they mean and how they apply only by seeing people, ourselves and others. To understand what certain virtues involve and how a person’s character manifests itself, we need to see them realized in the narrative fabric of human lives” (1993: 197). Hogan, to put it differently, encourages readers to imaginatively inhabit Angel’s world in order to realize - just as Angel did - that Hannah was a victim herself; a victim to the deeds of the colonialists and to the crimes of her mother Loretta. When Hannah passes away, Angel says: “it was death, finally, that allowed me to know my mother, her body, the house of lament and sacrifice that it was. I was no longer a girl. I was a woman, full and alive” (1995a: 250-251). Angel now fully understands the interconnection between her body and her peoples’ history. The perception of her mother as a scapegoat and her ability to feel grief and compassion, as Yonka Krasteva points out, “save Angel from repeating her mother’s fate, cure her of depression, and allow her to grow up” (2013: 24), and to ultimately become alive again. What Hannah leaves behind is thus a strong, independent young woman who marks a turning point in a long history of environmental exploitation and sexual victimization. The final pages of Solar Storms display how Angel completes her journey into selfhood and maturity by her participation in tribal political activism. Living together with the Fat Eaters, Angel has learned about the fatal social and environmental consequences the hydroelectric dam project has on the land and its people. “That year”, recounts Angel, “there would be no fishing camp because the fish were contaminated from the damming of water and mercury had been released from the stones and rotting vegetation […]. Because of the early thaw and new roads that crossed the migration routes of animals, spring camp the next year would not be fruitful, and people were already worried about food” (Hogan 1995a: 274-275). The real James Bay Project forced Crees on Fort George Island to leave the mainland because the island began to rapidly erode. “Multiple reservoirs released toxic methyl-mercury stored in the bedrock, contaminating certain species of fish with mercury, which in turn has poisoned some Cree villagers” (Picard 1990: 225). The Indigenous Peoples’ response was to organize themselves into, as Thayer Scudder notes, “what has become perhaps the most effective political entity among affected local people trying to stop or otherwise influence the construction of large-scale dams” (2005: 205). Since 1974 the organization, known as the Grand Council of the Crees, has negotiated various agreements with the Canadian government to protect the natural environment and its Feeling for Others 195 people. However, it still has not managed to completely stop the building of new hydroelectric plants on the Crees’ land. In Hogan’s novel, readers see the characters fighting for their rights, “for water”, as Angel explains, “the people, the animals” (1995a: 275). Angel, Bush, and Dora-Rouge join the indigenous-led movement to resist the construction of the hydropower project. First, they all meet in a church where the corporation officers present the building plans to the Fat Eaters. “When the officials and attorneys spoke”, recounts Angel, “their language didn’t hold a thought for the life of water, or a regard for the land that sustained people from the beginning of time. They didn’t remember the sacred treaties between humans and animals. Our words were powerless beside their figures, their measurements, and ledgers” (279). The women know that without active resistance they cannot stop the white men from destroying their lives, and so, day after day, they try to keep away the young police and workers from clearing the railroad track. “Dora-Rouge placed her chair right in front of them”, recalls Angel. “She tried to stare one of them down, as if she could transmit into them her knowledge, the sum of human emotion, as if she could send them away and show them her anger and determination” (306-307). After a year of struggle, the Native people can stop the construction of the dams, and Angel returns with Bush to Adam’s Rib. Angel bemoans the fatal personal and communal consequences, the partly violent acts of resistance hard. “For [her] people”, she recounts “the problem has always been this: that the only possibility of survival has been resistance. Not to strike back has meant certain loss and death. To strike back has also meant loss and death, only with a fighting change. To fight has meant that we can respect ourselves, we Beautiful People” (325). Nevertheless, Angel concludes her narration by telling her readers that she has not given up hope. “One day, when the light was yellow”, recounts Angel, “I turned to Bush and I said, ‘Something wonderful lives inside me’ […] Something beautiful lives inside us. You will see. Just believe it. You will see” (351, emphasis mine). Like at the beginning of the novel, Angel not only speaks to the characters in the story, but directly addresses the readers, showing us that despite the distance, despite the barrier of imagination we come to feel moral and empathetic sensitivity for each other. 2 Conclusion This chapter explored the various empathetic and sympathetic responses that are possibly evoked by readers’ engagements with Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms. Sharing the perspectives of women who refuse to give up their family members, 196 Carina Rasse their tradition and the natural world, readers are encouraged to share or become affectively aroused by their thoughts and feelings, their actions and intentions. Particular attention was given to the first-person narrative strategy, suggesting that this may be particularly powerful in encouraging readers to feel with and for the fictional beings. Furthermore, this essay proposed that embodied simulation processes often mediate readers’ capacity to share the meaning of the characters’ actions, feel‐ ings, and emotions, thus grounding their identification with and connectedness to them. In the first part of the Solar Storms, readers are encouraged to empathize with the protagonist when they learn about Angel’s devastating experiences. At the same time, Hogan tries to make readers see the link between the white Americans’ destruction of the natural world and the characters’ traumatic histories. In the second part, readers are encouraged to take a step further and share Angel’s feelings of sympathy and empathy for her people whose lives, just like Angel’s, were marked by abuse, exploitation, and injustices caused by Euro- American settlers. In the last part of the novel readers again are invited to feel with Angel and see the interconnectedness between humans, animals and the environmental landscapes. Using their ability to imaginatively inhabit the world of the fictional characters, readers, are encouraged to develop moral emotions, feelings of empathy and sympathy, for victims of social and environmental injustices, and for people that first only were seen as offenders, and not as victims. The scope of this essay precluded the inclusion of additional authors, but it would be worthwhile to also include the voices of other ethnic writers, as well as male writers within and beyond American borders. Works such as Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars (1993), Margaret Atwoods’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006), Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water (2014) or Gene Stone’s and Jonathan Doyle’s The Awareness (2014) capture the stories of past, current, and possible future generations who struggle for justice, for their rights to live in a secure environment, for access to food and water and for their rights for social and medical security. The tales reflect on relationships between men and women, parents and children, or people and animals, or animals and animals and encourage their readers to “inhabit their worlds”, as Johnson would put it, “not just by rational calculations, but also in imagination, feeling, and expression” (1993: 200). Using a cognitive-ecocritical approach to the study of novels like these may help people become aware of the injustice imposed on various ethnic communities around the world. Empirical investigations (see e.g., Małecki et.al. 2020; Schneider-Mayerson 2018), in turn, Feeling for Others 197 like the use of interviews or questionnaires or even behavioral studies may, in the end, present evidence for the assumption that fiction may have the power to engage their readers emotionally, to possibly change their attitudes or even their behavior. References Adamson, J., M. M. Evans and R. Stein (2002). The Environmental Justice Reader Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. 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(2004). Environmental racism and environmental justice: Moral theory in the making? Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 24 (1), 11-28. Rasse, C. (2022). Poetic Metaphors: Creativity and Interpretation. Amsterdam: John Ben‐ jamins. Schneider-Mayerson, M., A. Weik von Mossner and W.P. Małecki (2020). Empirical ecocriticism: environmental texts and empirical methods. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 27(2), 327-36. Schneider-Mayerson, M. (2018). The influence of climate fiction: An empircal survey of readers. Environmental Humanities, 10 (2), 473-500. Scudder, T. (2005). The Future of Large Dams. London: Earthscan. Weik von Mossner, A. (2017). Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Feeling for Others 199 “I Am Husband Now in Master Frankford’s Place”: Abuse of Power in the Main Plot of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness Iris van der Horst 1 Introduction Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness has in its title a strange contradiction, for how can one possibily be killed with kindness? If ‘kind’ actions kill a woman, do they not automatically disqualify as kind? What makes matters more fascinating is that these words are spoken by one of the characters in the play. To a mainly male gathering at his wife’s deathbed, John Frankford announces that he will engrave the following epitaph on her tomb: “Here lies she whom her husband’s kindness killed” (XVII.139). Everyone at the gathering knows that he is not actually confessing to murder, that Frankford did not really kill his wife. After all, the wife in question, Anne Frankford, the ‘woman’ in the play’s title, has just starved herself to death. She has done so voluntairily, to punish herself for commmiting adultery. Her suicide is applauded by the others, who view it as a noble deed of repentence. It was her husband’s kind reaction to her adultery that led to her admirable suicide. Thus, she was killed with kindness. This is what the characters in the play believe, just like many critics. They have often argued that Frankford has been moulded by Heywood’s hand to function as a model husband, whereas Anne is a negative exemplum. However, while working on this article I began to believe that the play is just like its title: it tells you one thing but is the exact opposite. What on the surface seems to be a play about a husband’s kind reaction to his wife’s adultery, is in fact a story driven by the dark underlying currents of power. Frankford seems to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, masking his unkindness with kindness; and Anne is perhaps not the negative exemplum we initially thought she was. Indeed, this article will raise the question if her adultery was even an adultery. As we move through the main plot of A Woman Killed with Kindness, we will touch upon different aspects of power: abuse of power, inequality in marriage, the power of rhetoric, and the power of the play itself. This is where we will begin. 2 The power of A Woman Killed with Kindness Heywood’s play is viewed by most critics as a domestic tragedy (Dolan 2012: x), a genre that is notoriously difficult to define due to the various meanings of ‘domestic’, but most often refers to plays that take the audience to the household of non-noble characters in England (Richardson 2006: 5). Not unlike other tragedies in Jacobean drama, “female transgression serves as a catalyst for the tragic action” (Aebischer 2010: 76): Anne Frankford has an affair with her husband’s guest, which eventually leads to her suicide by starvation. As is also common in domestic tragedies, the “male householder” in the play, John Frankford, “finds himself under siege from those he might consider his subordinates” (Dolan 2012: xi): his wife and his close friend, Wendoll, who together betray him in their affair. In the 1940s, the pioneering work of Henry Hitch Adams paved the way to a line of criticism that claims Heywood created Anne as a negative exemplum. Laura Bromley, for instance, argues that Anne’s passion causes the problem, while Frankford, “a middle-class hero” (1986: 264), behaves nobly. This leads Bromley to believe that “Heywood intended to dramatize a code of gentlemanly behavior for an emerging middle-class audience” (1986: 260). And yet the epitaph proposed by Frankford, which is the very last line in the play, leaves us at the very least to question the actions of the husband, and to wonder whether he, the victim of this affair, also bears blame for her death. Furthermore, Heywood’s play does something that is very untypical for domestic tragedies. It refuses to give the adulteress a motive. As Paula McQuade (2000: 232) points out, the wife usually commits adultery to satisfy her sexual desire and conspires to murder the husband, but this is not the case with Anne. The lack of motive leaves us to wonder what causes not only her death, but also the adultery. This is where the power of A Woman Killed with Kindness lies. To demonstrate this, let us briefly compare it to another play. When in search of a play that concerns itself with power and women, John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed is perhaps a more obvious choice than A Woman Killed with Kindness. After all, his city comedy introduces a powerful wife who aims to tame her husband. Standing on the balcony after the wedding, high above her husband and male spectators who are not allowed to enter, Maria publicly defies her husband. In front of everyone, she tells him: “I’ll make ye know, and fear, a wife, Petruccio” (1.3.264). The play is a response and subversion 202 Iris van der Horst of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, which, as Daileader and Gary explain in their introduction, “belongs to a long tradition of wife ‘taming’ literature”, endorsing the “husband’s right to exercise violence in bringing a rebellious wife under control” (2006: 1). In Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, Shakespeare’s Petruccio has recently turned widower and his new wife now aims to tame him, the wife tamer. As Natalie Zemon Davis points out the play does not only question gender hierarchies, but it overturns them, presenting us with a world where women are on top; it is a sexual-topsy-turvy (1975: 129-131). The play ends with an expression of love and Maria claiming she has successfully tamed her husband. Following the definition of ‘power’ as it can be found in the Cambridge Dictionary - “the ability to control people and events” - Fletcher’s play provides us with a powerful wife who manages to control her husband. A Woman Killed with Kindness, however, gives us a wife who is for the most part of the play passive and powerless, and in the eyes of the men, perfect (that is until she commits adultery). Even when she commits adultery, she does it so passively, without agency, without expressing any desire. This is why the play may at first come across as mysogenistic, as if Heywood believed that women commit adultery simply because they are women and thus do not need a motive. This is also why audiences today would be far more likely to identify with and cheer on a character such as Maria, who is vocal, confident and has power over her husband. And yet, perhaps A Woman Killed with Kindness does something that is even more powerful than questioning or overturning gender hierarchies: it critisizes them. It presents us not with a sexual-topsy-turvy, but a situation that feels very realistic, where we see what happens when a wife in her own household is less powerful than her husband’s guest and when those who have more power abuse it. Abuse of power is defined as “Improper use of authority by someone who has that authority because he or she holds a public office” (West’s Encyclopedia of American Law). As the household in the Jacobean period was metaphorically connected to various kinds of authority, such a definition, where abuse of power is linked to (public) office or government, is applicable. As Catherine Richardson reminds us, the husband governed or ruled the household, just like a monarch ruled the country (2006: 27). Household government was thus grounded in a hierarchy with the husband at the very top. This hierarchy created a power imbalance between a husband and a wife that is not very different from the power imbalance between a boss and an employee today, or a professor and a student, a coach and an athlete, a director and an actor. I Am Husband Now in Master Frankford’s Place 203 A Woman Killed with Kindness demonstrates how this imbalance of power denies the powerless party the option to act, whereas the powerful party can punish the other severely and frame and justify it as an act of kindness. It gives us a woman who repents and reflects, whereas her husband leaves the play having learned nothing. It is not a feel-good play like The Tamer Tamed, but it ends in tragedy, leaving us to wonder what led to it, making our thoughts turn to it even long after it has ended. As we now turn to the plot of the play, I will, like others before me (Bromley 1986; Panek 1994), compare Frankford’s treatment of his wife to the advice given in conduct manuals written in early modern England. These ideological conduct books, which ranged “from homilies, prayers and sermons, through educational and how-to tracts to satires and defences”, provided “rules for the public and private behaviour of women” (Aughterson 1995: 67). However, in addition to focussing on conduct manuals produced in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, I would also like to include modern ideas around consent and asymmetrical power dynamics as it allows us to view Anne’s adultery from a different and new perspective, which may make us doubt or at the very least wonder whether or not she even commits it. But before addressing this issue, let us first consider the question whether Frankford cheats on his wife long before she does. 3 Powerful and powerless “I am his wife that in your power hath left his whole affairs; Is it to me you speak? ” These words are spoken by Anne Frankford in her own house after her husband’s close friend and house guest, Wendoll, expresses his love for her (VI.121-2). She is Frankford’s wife, which gives her a powerful position in the household, but he has left his power in the hands of another man, who sees himself as “husband now in Master Frankford’s place” (XI.89). The affair that ensues, which will have fatal consequences for Anne, is soon discovered by her husband. When he first hears about his wife’s infidelity from one of his servants, he can hardly believe it to be true and even devises a plan to catch the adulterous couple in the act so that he can see it for himself. After all, he has been assured through the comments of other men attending his wedding during the opening scene of the play that Anne will be what they regard as the perfect wife. Sir Charles praises her noble birth and education, her discourse and musicality. He concludes: “To end her many praises in one word, / She’s beauty and perfection’s eldest daughter” (I.22-3). Then Sir Francis describes Anne, his sister, as “A perfect wife already, meek and patient” (I.37), shortly after which 204 Iris van der Horst Sir Charles promises Frankford, using metaphors from the domain of clothing and accessory, that his wife will not be a nuisance: She doth become you like a well-made suit In which the tailor hath used all his art. Not like a thick coat of unseasoned frieze, Forced on your back in summer. She’s no chain To tie your neck, and curb you to the yoke, But she’s a chain of gold to adorn your neck. (I.59-64) Later on, Frankford himself expresses his contentment with his wife: “I have a fair, a chaste, and loving wife, / Perfection all, all truth, all ornament” (IV.11-2). It is worth remembering that an ornament is an item that beautifies something, but often has no practical purpose. Anne’s main purpose as defined by the men in the play lies in making her husband look more attractive. Thus, as a possession, her value and worth as a wife and individual only exist in relation to her husband and other men. Lyn Bennett (2000: 38, 46) argues that Anne is in fact mostly “symbolic capital” to the economically wealthy Frankford, who can now rise to a higher social position through his marriage with the noble Anne. Referring to the wedding scene that opens the play, which describes the marriage as it is viewed by male friends, Bennet adds that the “worth of this union is established by other men” and depends on “its validation by the homosocial community” (2000: 45). Viewing the wife as ornamental or symbolic capital, the men express clear expectations of Anne’s conduct. She must be meek, chaste, and loving, which is in line with the recommendations provided by conduct manuals written in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. In 1637, Baxter writes in A Christian Directory that when the husband is present, the wife is to live in “voluntary subjection and obedience to him” (in Keeble 1994: 162). In order to acknowledge that voluntary inferiority, Gouge proclaims in Domestical Duties (1622) that her conduct and speech must signal submission: she should be humble, meek and modest precisely because “it will make her think better of her husband than of herself, and so make her the more willing to yield all subjection unto him” (in Keeble 1994: 159). Conduct manuals also recommend that the wife adopts the husband’s moods, feelings and thoughts. Burton, for instance, writes in Anatomy of Melancholy (1621-51) that a good wife “should be as a looking-glass to represent her husband’s face and passion” (in Keeble 1994: 164). Finally, Smith reminds us in A Preparative to Marriage (1591), that “the ornament of a woman is silence”; he is the teacher, she the hearer (in Keeble 1994: 147). I Am Husband Now in Master Frankford’s Place 205 Although still inferior to the husband, the position of the wife nonetheless comes with privileges and power as she is given a position next to him in the hierarchy of the household. Smith stresses that “the man and his wife are partners, like oars in a boat; therefore, he must divide offices, and affairs, and goods with her, causing her to be feared and reverenced and obeyed of her children and servants like himself ” (in Keeble 1994: 148). Upon his absence, the wife even climbs to the top of the household pyramid. According to N.H (in The Ladies Dictionary, 1694) she becomes, in fact, a “deputy husband”, which Overbury (1614) describes in A Wife as the husband’s “absent hands, eyes, ears, and mouth” (in Keeble 1994: 165). In A Woman Killed with Kindness, however, the wife never receives this power. Instead, Frankford bestows it upon another man: his close friend and guest, Wendoll. When he arrives to deliver some news, Frankford, who has noticed many good qualities in him, at once asks him to stay and be his “companion” (IV.71). The privileges he then receives seem to have no limit: Frankford’s table and purse, and a servant of Wendoll’s choosing. When we learn through Wendoll in the next scene about the attention and affection he receives from Frankford, it reminds of an intense, all-consuming love: He hath placed me in the height of all his thoughts, Made me companion with the best and chiefest In Yorkshire. He cannot eat without me, Nor laugh without me; I am to his body As necessary as his digestion, And equally do make him whole or sick. (VI.38-43) Due to his intense and passionate emotional attachment to Wendoll, it can be argued that Frankford cheats on Anne emotionally long before she becomes physically unfaithful. Furthermore, as Bennett (2000: 48) points out, Wendoll is led to believe that “there are no limits placed on what he is free to enjoy among Frankford’s household and its goods […] the economic basis of that friendship does not include clearly defined limits: Frankford’s invitation seems to extend to everything he owns, including Anne”. Also not clearly defined by Frankford are his expectations of Anne’s conduct with regards to Wendoll as he has given her ambiguous instructions: “Use him with all thy loving’st courtesy” (IV.79). As McQuade (2000: 243) mentions, he “urges her to affirm his own intense bond to Wendoll while assuming that she will not actually fall in adulterous love with his friend”. Meanwhile, however, Wendoll has fallen in love with Anne and although he expresses in soliloqies that he knows it is morally wrong to act on it, calling 206 Iris van der Horst himself “A villain, and a traitor to his friend” (VI.25), he still attempts to seduce her. This happens immediately after Frankford has departed for business and has Anne tell Wendoll “To make bold in his absence and command / Even as himself were present in the house / For you must keep his table, use his servants / And be a present Frankford in his absence” (VI.74-7). In Frankford’s absence, there‐ fore, Wendoll and not Anne becomes the deputy husband, climbing to the top of the household pyramid. When he approaches Anne romantically, there is thus an asymmetrical power dynamic between the two. 4 Was it really adultery? Many pages have been dedicated to finding an explanation for Anne’s adultery or her non-existing motive for adultery. These explanations are usually shaped by the critic’s interpretation of the play and therefore vary. To give a few exam‐ ples: Jennifer Panek (1994: 363-367) believes that as the play is an “exemplum of how not to treat a repentant adulteress”, Heywood avoids the question of motivation as he is more interested in Frankford’s actions. Bennett (2000: 36, 50), on the other hand, believes that as the play is about “homosocial economies”, the odd relationship between Frankford and Wendoll leads to Anne’s adultery as it becomes impossible for her to distinguish between her husband’s role and his guest. And McQuade (2000: 233) believes that Anne lacks agency because the marital hierarchy affects her “moral capacity”, which means she lacks the skills to adequately respond to ethically ambiguous situations. As I likewise believe that the play is about the consequences of inequality in marriage, I argue that Anne’s non-existing motive for adultery lies in the asymmetrical power dynamic between her and Wendoll, which is an aspect that to my knowledge has yet to be discussed in scholarly debates. When Wendoll shares his romantic feelings with her, Anne does not submit to him right away, but a brief exchange ensues where he attempts to convince her, using lines that may come across as romantic and loving, but are actually manipulative and threatening. Out of nowhere, he proclaims his love for her and immediately and repeatedly forbids her to respond: And in my heart, fair angel, chaste and wise. I love you - start not, speak not, answer not. I love you - nay, let me speak the rest. Bid me to swear, and I will call to record The host of heaven. (VI.104-8) I Am Husband Now in Master Frankford’s Place 207 Then he tries to emotionally manipulate her by hiding a threat behind words that are probably meant to sound romantic. More specifically he argues that if she told her husband, it would have disastrous consequences for him (a bad reputation or death), but that it would not matter to him, as it was all for love, all for Anne’s sake. “For you I’ll hazard all - what care I? / For you I’ll live, and in your love I’ll die” (VI.136-7). Of course, none of this is for Anne’s sake; her wellbeing and willingness are not his concern; if they had, he would not have attempted to make her an adulteress. It is to be doubted that Anne lacks moral capacity here. She reminds Wendoll about the inappropriateness of his confession and attempts to appeal to his moral compass by reminding him that he is her husband’s guest and close friend. It has no impact on Wendoll, possibly because he has pondered over this at length before (in soliloquies), but perhaps also because this is not an exchange between equals. Anne is addressing the person that they both consider to be the deputy husband and is therefore in a more powerful position. In addition, Anne lacks the rhetorical skills to debate Wendoll. When she submits to him, she does not do so out of passion, but because she finds herself out of arguments. “What shall I say? ” she says, “My soul is wandering, and hath lost her way. O Master Wendoll, O” (VI.148-50). She is then reduced to sighing. She does not express any happiness, but only speaks of shame and sin. According to the stage direction [Kisses ANNE], the kiss is not mutual but initiated by Wendoll, and it is unclear how it is received. Not at any point does she consent to the affair. Consent, which is defined by the Department of Justice as the “voluntary agreement to participate in sexual activity” is of course a modern concept and still today its conceptualization is being clarified, with policymakers and researchers moving towards a more active form, meaning that consent “is no longer merely an absence of no” (Baldwin-White and Christensen 2021: 333). Anne, who finds herself in an inferior position in her own house, does not explicitly say no to Wendoll, but her lines clearly indicate that she is confused and that she does not wish to commit adultery, which means there is no consent. Moreover, following the more active conceptualisation of consent, by which “the person initiating sex must seek positive indications of willingness, exercise common sense, and take into account all the relevant circumstances” (Baldwin- White and Christensen 2021: 333), Wendoll does not act accordingly, ambushing and emotionally manipulating her, forbidding her to speak and not giving her time to consider. Later on in the play, when Frankford announces that he has to leave again, only Wendoll expresses happiness, reaffirming his authority and position as deputy husband once more: “I am husband now in Master Frankford’s 208 Iris van der Horst 1 See for instance Bromley (1986: 269). place, / And must command the house” (XI.89-90). Anne does not share his joy, but first inquires whether Frankford really has to leave, then suggests Wendoll should accompany him, which shows her reluctance to be alone with Wendoll. Finally, she speaks of sin again and of her anxiety to be found out. As Baldwin-White and Christensen assert, consent “serves as the defining characteristic of sexual assault. An act of sex without consent is sexual assault” (2021: 332). Naturally, Heywood’s contemporaries will not have had the same understanding of sexual assault and consent as we do today. However, it strikes me as significant for various reasons that the seduction scene, which makes Anne an adulteress and ultimately leads to her death, would today classify as sexual assault. First of all, feminists have long argued that rape resides “in the patriarchal systems of male privilege, power and control over women and their bodies”. Indeed, second wave feminists viewed rape as a “manifestation of male abuse of power” (Buchanan and Jamieson 2016: 222). Heywood’s play may thus be of aid in understanding aspects of rape today. Secondly, analysed from this perspective, A Woman Killed with Kindness serves as a reminder that we easily tend to put blame on the victim. After all, the question of motive becomes irrelevant now. Ultimately, it is Frankford’s actions and kindness (to Wendoll) that deny Anne the power she requires to protect herself and thus allows the adultery to occur. It is his motive and not hers we should be questioning. 5 Frankford’s punishment It has often been argued that Frankford’s punishment of Anne after discovering the affair is exemplary, noble, fair and moderate 1 . After careful consideration, he decides he will not punish his wife’s body and turn her into a martyr. Instead, he intends to punish Anne’s soul with humility and kindness: “woman, hear thy judgement”, he says (XIII.158) as he banishes her from the house, ordering her to take all her belongings, select a few servants and make way to one of his four manors. Nothing associated with Anne, who is no longer allowed to see him or the children, must remain in the house. “A mild sentence”, Anne remarks (XIII.172), and indeed, compared to the alternative that is presented in the play (murder, which is also advocated by other characters), Frankford’s actions are indeed kind. Compared to the advice put forward by conduct manuals in the Jacobean period, however, his actions are rather cruel. I Am Husband Now in Master Frankford’s Place 209 Even though 17 th century conduct manuals proclaimed adultery to be “one of the most capital vices” (Gouge, in Keeble 1994: 129), the punishment deemed proper was not death. Considered to be not a felony, but a sin, the advised remedy for adultery was in fact divorce or reconciliation. Smith (1591), for instance, writes that the “disease of marriage is adultery, and the medicine hereof is divorcement” (in Keeble 1994: 137), whereas Baxter (1637) writes that adultery need not “dissolve the bond of marriage”, but that both the man and the woman may “continue in the relation, if they please” (in Keeble 1994: 137). In fact, according to Panek (1994: 359), most conduct-book authors championed exercising Christian charity and forgiving a penitent partner. Heywood himself, who wrote a conduct book called Gunaikeion, supported the idea that “repentance and a subsequently clean life swipe sin - even sexual sin - right off the slate” (1994: 363). It is therefore remarkable that reconciliation is not among the options that Frankford or Anne consider, even though Anne immediately repents and repeatedly asks for forgiveness. She seems surprised when Frankford does not physically punish her and even proclaims that she would “deserve a thousand thousandfold/ More than you can inflict” (XIII.95-6). Very quickly she concludes that since she no longer deems herself worthy to be in his presence, the only solution is death. Deeply upset and unable to handle her emotions, she quickly expresses suicidal thoughts with comments like: “I am ready for my grave” (XIII.106) and “In this one life I die ten thousand deaths” (XIII.129). Frankford sends her away although he knows she is suicidal. His ‘sentence’ is much harsher than the medicines suggested by conduct-book authors: it is a symbolic death. He intends to erase her from his life, considering himself to “be a widower ere my wife be dead” (XV.30), which is an inconvenient position (which he also notes) as it would prevent him from marrying again. The situation as it is at the end of the play, with Anne having taken her own life, is far more convenient. 6 Anne’s death The final scene is arguably one of the most dramatic ones in the play. ‘Enter ANNE in her bed’ the stage direction reads, having her join the primarily male gathering consisting of the men who had in the first scene of the play commented on her many qualities as a good wife and who now comment on the physical consequences of her repentance. As Frey and Lieblein point out, “the starving body is displayed as a publicly acknowledged spectacle”, making Anne’s suffering body visible (2004: 60). The play is clear about Anne’s goals: in starvation she hopes to absolve herself of her sins, and by these means she 210 Iris van der Horst gives herself power. She does not need to be redeemed, but she redeems herself. She says: I never will nor eat, nor drink, nor taste Of any cates that may preserve my life. I never will nor smile, nor sleep, nor rest, But when my tears have washed my black soul white, Sweet Saviour, to Thy hands I yield my sprite. (XVI.101-5) With these words, as Frances E. Dolan (2012: xx) argues, Anne “credits herself with the capacity for self-redemption”, revealing a “more assertive and vocal side” of herself than before, and thus for the first time strongly possesses agency. As Frey and Lieblein (2004: 47-48) mention, while critics of the “domestic tragedy school” have focussed on Anne as a sinner, others have interpreted Anne’s selfstarvation as a way for her to take responsibility for her actions, or as an act of rassertive rejection of her affair with Wendoll. Nancy A. Gutierrez, for instance, placing the play in a Puritan context and arguing that Wendoll is depicted as the devil and this adultery a demonic possession, regards Anne’s fasting as a means to exorcise her demonic lover (2003: 48). Such interpretations, however, are still grounded in the belief that Anne committed a sin, having been seduced by the devilish Wendoll. In contrast, Frey and Lieblein argue that Anne’s fasting is not so much a “response to her seduction by Wendoll”, but “a response to a patriarchal society in which food and eating are forms of control”. Thus, her fasting is in fact “addressed to Frankford” (2004: 47-48). Frankford only visits Anne and forgives her when it is certain she will die. “I wed thee once again” (XVII.116), he says on her deathbed, cleverly changing himself from a divorcee into a widower, when in fact he is a murderer. McQuade (2000: 250) notes that it has often been said that Heywood’s tragedy is different from other domestic tragedies in that it does not include a spousal murder. She argues, however, “that the play does depict a spousal murder, only with the genders reversed”. Not willing to forgive Anne at first, Frankford’s solution produces her death and the possibility to marry again should he wish to do so. By then forgiving her at her deathbed, he turns himself into a widower, which is undoudablty better for his reputation than to be seen as a murderer or a divorcee whose wife has committed suicide. In the end, the comments from the company around Anne’s bed are filled with hypocrisy and insincerity. When Frankford and then everyone else proclaim that they wish to die with Anne, the only honest statement seems to come from one of the servants who says: “So will not I! ” (XVII.98). Although they feel sorry for her, none of them seem to wish her alive. It is only now at the very end I Am Husband Now in Master Frankford’s Place 211 that other characters recognize or legitimize her repentance. Sir Francis notes that although he had come to chide Anne, her appearance turned his words of hate into compassion (XVII.62-3). His fiancé Susan says shortly before Anne’s death: “Pity it is repentance comes too late” (XVII.31). But that is not true: Anne has expressed her sincere regret and remorse a great number of times. She repented, but was not forgiven and now that she has physically harmed herself and death is near, the others claim repentance comes too late. The comment is absurdly contradictory and it demonstrates the power that the group gathered around Anne’s bed has to change the narrative, which Frankford masterfully demonstrates with his final line. The play ends with Frankford’s announcement that he will engrave the following words on her tomb: “Here lies she whom her husband’s kindness killed” (XVII.139). This is problematic due to a number of reasons. Firstly, as Bennett notes, Frankford takes away Anne’s agency again, depicting her as a passive woman in the sense that she does not kill herself, but is killed (2000: 49). Secondly, it leads him to believe that Anne’s noble suicide, through which she earned his forgiveness, was caused by his kindness, which means he conveniently does not need to consider the part he played in the events that led to the adultery. Theresia de Vroom maintains that while Frankford’s polite, silent and passive punishment of Anne is not kind, but cruel, he still manages to give the impression of having been a good husband (de Vroom 2002: 120). Unlike Anne, Frankford never takes responsibility for his actions, abusing his power once more. 7 Conclusion I would like to close this article by once more referring to the power of A Woman Killed with Kindness, which has inspired interpretations that are so far apart that they can be called exact opposites. Is Anne the negative exemplum or Frankford? Are his actions kind or cruel? Then we may wonder whether the play is even about the woman mentioned in the title, or actually about the two men and their relationship. One betrays his wife by forming an intense emotional attachment with his guest, the other betrays his host by forming a sexual attachment with his wife. The woman in the affair leaves the play punished and dead, the other two embark on new lives. And then there is the motiveless adultery, which, when analysed from the perspective of our modern concept of consent, would actually be a sexual assault - and yet we still search for a motive. The play reminds us that it is easy to blame the victim, that the victim might be mistaken 212 Iris van der Horst for the abuser, and that we tend to view the unkind actions of those in power as kind, simply because they had the power to do much worse. References - Primary Sources Fletcher, J. (2006) [written between 1609 and 1610]. The Tamer Tamed or, The Woman’s Prize. Introduced and edited by C. R. Daileader and G. Taylor. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Heywood, T. (2012) [printed 1607]. A Woman Killed with Kindness. Introduced and edited by F. E. Dolan. London: Bloomsbury/ Methuen Drama. Secondary Sources. Aebischer, P. (2010). Jacobean Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian. - Secondary Sources Aughterson, K. (ed.). (1995). Renaissance Women: A Sourcebook. Constructions of Femi‐ ninity in England. London/ New York: Routledge. Bach, R. A. (1998). The Homosocial imaginary of A Woman Killed with Kindness. Textual Practice, 12 (3), 503-524. Baldwin-White, A. and C. Christensen (2021). Understanding consent among emerging adults. Wrestling with the social construction of gender, sexuality, and salient social categories. In S. Dodd (ed.), The Routledge International Handbook of Social Work and Sexualities. Abingdon/ New York: Routledge, 332-346. Bennett, L. (2000). The Homosocial economics of A Woman Killed with Kindness. Renaissance and Reformation/ Renaissance et Réforme, 24 (2), 35-61. Bromley, L. G. (1986). Domestic conduct in A Woman Killed with Kindness. Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 26 (2), 259-76. Buchanan, F. and L. Jamieson (2016). Rape and sexual assault. Using an intersectional feminist lens. In S. Wendt and N. Moulding (eds.), Contemporary Feminisms in Social Work Practice. Abingdon: Routledge, 220-237. Cambridge University Press. (n.d.). Cambridge Dictionary, S.v. Power. Available at: https: / / dictionary.cambridge.org/ dictionary/ english/ power (accessed: 6 February 2023). Daileader, C. R. and G. Taylor (2006). Introduction. In C. R. Daileader and G. Taylor (eds.), The Tamer Tamed or, The Woman’s Prize. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1-41. Davis, N. Z. (1975). Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford University Press. I Am Husband Now in Master Frankford’s Place 213 de Vroom, T. (2002). Female heroism in Heywood’s Tragic Farce of Adultery. A Woman Killed with Kindness. In N. C. Liebler (ed.), The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Palgrave, 119-40. Dolan, F. E. (2012). Introduction. In F. E. Dolan (ed.), A Woman Killed with Kindness. New Mermaids. London: Bloomsbury/ Methuen Drama, vii-xxxi. Frey, C. and L. Lieblein (2004). ‘My breasts sear’d’: The self-starved female body and A Woman killed with Kindness. Early Theatre, 7 (1), 45-66. Gutierrez, N. A. (2003). ‘Shall She Famish Then? ’ Female Food Refusal in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate. Keeble, N. H. (ed.). (1994). The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-century Woman. A Reader. London/ New York: Routledge. Lehman, J. and S. Phelps (eds.). (2008). West’s Encyclopedia of American Law. 2 nd ed., S.v. Abuse of Power. Available at: https: / / legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/ Abuse+of +Power (accessed: 15 August 2022). McQuade, P. (2000). ‘‘A Labyrinth of Sin”: Marriage and moral capacity in Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness. Modern Philology, 98 (2), 231-50. Panek, J. (1994). Punishing adultery in A Woman Killed with Kindness. Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 30 (2), 357-378. Richardson, C. (2006). Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England: The Material Life of the Household. Manchester/ New York: Manchester University Press. 214 Iris van der Horst 1 Scholars who have stressed a renewed interest in Chesnutt are Taylor (2009); Danielson (2008); and Orban (2009). The publication of new editions of Chesnutt’s classics and of previously unpublished writings has played an important role in rescuing the writer from obscurity over the past two decades. 2 Among these are, besides race as overarching theme, Chesnutt’s relation to language (Finseth 1999) and realism (Simmons 2006), his use of genres (Bundrick 2009), the role of female characters in his texts (Najmi 1999), an affinity of his art to blues-aesthetics (Baker 2003), and Chesnutt’s sketch-work (Wonham 2004: 152-170). Unveiling Subjection, Practicing Subjectivation: Race, Power, and Strategies of Rewriting the Self in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition Matthias Klestil 1 Introduction In light of contemporary views on race as a social construction, the reappraisal of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) over the past two decades is hardly surprising. After all, the first major African American fiction writer in many of his texts shows a remarkable affinity to constructivist theorizations of race, conceiving of racial categories as fictions, fabricated through historically identifiable practices. It was “[t]radition”, Chesnutt famously wrote, that made the white people masters, rulers, who absorbed all the power, the wealth, the honors of community, and jealously guarded this monopoly […]. Tradition, on the other hand, made the negro a slave, an underling, existing by favor and not right, his place the lowest on the social scale to which […] he was hopelessly confined. (1901: 5) Accordingly, scholars have come to view Chesnutt as a “strikingly modern writer” (McWilliams 2002: ix), which is visible in a recent renaissance of his work and an expanding scholarship characterized by both a growing thematic diversity and a traditionally rather uniform methodology 1 . While scholars discuss a broad range of aspects 2 , discourse on Chesnutt is often marked by a narrowness that McWilliams appropriately describes when stating that discussion “[f]or the most part […] has been conducted within the methodological framework of biographical 3 Major biographical studies of Chesnutt include Keller (1978); Andrews (1980); and Pickens (1994). 4 With the important exception of McWilliams’ study (2002), there have been few explicitly poststructuralist approaches to Chesnutt’s work to date. Foucauldian theory is absent, except in Friedman (2007) and Redling (2006). and historical criticism, with an admixture of New Critical formal analysis” (2002: ix-x). Not least because Chesnutt’s political and personal texts are easily available in major collections such as those by Brodhead (1993) or McElrath and Leitz (1997), a form of biographism plays a major role in studies of Chesnutt until today and has led to a predominance of author-focused readings of his fiction 3 . My close reading of Chesnutt’s historical novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), a thinly veiled fictionalization of the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, deliberately departs from his tradition. While including some of the writer’s biography and his political ideas as contexts, I focus on the novel through Foucauldian theory of power and the self. The following thus breaks new ground by bringing poststructuralist theory, specifically Michel Foucault’s thought on the subject, in conversation with Chesnutt’s novel 4 . Through this Foucauldian lens, I reconsider the text as an attempt at de-racializing the self through literary discourse, arguing that The Marrow of Tradition provides an insightful investigation into relations between selfhood and race. My article poses a twofold question, asking how Chesnutt not only reveals the constructedness of a racialized subject, but also presents ways of ethically reconstituting a de-racialized self. By tracing processes of self-formation through themes such as space, speech, and power, I show how Chesnutt’s turn-of-thecentury novel deconstructs racialized discourses and the inconsistencies and unfreedoms produced by their binaries while re-writing the self in order to secure moral agency in readers. In Foucauldian terms, which I will briefly introduce and explain below (Section 2), the following thus demonstrates how Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition rewrites a de-racialized self by both unveiling subjection (Section 3) and practicing subjectivation (Section 4). 2 Power and the self in Foucault Foucauldian thought on power and the self is best understood through the last great shift in Foucault’s vast oeuvre, namely the turn to the care of the self, through which previous major concepts such as discourse, power, governmen‐ tality, or sexuality appear in a new light. This turn is in many ways also a return, as the question of selfhood is not exclusive to Foucault’s late ethical phase and works such as The History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self (1988 [1984]) 216 Matthias Klestil 5 The idea of a “field” recurs throughout Foucault’s writings, e.g. in relation to space, discourse, or power as a field of action upon action (cf. 1997a: 341). My suggestion to think of self as a field of potentialities therefore emerges from a broader conceptual legacy in Foucault. or The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2005 [1981-1982]), but is fundamental to the philosopher’s thinking in general. It is involved, for example, in the wellknown genealogies of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Discipline and Punish (1991 [1975]) or The Will to Knowledge (1998 [1978]), which analyzed nothing less than the discursive and non-discursive practices that produce modern subjects. Here, Foucault addressed forms of subjection: what he calls retrospectively the formation of the “modes of objectification that transform human beings into subjects” through “technologies of power” (1997a: 326), such as disciplinary power, panopticism, or biopower. On the other hand, his late ethical work undoubtedly presents the most explicit engagement with selfhood through forms of subjectivation, as Foucault identifies in ancient Greek and Roman cultures “moral conceptions […] oriented towards practices of the self” (1990: 30) that revolve around two central concepts: the care of the self and the practice of veridiction called parrhesia. Late works such as the last volumes of The History of Sexuality and the lectures on The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2005 [1981-1982]), The Government of Self and Others (2010 [1982-1983]), and The Courage of Truth (2011 [1983-1984]) spotlight ethical practices of the self and truth telling. The omnipresence of the subject as a theme and a lens for reading Foucauldian thought requires the introduction of some basic terminology, as it will be used in the following. Since terminology of the self and the subject in Foucault is problematic due to changing definitions within Foucault’s writing as well as “not-always-accurate translation” (Downing 2008: ix), I am at this point necessarily selective and my terms are rather pragmatic. Hence, the central terms subjection and subjectivation are interpretations, heuristic tools that describe two fundamental modes of self-formation identifiable within Foucault’s work, which interlink with other concepts such as biopolitics, discourse, space, care of the self, and parrhesia. In order to further explicate these two Foucauldian modes, they are contextual‐ ized within a broader model of selfhood based on three premises that will be denoted by the term self. Firstly, self, as heuristic term derived from Foucauldian thought, does not signify a substance, essence or origin. There is no “authentic, ‘natural’ self” (Dews 1989: 38), no stable, a-historical, sovereign self. Instead, self in Foucauldian thought denotes potential activity or energy that may be acted out, exerted in various directions and forms. It behaves as a field of potentiality 5 , of potential activity underlying human experience and exists as process and Unveiling Subjection, Practicing Subjectivation 217 performance. Secondly, any concrete emergence of selfhood is therefore historical. The field of potentiality may only enter into concrete form through the realm of the historical; subjectivity underlies history, not essence or essential rule. An additional premise lies, thirdly, in the double-sidedness of subjectivity, the way in which, out of the field of potential action denoted by the term self, a concrete subject emerges through a “way of conducting individuals” (extrinsically, socially) as well as a “way they conduct themselves” (intrinsically, through techniques of the self) (Foucault, qtd. in Gros 2005: 548). Note, here, the crucial difference between the terms self and subject: self, in the following, means the basic field of potentiality underlying the emergence of selfhood, while subject denotes a con‐ cretely identifiable and actualized experiencing mode of self-formation emerging at the intersection of action relating to self and others. If self is the potentially performed, subject is the actually performed; if self is a neutral Urzustand of potentialities, subject means a historically distinct grammar of experience. The terms subjection and subjectivation describe two such grammars of expe‐ rience, two fundamental modes of self-formation. Denoting two ways in which the field of potentiality may manifest historally, subjection and subjectivation differ fundamentally in terms of three criteria: (1) the way in which a subject relates to truth, (2) the way in which it relates to an other, and (3) the way in which a subject is capable of agency. (1) First, processes of subjection and subjectivation may be discerned in terms of a subject’s relation to (non-capitalized) truth, understood as functional element in formative processes. The focus lies here not on an “essence” of truth, but on the “historical form”, in which “the relations between the ‘subject’ and ‘truth’ […] take shape” (Foucault 2005: 2). With processes of subjection, the relation of subject to truth revolves around a subject’s constitution as true, knowable object. The subject produces itself as “product of systems of knowledge and power”, as “correlate of these apparatuses of power-knowledge” (Gros 2005: 513). The relation of subject to truth in processes of subjection is therefore one, in which truth becomes involved in a subject’s objectification through true, knowable discourse, and which results, as Gros puts it somewhat drastically, in a “straightjacket of truth” (2005: 511). By contrast, the subject of subjectivation is not a subject of true knowledge but of true action. Two aspects illustrate the subject’s relation to truth in subjectivation. First, there is striving towards a unity of existence: As Foucault notes, within processes of subjectivation, one “does not aim to split the subject, but to bind him to himself ” (qtd. in Gros 2005: 532). Here, the aim is to establish an “immanence of the self to the self ” (Gros 2005: 532), to cohere a self-consciously recognized field of potentialities. Congruence is sought, “the 218 Matthias Klestil fullness of a perfect relationship to oneself ” (ibid.: 533), which does not mean “to discover the [knowable] truth of oneself ”, but becoming aware “with what true principles one is equipped, [and] to what extent one is in a position to have them available when necessary” (Foucault, qtd. in Gros 2005: 528). This means that truth, primarily tied to a way of being rather than to knowledge, is attained through action; the way to enter into a relationship to truth, for the subject of subjectivation, lies in conscious activity. For this subject, “truth is not displayed in the calm element of discourse, like a distant and correct echo of the real. It is, in the most accurate and literal sense of the expression, a reason for living, a logos actualized in existence” (Gros 2005: 529; emphasis in original). Recognizing self as field of its potential action, this subject may become true only by actively shaping its way of being. While, in subjection, being a subject is tied to the fragmenting production of a knowable truth of oneself, subjectivation denotes processes in which a subject may only become “truthfull” - a subject “full” of its activated and performed truth - by linking itself to action. (2) Secondly, the two fundamental modes of self-formation differ in terms of the relation between subject and an other. Foucault sees an inevitable involve‐ ment of otherness in the production of subjectivity, a view expressed in his investigations into Greco-Roman antiquity, his conception of discourse, and his idea of power as constitutive element of social systems. Regarding the latter, he therefore famously assured that “[p]ower is not evil. Power is games of strategy” (1997b: 298), meaning that power is inevitable as a current running through social systems, but also that there is potential for processes of subjectivation where power occurs as “open-ended strategic game” (1997b: 298). Such processes furthermore correspond with Foucault’s interpretation of formative relationships of selfhood in Greco-Roman antiquity, which he reads as power relationships that remain dynamic and that are built on negotiation rather than domination. Here lies the place of parrhesia, the practice of courageous truth telling, which opens up “pockets of ethical resistance” (Downing 2008: 102). Variously translated into modern languages as franc-parles, Wahrsprechen, or free speech, parrhesia labels a set of principles, practices, and relations within verbal intercourse, and designates “a virtue, a quality” as well as “a duty” and “a technique” (Foucault 2010: 43). For Foucault, four central features define a “parrhesiastic game” (2001 [1983]: 17). These include that parrhesia is a verbal activity, a certain “way of speaking” and “ethics of speech” (Foucault 2005: 137), and that parrhesia is about telling the truth, a mode of veridiction. Since there are various modes of truth telling (e.g. that of the prophet, the wise man, or the teacher), parrhesiastic activity is differentiated furthermore as dutiful criticism: one is not forced but feels obliged to tell truth in a relationship of power, where one speaks to and criticises another Unveiling Subjection, Practicing Subjectivation 219 6 For advocates of the former position, which sees a return of an essential subject in the late Foucault, cf. McNay (1992: 84) or Dews (1989). Gros (2005: 525), Rayner (2007: 121), and Downing (2008: 97), on the other hand, see no clear break or giving up of the idea of a constructed subject. who has the potential to affect the speaker. Parrhesia therefore always involves risk; it takes courage to speak truth in a parrhesiastic way. Most obviously, this is the case in the setting of political, “monarchic” parrhesia, where the parrhesiastic advisor risks life itself (cf. Foucault 2001 [1983]: 17). Always at risk, however, even if it is not life as such, is the very relationship that first constitutes the field of the parrhesiastic game. In contrast to such a grammar of experience, “in which to master himself the subject no longer has to extend social schemas of domination into the relationship of the self ” (Gros 2005: 535), processes of subjection are marked by the “domination effects” that Foucault seeks to “avoid” (1997b: 299). With subjection, the relationship of subject to an other is characterized by domination through this other, which primarily assumes the role of a compellent inducer of specific activities or of a confessional partner enforcing the discursive production of the subject. Here, the other (in the broadest sense not simply of individual, but also discourse, game of power, spatial setting etc.) effectuates often subtle but always coercive practices, which activate the production of knowable truths in processes of subjection. The role played by an other in subjectivation and subjection thus differs significantly. With the former, there is a practice of forming a subject out of the dynamics of a power relationship with an other that may always be challenged in accordance with an ethics that seeks truth in conscious action. With the latter, there is the production of a knowable subject through an other’s inducing and often repressive practices within static relations tending towards domination. (3) Thirdly, there is the crucial question of a subject’s agency in modes of subjection and subjectivation, which coincides with the debate over whether Foucault’s late work represents a reanimation of a ‘dead’ and introduction of an essential subject 6 . While here is not the place to discuss such questions in detail, there should be no doubt that Foucault’s late works problematize agency. Agency lies at the heart of late Foucauldian thought and particularly The Courage of Truth (2011 [1983-1984]), and even when viewing this phase as a continuation of constructivist notions, this does not mean that it cannot address different forms of agency. Bearing this in mind and based on the premise of the self as field, subjection ultimately figures as a mode of self-formation that tends to inhibit or even deny agency. The subject is being produced, out of relationships of domination and via 220 Matthias Klestil objectifying techniques, as passive non-agent and “epiphenomenon of discourses of truth” (Rayner 2007: 122). In order to bind itself to truth, a subject must deploy potential activity of the self in its own objectification; it must conform, in a “straightjacked of truth” (Gros 2005: 511). By contrast, subjectivation as a mode of self-formation not only makes action possible; it proposes self-conscious action born out of the recognition of self as a field of activity, as an indispensable element, a prerequisite of becoming a subject of truth. For this, subjectivation demands the attainment of a critical distance, an attitude of critique; through parrhesia, one has to stand back and evaluate one’s position and perspective. “[W]hat is philosophy today - philosophical activity, I mean”, Foucault tellingly asks, “if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? ” (1990: 8-9). Critical reflection on one’s subjection is therefore a precondition of a subject’s active creation of itself as a truthfull, subjectivated subject. 3 Unveiling subjection: The Marrow of Tradition as genealogy of race The Foucauldian modes and terminology of self-formation introduced so far help explain the de-racializing strategies at work in Chesnutt’s novel. Although often praised today as Chesnutt’s best work, The Marrow of Tradition, famously called by his writer colleague William Dean Howells “a bitter, bitter book”, was initially unfavourably received and resulted in Chesnutt giving up his fulltime dedication to writing (cf. Bentley and Gunning 2002: 26). Retrospectively, however, the complex book, mixing features of a novel and a sociological tract, is remarkable and valuable as a text “obsessed with race’s effects on people’s behavior” (Worden 2009: 17). Chesnutt provides nothing less than an earlytwentieth century genealogy of race in the U.S. that reveals how racialization shapes subjects through processes of subjection, especially with respect to space and discourse. To begin, The Marrow of Tradition unveils subjection through its depiction of mutually constructive relations between space and race. Chesnutt’s portrayal of a southbound train in an early chapter is a prime example in this respect. The chapter, titled “A Journey Southward”, presents a significant series of events that not only introduces one of the main characters, the light-skinned African American physician Dr. Miller, but also gives a fictional account of the infamous Supreme Court decision Plessy vs. Ferguson. Miller, returning to his Southern home from a trip “to purchase equipment for his new hospital” (Chesnutt 2002: 75), meets his former liberal-minded professor Dr. Alwin Burns and engages in vivid conversation about their profession. However, as the train moves southward, the conductor enforces the segregational “law of Virginia”, thereby Unveiling Subjection, Practicing Subjectivation 221 eventually “part[ing] friends” (77). Adhering to the wish of another passenger, a one-eyed character named Captain McBane, who will play a major role later on as one of the white supremacist conspirators who incite the climactic riot, Miller retreats to a car with “faded upholstery”, which was conspicuously labeled at either end with large cards, similar to those in the other car, except that they bore the word “Colored” in black letters upon a white background. […] Lest a white man should forget that he was white, […] these cards would keep him constantly admonished of the fact; should a colored person endeavor, for a moment, to lose sight of his disability, these staring signs would remind him continually that between him and the rest of mankind not of his own color, there was by law a great gulf fixed. (79) The novel thus highlights that Miller’s spatial exclusion involves not just the official separate-but-equal doctrine to fabricate a “great gulf ” (79) between supposedly distinct groups of humans, but that the enactment of this law furthermore requires customs and surveillance practices that norm and exclude. It is passengers such as McBane with his one-eyed “scornful glance” (77), in conjunction with “staring signs” (79), that spatially inscribe race. Chesnutt illustrates how space functions as a “bubble of panoptic and classifying power, a module of imprisonment that makes possible the production of an order” (de Certeau 1988: 111). The train becomes a “social microcosm” that chronicles the spatial positioning of racialized groups, as “a Chinaman, of the ordinary laundry type” and a “colored nurse” enter and take their assigned places (Chesnutt 2002: 81). When a group of black farm laborers, a “jolly, good-natured crowd” enters, and “enjoy themselves” (82), Miller’s reaction - he cannot identify with them “apart from the mere matter of racial sympathy” (82) - stresses the artificiality of the distinction inscribed into the train’s space. The text makes clear that the drawing of the color line through space is, in Miller’s words, “a veritable bed of Procrustes” since artificial distinctions are made meaningful beyond any “logical and considerate basis” (2002: 82). Through the physican’s observations, the train represents a bourgeois panoptic space that epitomises the constructedness of race within and out of spatial separations through a segregating vision of the late-nineteenth century American South. The novel thereby emphasizes not only the arbitrariness inherent in the mutually constitutive relation between race and space, but by extension also problematizes the readability of race in human bodies. Beyond demonstrating how space is involved in the production of racialized subjectivity, the novel also traces how racializing discourse is part of processes of subjection. The discursive production of race becomes visible, on the one 222 Matthias Klestil hand, through the ways in which Chesnutt lets his characters speak and in his deconstruction of speech as a racial marker. Although, at first, the various dialects and sociolects found in the cast might suggest speech as a stable marker of racial identity, matters become much more complicated upon closer consideration. What should readers make, for example, of Dr. Miller, the “colored doctor” (2002: 198), whose sophisticated speech strikingly contrasts with that of other black characters such as Sam, the black servant at the Carteret mansion, or Josh Green, the courageous but uneducated black leader? Other figures, too, deemed part of an “inferior” race by the white supremacist creed, speak in ways that would not betray their racial identity, such as the lawyer Watson, the editor of the local newspaper Barker, or the “new nurse” of the Carterets, who is presented through her use of language in stark contrast to old Mammy Jane. Conversely, some white-identified (supremacist) characters do not speak in ways associated with “whiteness”, most obviously in the case of Captain McBane. As the “son of an overseer” who perpetuated his father’s trade in the system of “convict labor” and being of lower social standing, his speech shows none of the gentleness in vocabulary and tone that characterizes Major Carteret and General Belmont’s racist lyrics (2002: 87, 65). On the contrary, McBane’s words offend the other conspirators in their insulting coarseness, which, in Carteret’s view, “robbed the enterprise [i.e. an attempted coup] of all its poetry” (2002: 199). McBane’s excessively sought aristocratic whiteness is not readable in his verbal manners, his racial affiliation not inscribed, literally not pronounced in his speech. Chesnutt thus, while revealing the discursive production of racial categories, through his diverse cast and its verbal ambivalences, deconstructs not only bodies but also speech as racial marker. The novel unveils the arbitrariness inherent in racializing processes of subjection. On the other hand, it also examines how professional discourse and ethics are involved in the discursive production of racialized subjects. The professional dis‐ courses Chesnutt presents, such as journalistic, judicial and medical discourses, are infused and often compromised by racial thought. A look at medical profes‐ sionalism is particularly striking in this respect, as it severely questions the notion that post-Reconstruction “professionalism seemed to promise aspiring blacks a site, not economic and not social, on which blacks and whites could meet without fear in their pursuit of universal truth” (Danielson 2008: 77). Such a hopeful vision, put to the test through the character of Dr. Miller, is ultimately denied by Chesnutt’s text. Not just the scenes on the southbound train, but especially the subsequent sequence in Wellington that involves the debate of Miller’s attending the medical operation on Dodie Carteret, the infant heir of one of the supremacist conspirators, convey Chesnutt’s doubts about the Unveiling Subjection, Practicing Subjectivation 223 liberating potentials of professionalism. For although his friend Dr. Burns acts in accordance with his ethical conviction and “professional honor” (Chesnutt 2002: 88), insisting that it would help to have Miller, “a capable man” (84) assist him, Major Carteret, in accordance with his white supremacist creed, opposes this position and eventually succeeds in betraying Burns’ idealism. Significantly, Burns does not overtly give in to Carteret’s racial prejudice and desire to exclude Miller. Neither Carteret’s fervid attempts to persuade Burns into acknowledging Southern attitudes towards ‘the Negro’, nor the local physician Dr. Price’s attempts at mediating are successful in changing Burns’ mind. The turning point comes instead through a “change of manner” (89) in Carteret’s speech, an alteration in discourse that aligns their positions, so that Burns can justify for himself that if there is a personal question involved, that alters the situation. Had it been merely a matter of color, I should have maintained my position. As things stand, I wash my hands of the whole affair, so far as Miller is concerned, like Pontius Pilate […]. (90) Professional discourse and ethics thus reveal a blind spot through which Carteret’s racism enters. In this respect, it is significant that the alignment of Cartered and Burns happens in the private; it is ostensibly “vital, personal reasons” (89) that Carteret puts forward at last in order to corrupt Burns into the dominant racial order. Ostensibly, since these “personal reasons” involve a shared family history across racial lines between the two families at the heart of the novel, the Millers and the Carterets, which is suppressed precisely because it is “a matter of color” (90). Ultimately, the idea of medical discourse as a place where “blacks and whites could meet without fear in their pursuit of universal truth” (Danielson 2008: 77) is therefore shown, at least in the climate of the post-Reconstruction American South, as unrealistic. Even with a liberal-minded Northern physician like Burns, medical professionalism is not portrayed as promising solutions but as vulnerable to racist practices and sentiments, which is also visible in the conditions of Miller’s acceptance in Wellington. Rather than being embraced by the town community for his superb professional capacities, he is tolerated by his fellow professionals primarily because he does not take his white colleagues’ patients away (cf. Chesnutt 2002: 84-85). Through its portrayal of racialized spatial constellations and discursive strategies, the novel eventually promotes a rather pessimistic view of professionalism in general, depicting its discourses as essentially infused by and proliferating racial truths. The Marrow of Tradition therefore exhibits racialization as a process of subjection by revealing the arbitrariness and mutual constructedness that char‐ acterizes the relation between race and space, by deconstructing the readability 224 Matthias Klestil of both bodies and speech as racial markers, and by showing how professional discourse is involved in the production and perpetuation of race. The novel portrays its cast as interlinked with and limited by racialization; characters are confined into “straightjackets of racial truth” (cf. Gros 2005: 511), as products of the racializing processes that Chesnutt genealogically disentangles. Figures such as the porter Jerry, who seeks safety in subjecting himself to a model offered by the white supremacists, Mammy Jane and Sandy, who are products of an old time, or Major Carteret, who is caught up in his life-long beliefs, are presented as having little or no agency. Crucially, the characters’ inability to act surfaces across racial lines. Chesnutt ultimately unveils racial customs as discursive and spatial practices that determine and limit the subject ethically, leave a subjectas-object, devoid of agency. If the novel therefore appears overcrowded with flat stock characters, “walking social exhibits who behave more like personifications than persons” (Andrews 1980: 203), this is precisely because the cast is marked by their determination through racializing subjection. The novel does not simply employ flat characters; rather, their flatness is both a result and a means of portraying processes of subjection that determine and limit their lives. They are “puppets in the hand of fate” (Chesnutt 2002: 231), spotlighted as subjected, ethically impoverished non-agents. 4 Practicing subjectivation: The Marrow of Tradition as care of the self Chesnutt thus illustrates existing conditions in the South and a “tradition of en‐ demic prejudice against Negroes in the post-Reconstruction period” (Robinson 2002: 100) by exposing racializing processes of subjection that leave everyone involved incapacitated, unable to truly take charge of their actions and lives. Beyond unveiling subjection, however, the novel also presents and practices subjectivation. This mode of self-formation characterized by a recognition of and distancing from underlying processes of the self and by seeking truth as element of action within relationships of power, becomes visible when considering forms of truth telling. Veridiction in the novel figures in two ways: On the one hand, Chesnutt reveals through his cast how racialization affects veridiction. On the other hand, The Marrow of Tradition ultimately not only presents and criticizes racialized veridiction, but also performs subjectivating and de-racializing truth telling to affect a readerly subject. Regarding veridiction in characters, Chesnutt makes an important point by showing how veridiction fails due to racialization. Acts of truth telling in characters occur in two types of situations that correspond with the dominant racial order. First, we find instances of veridiction among characters identified Unveiling Subjection, Practicing Subjectivation 225 as belonging to the same racial group. Such intra-racial veridiction emerges as problematic, Chesnutt suggesting that this never involves telling truth in its entirety and full implications. A good example comes in the soft rebuke that the morally corrupted heir of one of the first families of the town, Tom Delamere, receives from Major Carteret after the latter learns of Tom’s gambling habits. The major employs merely “mild censure” (2002: 103), and was kind, and talked in a fatherly way about the danger of extremes, the beauty of moderation, and the value of discretion as a rule of conduct. […] The major was a man of feeling and of tact, and could not have put the subject in a way less calculated to wound the amour proper of a very young man”. (102, emphasis in original) Delamere responds to this address, which is anything but frank speech, with hypocrisy, flattery, and “well-simulated frankness” (103). Parrhesiastic veridic‐ tion does not occur on either side in this instance of intra-racial veridiction. Truth telling, in this relationship and a host of others is exposed as morally flawed on all sides, not merely with respect to a vile Southern aristocracy that greedily seeks to stay in power by upholding the fiction of race, but also in various exchanges among the black characters of the novel. Veridiction in these cases is flawed, concealing rather than revealing truth. The same holds true for the other type of situation, namely inter-racial veridiction across the socially constructed racial divides. Consider, for example, how Major Carteret’s wife Olivia and her aunt, Polly Ochiltree, never commence veridiction in the presence of a black person (Chesnutt 2002: 124), or how Dr. Miller and the editor Lee Ellis are forced into silence despite shared views on the goings-on while driving together through the riotous Wellington, as “[t]here was nothing […] to say” (223). The exchange between Dr. Price and Dr. Miller, too, following the refused participation of the latter in the surgery at the Carteret mansion is revealing in this respect. Here, Price’s admission that he “did not like to lie, even to a negro” (91) epitomizes the essence of racialized relationships of veridiction in the novel. Chesnutt makes clear that a dominant creed according to which only “[t]o a man of his own caste, his word was his bond” (91) ultimately subverts and compromises any relation to truth. Racialization leads to non-parrhesiastic relationships: On the one hand, Dr. Price cannot bring up the courage “to look this man [Miller] in the eyes” to tell him “the humiliating truth” (90). On the other hand, Dr. Miller is “not altogether sure, upon reflection, whether he blamed Dr. Price very much for the amiable lie, which had been meant to spare his feelings” (92). The novel thus suggests that racialization infuses the very fabric of acts and relations of veridiction. It renders modes of frank speech impossible and corrupts both the 226 Matthias Klestil speaker and the listener, who does no longer seek truth from the other’s lips. Interpersonal care of the self and subjectivation become impossible. This being the general position the novel takes regarding its characters’ inabilities to tell truth in a racialized world, there are nevertheless two instances of parrhesiastic truth telling. First, we find a form of public political parrhesia in the local black editor’s article on the injustice of lynching (cf. Chesnutt 2002: 96, 193). His writing fulfills the criteria of parrhesia: It is a “frank and somewhat bold discussion” (97) and is addressed to the public, thus taking the risk and requiring the courage characteristic of parrhesiastic speech. Moreover, the utterance manifests through a “right of free speech” (215), and comes as dutiful criticism stating what the addressees, i.e. “white people would scarcely acknowledge to themselves in secret” (193). The possibility and the effects of such parrhesia, however, are shown to be fatal, as frank discourse is corrupted through racialization. Here, parrhesia even becomes instrumental to the conspirator’s campaign, as Carteret responds to what he views as an “obnoxious article” (193) with an “inflammatory comment” (196) that denounces the very possibility of public truth telling. Hope lies, however, in a second form of parrhesia in the novel, namely parrhesiastic discourse in the private sphere. Such truth telling becomes crucial towards the novel’s close, as, once more, pressure in the form of the impending death of the young Carteret heir is built up and reaches an intensity, in which “the pride of intellect and caste is broken” (Chesnutt 2002: 243). This leads to the climactic situation in which the only way to save Dodie Carteret’s life lies in Miller’s medical skills. The situation introduces a shift of parrhesia from an impaired discourse of truth in the public to parrhesia in the private sphere, which is paralleled by a shift from male to female characters’ veridiction. After an unsuccessful conversation between Miller and Carteret, their respective wives, the unacknowledged half sisters Janet and Olivia, encounter each other in a private parrhesiastic discourse. In this exchange, relations that have remained hidden throughout due to the racial order are finally brought out into the open: “I have a confession to make. You are my lawful sister. My father was married to your mother. You are entitled to his name, and to half his estate” (245, emphasis in original), Olivia Carteret acknowledges, as she throws herself at her half sister’s mercy. Janet, in turn, thus becoming the one truly heroic figure of The Marrow of Tradition, eventually leaves her husband go with orders to save little Dodie’s life despite her own son’s death in the riot incited by Carteret, as she can therefore acknowledge that she has “a heart to feel, even for one who has injured her” (246). Hence, while the attempt at political parrhesia fails, The Marrow of Tradition proposes that truth telling under existential pressure might succeed. Unveiling Subjection, Practicing Subjectivation 227 The novel illustrates that veridiction is dysfunctional through racialization, yet nonetheless presents two instances of parrhesia to show the dangers of African American frank speech in public while proposing the effectiveness of parrhesiastic discourse in private. Moreover, the novel not only presents us with truth telling, but also becomes itself an act of parrhesiastic, subjectivating veridiction. Considering that the text plays with truth and a “pattern of secrets and revelation, essence and appearance” (Finseth 1999: 11), it is significant that Chesnutt from the start binds his audience in an epistemological game by relating a readerly subject to a premised truth. The Marrow of Tradition introduces and presupposes a true constellation within its extensive cast of characters: the truth of the half sisterhood of Olivia Carteret and Janet Miller. Thus, a genealogical fact is proposed, a family truth fixed as true within the novel’s diegesis. At the same time, Chesnutt stresses the storicity of this truth, as he presents the genealogical fact as told, by having Mammy Jane, the Carteret’s house servant, relate the family secret to Dr. Prize as a story that “goes fu’ther back, suh, fu’ther dan dis day er dis year” (Chesnutt 2002: 46). If readers are thus presented with an insight that qualifies as true knowledge, it is crucial that this gift comes not without reason, is not free of charge, as the novel begins to play with the presupposed truth through its cast. Thereby, The Marrow of Tradition negotiates and transforms readers’ relations to their own knowledge by having characters tell stories about and interpret the truth of the sisters’ kinship. It becomes involved, for example, in Janet’s wish of a reunion with her relative, as she “would have worshipped this sister, even far off, had she received even the slightest encouragement” (85). At the same time, we come to relate to the same genealogical truth through Olivia’s hatred towards her sister when she feels “violent wave[s] of antipathy sweep over her” at the mere sight of Janet (111). Readers thus encounter a host of new meanings of a simple fact, as they literally accompany Olivia in her search for more information on the circumstances of the bond between the sisters, which even leads her to discover a legal bond through marriage between her father and Janet’s mother. Thus, the text, having first positioned the reader in a seemingly stable relation to a factual truth, ultimately demonstrates how a simple genealogical fact interlinks with processes of interpretation from various characters’ points of view. Chesnutt shows, so to speak, how his cast variously “clothes” the “naked” fact that has been put forward, in new “robes”. Thereby, a readerly subject is bound up in a process of subjectivation, as it is forced to recognize that truth is not simply what is presumably known. In the beginning of the novel, readers, through Chesnutt’s fictional discourse, may enter into an 228 Matthias Klestil epistemological relationship to truth: We know perfectly well, not albeit but because this is fiction, that Olivia Carteret and Janet Miller are half siblings. The relation to truth for a readerly subject appears to be one of subjection rather than subjectivation, as the novel, at first, simulates a relationship that engages in subject formation through true knowledge. Truth, in other words, is something signified. Crucially, however, as the characters attach a variety of additional meanings to this truth, this relationship and thus the very nature and status of truth, is transformed. What previously functioned as something signified, becomes a signifier within practices of interpretation for the observed characters, as they attach new meanings to the premised truth, make it signify. Eventually, this process alters a readerly subject’s relation to truth. In one sense, Chesnutt’s narrative strategy makes clear in almost postmodernist fashion that truth is involved in processes of signification. Truth may be something signified, something that seemingly lies underneath, yet it simul‐ taneously acts as that which signifies: a readerly subject is dispossessed of the epistemological comfort of subjecting itself to truth. More importantly, however, this deconstruction also has effects of subjectivation. The text is unwilling merely to provide truth for a subject that may remain within a mode of subjection; the text is not an other of the kind that dictates and dominates. Instead, it breaks up the possibility of truth via simple relations of knowledge, to practice a constitutive form of parrhesia that requires self-conscious action within the process of attaining a sense of truth. The grammar of experience underlying self-formation changes fundamentally through the reading process. For although the premised truth remains - Olivia Carteret finally acknowledges “You are my sister” (Chesnutt 2002: 245, emphasis in original) - the act of a readerly subject’s relating to this truth is altered. The novel practices parrhesia by deconstructing the status of truth as such and takes care of the self as a field of potentiality by modifying the readerly subject into a truthfull one of subjectivation marked by active engagement in self-formation. 5 Conclusion Foucauldian theory on power and the self helps demonstrate how Chesnutt’s novel not only deconstructs the fiction of race but also fundamentally changes modes of self-formation. The focus on the subject highlights how the writer’s proclaimed goal to endow his literature with “the faculty of persuasion, by which men’s hearts are reached, the springs of action touched, and the currents of life directed” (1999: 114), is realized in The Marrow of Tradition, which un‐ veils racialization through subjection while practicing de-racialization through Unveiling Subjection, Practicing Subjectivation 229 subjectivation. Since I have been rather selective both regarding my use of Foucauldian concepts and with respect to Chesnutt’s complex text (which includes important plotlines beyond the ones discussed above), my observations should only be taken as starting points that may be useful in three contexts. First, and most obviously, my reading of The Marrow of Tradition contributes to the ongoing renaissance of Charles W. Chesnutt in literary and cultural studies. In this respect, a poststructuralist (and especially a Foucauldian) perspective provides a new lens, adding to traditional biographical approaches, and helps further explicate Chesnutt’s writings as deconstructions of race. Secondly, my argument suggests the usefulness of Foucauldian ideas of self-formation not only in African American literature, but also in other ethnic literatures and in relation to racialization generally. The notions that were central to my reading, subjection and subjectivation, can be valuable in such contexts, as they allow for a simultaneous focus on both the vulnerabilities of racialized groups and strategies of resistance and resilience. Moreover, forms of veridiction could interlink productively with scholarship on (the legacies of) race and changing forms of (resistance to) racism. Thirdly, the notion of parrhesia, as understood in Foucault’s late works, may be fruitful more broadly for literary and cultural studies in the twenty-first century. Not only could parrhesia contribute to reassessments of the politics and pragmatics of (different kinds of) literature. Extending the notion of parrhesia also holds the potential to address fundamental questions anew, which have been as important to nineteenthcentury writers such as Chesnutt as they are to contemporary humans living in a globalized environment sometimes labelled an age of post-truth: the questions of veridiction and agency. References Andrews, W. L. (1980). The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Baker, B. A. (2003). The Blues Aesthetic and the Making of American Identity in the Literature of the South. New York: Lang. Bentley, N. and S. Gunning (2002). Introduction: cultural and historical background. In N. Bentley and S. Gunning (eds.), Charles W. Chesnutt: The Marrow of Tradition. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 3-26. Brodhead, R. (ed.). (1993). The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt. Durham: Duke University Press. 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Orban (eds.), Charles Chesnutt Reappraised: Essays on the First Major African American Fiction Writer. Jefferson: McFarland, 202-213. Wonham, H. B. (2004). Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Worden, D. (2009). Birth in the briar patch: Charles W. Chesnutt and the problem of racial identity. Southern Literary Journal, 41 (2), 1-20. 232 Matthias Klestil The Story of Meat - Challenging Carnist Ideology, Science Denial, and the Erasure of Animal Cruelty, Ecocide and Social Injustice Ursula Posratschnig 1 Introduction The story of meat veils existential threats to human and other animals, both through particular patterns of language use, and through the systematic absence of its damaging effects from everyday discourses on meat production and consumption. Ecolinguistic analysis shows that the large-scale and intense suffering of other animals in the livestock industry is erased both in everyday language and in the language used by animal user industries. Simultaneously, there is a systematic absence of discourses and frames that would reveal connections between meat and ecocide, social injustice, health hazards, and extreme physical violence inflicted on nonhuman animals. What follows is the application of the ecolinguistic concept of erasure to western mainstream beliefs and practices regarding meat consumption, with a focus on the US American context and occasional reference to Europe. In the face of compelling evidence, such mainstream beliefs and practices will be shown to be a “socially acceptable form of science denial” (Dutkiewicz, Taylor and Vettese 2020). 2 Stories we live by Storytelling not only seems central to the human experience, but may actually have a more influential effect on attitudes and beliefs than factual information. While individuals tend to be skeptical when processing scientific data or statistics, they seem to “drop [their] intellectual guard” when absorbed in a story, which leaves them more emotional and defenseless, and thus more easily influenced in their attitudes and beliefs (Gottschall 2012: 151-153). Such attitudes and beliefs are molded through continual exposure to stories “the way that flowing water gradually reshapes a rock” (ibid.: 153). Stories thus have a major impact on individuals’ conceptualizations of their cultural contexts, which also applies to the stories analyzed in Ecolinguistics. The stories we live by “exist behind and between the lines of the texts that surround us” (Stibbe 2015: 3), and are defined as “ways of speaking and writing that construct or shape the objects being spoken of ” (Stibbe 2012: 3), much in the same way that rivers and streams modify the environments through which they travel - gradually and unnoticeably, yet with powerful outcomes. They are also defined as “mental models that influence behavior and lie at the heart of the ecological challenges we are facing” (Stibbe 2015: 1-2), and they are classified as either beneficial or destructive, depending on whether they “encourage cooperation or competition, sharing or greed, peace or violence, and ecological sustainability or destruction” (ibid.: 11). Discourses of the destructive kind are highly problematic because they “are so much a part of mainstream ways of thinking and talking about the world, they can go unnoticed and just be treated as ‘the way things are’” (Stibbe 2012: 6). Among the most destructive stories range those that define success as “unlimited economic growth” and those that conceptualize nature “as something separate from humans, a mere stock of resources to be exploited” (Stibbe 2015: 3). The most destructive story of all, however, may be the story that places the human species at the center of planetary existence, considers human needs, desires and unsustainable aspirations as paramount, and gives humans priority over other animals and plants that make up the nonhuman environment. This story has become so dominant as to be perceived as a reality in the world today through the presence of a perverted, but persistent environment frame, which, according to Lakoff, sees the environment as separate from, and around, us. Yet, we are not separate from Nature. We are an inseparable part of Nature. Yet we separate self from other, and conceptualize Nature as other. […] It is a terribly false frame that will not go away. (2010: 76-77) In reality, however, “[t]he concept of humans outside of nature is a cultural reversal of natural reality” (Radford Ruether 1993: 348) situated at the center of anthropocentric thought, which is defined as “a kind of incessant attention to and rotation around exclusively human existence” and that entails a binary categorization of human and nonhuman animals (Calarco 2014: 416). This strict separation of humans and other animals is another such false frame that will not go away. The relationship between humans and their natural environment, or nature, within the framework of their socially constructed duality has serious implica‐ 234 Ursula Posratschnig tions. At present, a radical divide between humans and nature can be observed, particularly in western urban consumer cultures (Sampson 2013). Any knowl‐ edge that such urban individuals may have of nature and nonhuman animals tends to be conveyed through media channels which have increasingly come under corporate control (Nibert 2002: 208). Thus, while individuals habitually consume other animals, they may go a lifetime “without actually seeing a live farm animal, let alone [witness] acts of cruelty or neglect” (Linzey 1989, cited in Heuberger 2003: 102) and their “attitudes towards animal issues are con‐ sequently increasingly prone to manipulation through language” (Heuberger 2003: 102). This means that the less individuals are exposed to nature and nonhuman animals, and obtain real-life experience for themselves, the greater the power of language that constructs nature and nonhuman animals in their physical absence. Power, however, lies not only in how language is used to construct particular realities, and how such realities can be distorted or misrepresented through language; it also lies in silence and the absence of discourses on problematic issues. The story of meat as it is told in mainstream discourses fails to address its serious implications, although they gravely affect other animals, ecosystems, and fellow human beings. This phenomenon is called erasure in Ecolinguistics, and it is defined as “a story in people’s minds that an area of life is unimportant or unworthy of consideration” (Stibbe 2015: 146), which manifests itself as “patterns of language which fail to represent a particular area of life at all, or which background or distort it” (ibid.: 17). Moreover, “systematic absence […] from a text, a discourse or across multiple discourses tells a story in itself - that those participants are unimportant, irrelevant or marginal” (ibid.: 145). Erasure thus pays attention less to accidental and inevitable lexical gaps in language than to the active process of erasing particular agents, items or concepts for a specific purpose. The goal of ecolinguistic analysis is thus to determine “what has been erased by texts and discourses” and “whether that erasure is problematic” (ibid.), which shall be applied in the following to the story of meat. 3 The story of meat The myths of meat are not the facts of meat. ( Joy 2010: 116) One of the most powerful stories told today is that the consumption of meat is but a benign cultural practice, derived from ancestral traditions, necessary for good physical health, and an indicator of a reasonably affluent lifestyle. Myriad myths and beliefs revolve around this powerful story, including that eating meat is normal, natural and necessary, and just the way things have always been ( Joy The Story of Meat 235 2010). In its uniquely powerful way, however, the story of meat denies scientific findings that firmly establish the role of meat in environmental degradation, human disease, social injustice, and animal cruelty. At the same time, the impact of meat on present social and environmental challenges remains well-disguised through its absence from mainstream discourses. Such mainstream discourses normalize eating the flesh and secretions of other animals as a widespread cultural practice situated at the center of western cuisine. The images evoked by meat are very likely variations of these themes: ancient humans who hunt and consume an impressive mammoth; festive medieval banquets with pigs and pheasants for kings and queens to devour; or modern-day families gathered around Sunday roasts, holiday turkeys, or summer barbeques. There does seem to be some awareness, buried under a lifetime of socialization to meaty cuisine, that meat is taken from other animals, at least particular ones like cows, pigs and chickens; dogs or cats only in faraway, oriental places. The lives of these animals are pictured in ways reminiscent of farm life as illustrated in children’s books, where the farm is a wonderfully romantic and colorful place in a pristine environment; green and perpetually sunny, with happy faces on the farm folk and the animals they regard as ‘family’. This seems to be the dominant conceptualization of meat and the lives of farm animals in mainstream discourses, observable in myriad encounters with people in real life and on TV. This story is retold with the sincerity of prayer and it is deeply ingrained in the minds of individuals who have internalized that meat is what has made humans strong and intelligent, that meat is the essence of good health and masculinity, and that the animals happily embrace their roles as providers of their own flesh. In animal rights advocacy discourse, the Matrix metaphor is often used to symbolize this condition. In the 1999 science fiction film Matrix, the protagonist is faced with the choice between a blue and a red pill. The blue pill will allow him to remain in the Matrix and continue with what he perceives as his relatively comfortable reality. The red pill, however, will allow him to perceive the actual reality beyond the Matrix, which is a violent battlefield. Similarly, unless individuals choose the red pill and actively seek to know the realities beyond the carnistic matrix, they remain blissfully ignorant. The carnistic matrix is sustained through tradition, education, and massive legal and PR efforts on behalf of the meat industry, which all tell the story of meat; and it is also sustained through language. The word meat itself, for instance, conceals the fact that what is on someone’s plate is actually the flesh of another being; living, breathing, and hopeful; with a broad range of emotions and immeasurable cognitive abilities; diverse behaviors, strong social bonds, 236 Ursula Posratschnig particular needs and idiosyncratic joys (see Balcombe 2010). These are only the characteristics that humans can deduce from their own experience, but there is likely much more that may never be known. What disguises the realities of meat even more effectively is the endless variety of names for different types of meat-based cuts and meals: bacon and steak, spare ribs and luncheon meat, ham and baloney, sausage, schnitzel and wurstsalat, smoked or roasted meat and jerky, meatloaf, pot loaf, goulash and stew, charcuterie and delicatessen, seafood and meatball sandwiches, hot dogs and sloppy joes, hot wings, buffalo wings, and pepperoni pizza, and the almighty burger as cheese or as ham. There are at times individuals who abstain from consuming meat, which involves the conscious effort not to conform to what is taken for granted by most. It may be based on the knowledge that contemporary meat consumption causes unfathomable violence suffered by other animals, or may endanger human health; or that beyond the Matrix there is a calculating business world, producing meat for profit and embodying a terrible scourge on humans, other animals, and global ecosystems. This scourge is called the animal-industrial complex, which is defined as the “global capitalist economic and scientific-technological-corporate commodifi‐ cation of animal life” (Calarco 2014: 418). It is one of the major global businesses today and is estimated to yield “a direct yearly revenue of $ 2.74 trillion in the US alone, compared to a ‘mere’ $ 734 billion in the automotive industry” (Leenaert 2017: 11). However, [s]ustainability concerns include, at the very least, direct environmental pollution, greenhouse gas production, human health impacts of consumption and labor, effects on communities, land use priorities, water consumption, zoonotic disease, and ethical questions around the killing of the animals. (Twine 2013: 78) The scale of the global meat business is such that “more than 160 billion animals are killed every year for food production (around 60 billion terrestrial and more than 100 billion aquatic animals)” (Brels 2017: 113). And this is billions, not millions. In terms of sheer numbers, animal agriculture is the most far-reaching and consequential form of animal exploi‐ tation. It accounts for 99 percent of the animals killed by humans, and many more animals die in the food industry than through scientific research, hunting, or the clothing and entertainment industries combined. (Leenaert 2017: 8) The environmental impact of this industry is so significant that it must be regarded as “a global emergency” and addressed “as a root cause of the major The Story of Meat 237 global issues the world is currently facing” (Brels 2017: 113). All of this is erased by the story of meat, which instead continues to evoke images of romantic rural adventures and innocent culinary pleasures. The story of meat also parrots the false belief that meat was central to the development of human brain size and intelligence. However, it is based on archeological work that focused unduly on meat “largely because the butchered bones of wild animals are so likely to be preserved at dig sites” (Barras 2016). Rather than meat, “[c]ooking starchy foods was central to the dietary change that triggered and sustained the growth of the human brain” (Copeland 2015). While ancient humans certainly did consume other animals, it remains unclear to which extent (Pobiner 2016); and “for most of the last twenty million years [humans] were eating fruit, nuts, leaves, and the occasional bit of insect, frog, bird or mouse” (Dunn 2012). This is a far cry from the substantial amounts of animal-based products that are consumed every day in meatified western societies. It is the animal-industrial complex that is largely responsible for this “’mea‐ tification’ of the global diet”, meaning that “the global population has approx‐ imately doubled since the 1950s, but meat production has increased almost five-fold in the same period” (Weis, cited in Twine 2013: 85). The result is that particularly in western countries, following a carnivorous diet requires considerably less effort than choosing not to. “Meat is readily available, while nonmeat alternatives must be actively sought out and may be hard to come by”, and “vegetarians often find themselves having to explain their choices, defend their diet, and apologize for inconveniencing others” ( Joy 2010: 106). Moreover, those who follow a plant-based diet are frequently met with resistance and ridicule: “vegans and vegetarians in western society - and vegans in particular - experience discrimination and bias on par with other minorities” (Reynolds 2019). The animal-industrial complex seeks to justify increasing levels of meat production by claiming that the latter is necessary to feed growing global populations. However, global agribusiness is responsible for the appropriation of land and water, while “[producing] food for those who can afford their products, not for those who need them” (Nibert 2002: 116). In other words, valuable land and water resources are used to fatten other animals for profit at the expense of starving populations. Moreover, the story of meat omits that eating other animals, where it is not a matter of survival, is a matter of choice and part of the carnist ideology ( Joy 2010). While the story of meat normalizes eating other animals, those who choose not to comply with such mainstream pressures are assumed to 238 Ursula Posratschnig act on the basis of a particular belief system regarding the value of nonhuman life, and are thus marked as ideological, while eating meat is simply “what we consider normal” ( Joy 2010: 31). However, Joy coined the term Carnism to show that the mainstream beliefs held about eating meat also constitute a powerful ideology that is based on the construction of a binary and hierarchical relationship between humans and other animals, and that resembles other pervasive ideologies like patriarchy (ibid.). The story of meat also fails to mention the environmentally destructive impact of the livestock industry. Although a strong connection has been established between animal-based food choices and environmental degradation, there is a lack of public awareness, partly caused by the livestock industry’s desire to conceal its ecological impact (Oppenlander 2012: xv). What individuals know about food is “obscured by many layers of cultural, political, and educa‐ tional untruths and misconceptions”, which applies in particular to animaluser industries like meat, dairy and fish, who contribute most strongly to global depletion by polluting drinking water, air, and land, while threatening biodiversity everywhere (ibid.: 1-2). In addition, the livestock industry seems to be an underestimated contributor to the climate crisis. Raising animals for food produces more CO 2 emissions than the entire transportation sector and contributes to the depletion of land and water in alarming ways (FAO 2006). The vast amounts of manure produced by livestock “[generate] 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO 2 ” and “the digestive system of ruminants” generates “37 percent of all human-induced methane (23 times as warming as CO 2 )” (FAO 2006). In other words, “human meat consumption is the dinosaur under the desk of environmental reform” (Balcombe 2010: 192). In spite of increasing evidence that animal-based products may actually be harmful to human health, it is still widely and falsely believed that meat is a requirement for good health. This can be explained through the “[s]ignificant factors of lifestyle, culture, tradition, psychological resistance to change, and powerful lobby group pressure” (Gullone 2017: 47-48). However, in 2015 the World Health Organization classified processed meat as “carcinogenic to hu‐ mans (Group I)”, red meat as “probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A)”; and processed meat as proven to cause “other chronic and potentially lifethreatening diseases such as coronary heart disease, stroke and type II diabetes” (Harvard School of Public Health 2015). Another serious threat to human health emanates from looming antibiotic resistance as a result of the use of antibiotics in factory farming. In the United States, up to 80 % of all antibiotics are fed to cows, pigs and chickens “to prevent The Story of Meat 239 disease or to promote growth” (Guglielmi 2017). The effects of this reckless use of precious medication are starting to show, as globally “at least 700,000 people die each year due to drug-resistant diseases” and the World Health Organization warns that this number could increase to “10 million deaths each year by 2050” (WHO 2019). The scale of this threat is so grand that it “could end the age of medical progress, returning humanity to a time when minor injuries and routine operations could be fatal” (Cohen 2020). Finally, the story of meat erases all relevant connections between livestock farming, environmental degradation, and zoonotic outbreaks. It is ironic that in the US, CDC stands for “an agency whose name is actually the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” (Foer and Gross 2020, italics in the original), and that prevention is dropped from the acronym as it is from public discourse. The same is true for the role of the animal-industrial complex in zoonotic outbreaks, exemplified by the Spanish influenza pandemic early in the 20 th century, and by repeated bird flu outbreaks since the late 20 th century originating in largescale chicken farms. The UN has been urging authorities everywhere to curb factory farming, because together with “live bird markets” it creates optimal environments for viruses to “spread and mutate into more dangerous form” (Greger 2007: 117-121). Outbreaks should therefore not be viewed as isolated events: The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to food production and the profitability of multinational corporations. Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture and, more specifically, livestock production. (Wallace 2020) Mass media, however, has been telling the story of a ‘Chinese virus’, “with fingers being pointed at Chinese wet markets and eating habits” (Spinney 2020). Except for mentioning the consumption of bats and pangolins, however, the animal-industrial complex has not been connected explicitly enough to the current pandemic, except on animal rights platforms. An analysis conducted by Million Dollar Vegan has found that “[m]ainstream media outlets are neglecting to report on the connection between Covid-19 and the human exploitation of nonhuman animals” (2020). The platform surveyed five of the world’s largest media outlets (NPR, BBC, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times) with specific attention to the words animal and origin. Even when they occur together, authors “neglect to mention that human exploitation of nonhuman animals is at the root of the pandemic” (2020). In light of the above, the continued consumption of other animals at current levels has been called “a socially acceptable form of science denial” in a recent 240 Ursula Posratschnig New York Times article (Dutkiewicz, Taylor and Vettese 2020). Current levels of meat consumption, moreover, lead to chronic health issues, which have been shown to make the course of infection with viruses like Covid-19 more severe and more lethal (Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine 2020). And it is again other animals who suffer when new vaccines have to be designed and tested (Benatar 2006) and when large populations of factory farm captives are brutally culled in the event of outbreaks (Greenwald 2020). Yet the story of meat in mainstream discourse is one of cherished tradition and rural nostalgia, of ancestors’ rise in the food chain, of healthful nourishment and savory celebration, of physical necessity and masculine virility, of palatable comfort and taken-for-granted prosperity, and of how just the way things have always been. The way it is told in mainstream discourse is as powerful as it is destructive, because it obscures a whole universe of tragedy suffered by humans, other animals, and ecosystems, and it must be unmasked urgently for its exceptionally destructive nature. 4 The erasure of other animals as sentient individuals and as victims of animal user industries Animal bodies are the reality behind our metaphors. All of us know the reality of the sheer horror of animals’ lives on some level, which is why we don’t want to be treated like them. (Hunter 2012) The categories of the human and the animal are constructed through language as completely separate, and the human-animal relationship is framed as humans over animals. The very term animal erases the biological reality that both humans and other animals are mammals and belong to the same group, so that saying humans and animals is “as incoherent as saying ‘carrots and vegetables’” (Shapiro, cited in DeMello 2012: 15). However, there are may examples in English for the common assumption that “humans are ideally different from animals” (Goatly 2006: 17), including bovine = slow or stupid, sheep = unthinking imitator or over obedient person, pig = greedy or fat person (ibid.: 26-28). This “[reinforces] the ideology of human superiority and disdain for animals” (ibid.: 28), and the consequence is that much lower value is assigned to the lives of other animals. Such anthropocentric prejudice can be found, for instance, in major mono‐ lingual English dictionaries that exhibit “strong anthropocentric biases against animals” (Heuberger 2003: 93). These biases confirm the “shared view of our time that animals are, above all, renewable resources for nutrition, clothing, experimentation and labour” (ibid.: 94) and that, therefore, “animals are treated The Story of Meat 241 as objects that are produced, managed, optimized and utilized” (Trampe, cited in Heuberger 2003: 94). As expected, particularly domestic animals tend to be thus objectified and portrayed as “subordinate links in the human food chain, without recognizing them as the self-sufficient creatures that they are” (ibid.: 96). A turkey, for instance, is defined as “a bird that looks like a large chicken and is often eaten at Christmas and at Thanksgiving” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, cited in Heuberger 2003: 96). Such classifications of other animals as altogether different from humans, and their perception solely on the basis of their use to humans, “distances us from, and prevents us from seeing, animal suffering” (Shapiro, cited in Stibbe 2012: 23). One of the most profound and far-reaching ways in which other animals are objectified is through legal discourse, where an “ancient, high, and thick legal wall […] presently separates all humans from all non-humans” (Wise 2013: 241), and in which animals are erased as living beings. One major effort in animal rights advocacy is thus aimed at changing the legal status of nonhuman animals from property to persons before the law, so that they may have basic legal rights, including the most fundamental ones of bodily integrity and bodily liberty (ibid.: 242). As for now, however, nonhuman animals are categorized as “humans’ property and thus subject to the rules of the laws of property and contract. Animals are not ‘she’ or ‘he’. They are things. They are ‘its’” (Beirne 2014: 54). The conception of other animals as objects or property is the basis of their exploitation for economic gain, and “the erasure of animals as living beings in agribusiness discourse has the potential to remove moral consideration of animal welfare from the design and running of farming systems” (Stibbe 2015: 154). These are environments in which nonhuman animals are regarded as lifeless machines and experience extreme physical and psychological torture. Their role in human nutrition is thus an example of how participants are erased on a massive scale by industrial and everyday discourses on the consumption of their flesh. The livestock industry itself uses specific discursive strategies, such as doublespeak, to mask the cruelties inherent in factory farming. Such language is “intentionally misleading by being ambiguous or disingenuous” (Glenn 2004: 64-65). Examples include the use of animal agriculture to sound more natural and benign than livestock industry (Dunayer 2001, cited in Glenn 2004: 68-70; the term livestock itself is problematic because it reduces other animals to commodities, and they would be better represented by terms such as foodindustry captives, see Dunayer 2001, cited in Stibbe 2012: 4). Moreover, gestation crates (which are metal cages the size of the animals they contain, to which pregnant pigs are confined for most of their lives, causing serious physical and 242 Ursula Posratschnig mental pain) are called individual accommodation, and weak piglets or so-called runts are euthanized (which means they are smashed against the concrete floor, sometimes multiple times, or beaten to death with pipes), whereby “calling it euthanasia hides the violence and suffering inflicted on these animals behind a euphemism that renders the practice humane or sterile” (Dunayer 2001, cited in Glenn 2004: 67-70). At the same time, the industry benefits from “the creation of ‘speaking’ animals in advertisements to sell the products of those industrial processes” (Glenn 2004: 63). Euphemistic language that glosses over the torturous practices to which other animals are routinely subjected in the meat industry tends to be combined with advertisements in which smiling and talking animals offer their own bodies, bodily fluids or eggs as desirable commodities. It is, however, highly problematic that “[t]he use of speaking animals selling themselves is largely taken for granted and rarely questioned with respect to ethics” (ibid.: 72). The practice is as absurd as it is effective in erasing the real circumstances under which other animals exist on factory farms, while their “remains are simply consumable commodities” (ibid.: 71). The term “absent referent” (Adams 2015 [1990]: 20) has been used to concep‐ tualize the erasure of nonhuman animals’ lives in meat discourses, which seek to conceal that meat cannot exist without extinguishing another animal’s life: Animals are made absent through language that renames dead bodies before consumers participate in eating them. Our culture further mystifies the term ‘meat’ with gastronomic language, so we do not conjure the dead, butchered animals, but cuisine. (Adams 2015 [1990]: 20-21) For instance, “[e]ating pâté sounds refined, whereas eating the swollen liver of a force-fed goose sounds quite different” (Smith-Harris 2004: 14). It sounds different because, rather than erasing the torture and brutal death of another animal, it truthfully represents the nature of “pâté” (geese factory farmed for “pâté” live in cages, and are force-fed every day by having metal pipes inserted into their gullets and feed pumped into their stomachs). Terms for “rendered animals” including “beef, mutton, veal, pork, poultry, bacon, sausage, [and] terrine” are equally misleading (Beirne 2014: 53). The keeping and killing of animals destined for consumption changed in modern times when it was moved to remote locations and became invisible to the general public (ibid.: 52). This invisibility has led to an almost complete absence of public knowledge about the actual day-to-day realities of factory farming, which is relevant as 99 % of food animals in the US and 90 % of food animals worldwide are estimated to be held captive under such conditions (Sentience Institute 2019). Images or undercover footage obtained by animal rights activists The Story of Meat 243 do surface occasionally on social media or in late-night documentaries, but overall, extremely little is known by the general public about the standard conditions under which captives of the food industry endure their lives and deaths. These standard conditions are intentionally concealed by the livestock in‐ dustry and their recording and publication is often criminalized on both sides of the Atlantic. Those listed below (they do not include cases of extreme animal cruelty that has been reported by NGOs and activits) exist in industrial farming everywhere in the western world. They include extreme confinement and crowding with little or no room to escape excrement or aggressive peers or for autonomous movement, sometimes even inability to reach sources of food or water; excessive boredom and ensuing aggression and cannibalism; uninterrupted artificial darkness to discourage movement or uninterrupted artificial light to encourage eating, deprivation of the natural rhythm of day and night; ammonia-filled air irritating eyes, airways and olfactory senses, often leading to chronic infection; existing on concrete or wire instead of grassy surfaces or straw, often causing severe and untreated injury, obviously painful; monotonous sustenance rather than varied or preferred foods, at times even deliberate starvation; mutilations including castration without anesthesia by untrained personnel, clipping of teeth, beaks and tails, or branding; excessive stress through having to watch peers being mutilated or abused; forced separa‐ tion from family or peers, causing severe psychological stress; frequent chronic pain from being bred to grow too fast or in grotesque proportions; being loaded onto transportation trucks, beaten severely for resisting, and handled in extremely rough ways, often causing broken bones or amputated limbs; exposure to extreme crowding and extreme temperatures on route, both heat and cold, for considerable lengths of time, often without food or water, resulting in death for a calculated percentage of individuals; being killed mechanically and without compassion, by being gassed or foamed, with faulty equipment or human error, at excessive speed, often leading to individuals being boiled or dismembered alive. The story of meat erases this large-scale institutional torture and violent killing of nonhuman animals for their flesh, which has been called the “animal holocaust” (Best 2007). It is a comparison that is highly controversial and usually met with incredulousness and outrage. However, [t]here is a significant parallel between animals and humans confined in cages or cells, sick and scrawny, crammed into trucks or railcars on the way to slaughter, forced to labor unto death, and killed in gas chamber rooms (or meeting worse fates in the case of animals, such as being sliced apart while still conscious). (Best 2007) 244 Ursula Posratschnig Similarly, Harari calls factory farming one of the worst crimes in history and states that “[t]he fate of animals in industrial installations has become one of the most pressing ethical issues of our time” (2015) as there is “a system of industrialized animal food production […] that is under no legal compunction not to torture the animals in its ‘care’” and “if it turns out that it is cost effective to confine animals in conditions that actually resemble Auschwitz or Dachau, then that’s what will happen” (Robbins, cited in Joy 2010: 8). Inside and beyond the factory farm, the construction of other animals as inanimate resources or commodities allows human owners to take their lives with impunity. Judging from the vast range of words for ways in which animals can be killed, it seems that killing is, first and foremost, what humans do to other animals. They can be “boiled, cooked, crushed, electrocuted, ensnared, exterminated, harpooned, hooked, hunted, injected with chemicals, netted, poached, poisoned, run over, shot, slit, speared, strangled, stuck, suffocated, trapped and vivisected” (Beirne 2014: 53). They, can, however, not be murdered, which is the term reserved for the killing of a human being and may sound strange or even comical when applied to another animal; the term theriocide has been suggested as a dignified equivalent to homicide (ibid.: 62). The story of meat thus paves the way for animal cruelty on an unprecedented global scale and it is one aim of this paper to draw attention to the nature and scale of this exploitation. The other aim is to show that it is not only other animals that feel the consequences of the animal-industrial complex. 5 The erasure of social injustice If you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals. (Foer 2020b) Social injustice cannot be addressed meaningfully without referring to the deep connections between the systematic oppression of both humans and other ani‐ mals. This is true particularly in the era of global capitalism where “[increased] awareness of the entanglement of many critical problems confronting humans in the twenty-first century with the oppression of other animals is important for the overall struggle for social justice” (Nibert 2002: xiii). The following examples are intended to illustrate the joint oppression of humans and other animals. The story of meat masks close connections between the oppression of other animals and women, which is most powerfully dismantled by ecofeminist approaches. They draw attention to “hierarchies of domination as the model of relationship between men and women, between human groups, and between humans and other beings” (Radford Ruether 1993: 354). Today, the animal- The Story of Meat 245 industrial complex is “the most large-scale, institutionalized control of female reproduction, sex, and bodies-in-general that has ever existed”, which should be included along with human privilege in any feminist critique (Hunter 2012). And feminists have, in fact, examined the joint objectification, fragmentation and consumption of women and other animals, where women figuratively and animals literally are turned into meat in patriarchal cultures (Adams 2015 [1990]: 26-27). This is exemplified by advertisements that read: “Everybody loves big breasts. Introducing the big chicken fillet sandwich. 100 % chicken breast” (Krantz n.d.). It is also exemplified in language use where terms used for other animals are also used to degrade women: bitch, fat cow, hot chick, henpecker, sex kitten, foxy lady, evil vixen, beaver and pussy - “women and animals are consumed together” and “made into pieces of meat” in this “metaphor of oppression” (Hunter 2012). Moreover, the meat vs. vegetable metaphor embodies masculine virility and feminine passivity (Adams 2015 [1990]: 14-15) and it seems that what is perceived in patriarchal cultures as authentic masculinity depends on the consumption of meat (ibid.: 29), which appears to be “visibly aligned with a certain kind of conservative alpha-masculinity” (Reynolds 2019). Before it became a mass commodity, meat was a privilege of usually white, male elites to such an extent that “[n]ineteenth-century advocates of white superiority endorsed meat as super food” which “divided the world into intel‐ lectually superior meat eaters and inferior plant eaters”, providing an additional rationale for colonial endeavors (Adams 2015 [1990]: 8-9). At present, the economic disadvantage of minority populations in the US, for instance, is well documented, as is their increasing dependence on meat-heavy and unhealthful fast food restaurants in food deserts, which are “areas with limited access to healthful food sources and high levels of racial segregation and income inequality” (Hilmers et al. 2012). Simultaneously, a “disproportionate” presence of factory farms has been documented in rural communities, particularly “in areas populated by people of color or people with low incomes” (Donham et al. 2007). The health and quality of life of such communities suffers greatly from “the emission of pollutants and malodors that reduce the quality of air and water” and that “decrease the value of properties”, and they have been shown to “have higher susceptibilities to CAFO impacts due to poor housing, low income, poor health status, and lack of access to medical care” (ibid.). Overall, “[w]hite people generate 97 percent of all income from the operation of farms. Yet Latinx farmers alone comprise more than 80 percent of farm laborers” in the United States (Foer 2020a). In short, “[r]acism is perpetuated each time meat is thought to be the best protein source” (Adams 2015 [1990]: 10). 246 Ursula Posratschnig Today’s wealth disparities can, in the same way as sexism and racism, be traced to pre-historic times (see Patterson 2002). “It was only with the domestication of cattle and horses […] that serious divisions between societies’ haves and have-nots began to emerge” (McKie 2017). Social stratification thus seems to be traceable to the exploitation of other animals, whose labor and bodies were and continue to be exploited for profit. Horkheimer (1978 [1934]: 66) uses the skyscraper metaphor to describe this stratification of human society: “tycoons” and “capitalist power constellations” at the top, followed by “lesser magnates” and “large land owners”, then “military and the professors”, then much further down the line “the proletarian” including the “permanently unemployed, the poor, the aged and the sick”; and on the level below the ground, “the coolies of the earth perish by the millions, the indescribable, unimaginable suffering of the animals, the animal hell in human society”. Through the animal-industrial complex, meat has become a ubiquitous commodity in western countries, where it is no longer scarce or reserved for wealthy elites and aristocrats. The current “flood” of cheap meat products is generated by an industry that treats animals and workers ruthlessly. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) was the first investigation of the meat packing industry and the exploitation of migrant workers and other animals has only deteriorated since then. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001) documents a dangerous working environment where mainly illegals are employed at will and are vulnerable to severe injuries and death, sexual harassment and drug use. Meat packing is still considered as the most dangerous factory job in the US, where workers endure the “physical danger of kicking and falling animals” and suffer “demoralizing and brutalizing effects that are conducive to alcohol abuse, family violence, and abusive behavior” (McCance 2013: 18-19). There have even been reports that employees at large meat packing plants “commonly wear adult diapers or simply urinate on themselves because bathroom breaks are routinely denied by supervisors under threats of retribution” (Foer 2020a). Similar abuse and exploitation are prevalent in European contexts (orf.at 2021). However, it is relevant to investigate the US American context of meat production and consumption because it is a model that is emulated by economies around the world. In spite of the collateral damage done by the meat industry to “the factory workers, the residents who live near polluting CAFOs, the meat consumers” and “the tax-payers” ( Joy 2010: 73), the meat industry is heavily subsidized because it “can influence legislation to benefit itself ” (ibid.: 90). It has thus outgrown the confines of democratic social organization to the extent where it can be called a “meatocracy” (ibid.: 91). The Story of Meat 247 This can be seen in how the meat industry externalizes costs in the areas of health care (for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, antibiotic resistance, etc.), subsidies, environmental costs (for soil erosion, property devaluation, etc.), and cruelty (Simon 2013: 202-203). These expenditures are a burden carried by the general public rather than the meat businesses that incur them. The animal-industrial complex thus poses a direct threat to democratic societies, not only by avoiding transparency and draining public resources, but also by criminalizing the spread of information about factory farming. For instance, The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006 “makes it illegal to engage in behavior that results in the economic disruption of an animal enterprise” ( Joy 2010: 41). This law protects the profits of large corporations and renders much of the work done by environmental and animal rights activists illegal. The industry is also protected by so called Ag-Gag Laws, which seek to “punish those who expose abuse, rather than those who commit it” by restricting “the ability to document animal farm operations” (Reese 2018: 28). They “[criminalize] people who take photographs or video of animal welfare abuses, for instance, on slaughterhouses and factory farms”, which is based on post 9/ 11 “anti-terrorism” legislation that is now targeted at environmental and animal rights activists (Potter, in Eng 2014). This is true not just in the US American context, but internationally. In Austria, for instance, the notable animal rights organization Verein Gegen Tierfabriken experienced such criminalization in 2010, when the so-called Tier‐ schützerprozess erupted. After years of what turned out to be illegal government surveillance, thirteen animal rights activists were pulled from their beds at night by a heavily armed task force, held at gunpoint, arrested on charges of forming a Mafia-like criminal organization pursuant to the infamous anti-terrorism law ‘§278a’, and faced a 14-month trial. All thirteen of the activists were eventually acquitted of all charges as the evidence produced against them actually proved their innocence (Bendl et al. 2019: 211). The story of meat, however, continues to orchestrate the consumption of other animals as a pleasurable and benign cultural practice, and thereby erases severe social injustice, although it is closely intertwined with forms of oppression that include racism, sexism, classism, speciesism and ecocide, and poses a direct threat to democratic societies. Simultaneously, it promotes and perpetuates these forms of social injustice by encouraging the denial of scientific findings that refute its fallacious tale. 248 Ursula Posratschnig 6 Conclusion Even in the face of scientific consensus that “eating less meat would almost certainly be better for everyone” (Reynolds 2019), the story of meat continues to encourage the consumption of other animals in celebration of cherished traditions, rural nostalgia, colonial reminiscence, hegemonic masculinity and economic superiority. It also exerts its powerful and destructive influence by glossing over cruel and extreme agricultural practices while criminalizing social activism and erasing its contribution to ecocide, zoonotic outbreaks, social injustice, and the perpetuation of deep-rooted forms of oppression. 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Available at: https: / / www.who.int/ news-room/ detail/ 29-04-2019-new-repor t-calls-for-urgent-action-to-avert-antimicrobial-resistance-crisis The Story of Meat 253 Disempowering the Controller - Videogames and the Metanarrative of Agency Armin Lippitz, René Reinhold Schallegger & Felix Schniz 1 Introduction With the shift away from divine and collective towards individual, human agency as the driving force of modernisation at the end of the Middle Ages, the dominant Enlightenment logic of individual empowerment and mastery of the world took hold and intensified until the 20 th century. Under the impact of the catastrophic experiences of two world wars and (de-)colonization, Postmodern theory brought what Lyotard identified as a profound “incredulity toward metanarratives” (1984: xxiv) as well as a ludic turn (Best and Kellner 1997: 26-27) in culture. A new acceptance of the irreducibly aleatory elements of existence emerged, an acknowledgment that the complexities of life and world infinitely transcend human capacities to understand and agency. This new perspective was accompanied by the rise of ludic media, first with the increasing inclusion of playful elements in linear media such as books, films, or TV-shows, and near the end of the 20 th century with the explosive development of analogue and digital games that provide systemic, configurational, and simulational ludo-narratives. Now, well into the 21 st century, games media have come to dominate the cultural industries. Due to their technological, computational platform, videogames explore notions of cybernetic feedback loops and systemic awareness (cf. Aarseth 1997; Dovey and Kennedy 2006; Salen and Zimmerman 2004), they recognise nonhuman, systemic agencies and let players experience how human and nonhuman agencies are intertwined in intricate, interdependent feedback loops. In a medium built on and defined by explicit interactivity (Zimmerman 2004: 158), however, individual (human) choices necessarily still have consequences. Vid‐ eogames therefore also always establish our irreducible personal responsibility within systemic structures, even if we experience feelings of disempowerment at times, and our impact on the larger whole seems insignificant. Thus, they not only provide us with virtualized experiences of the inherently chaotic nature of an indifferent reality, but certain games even go so far as to generate their core leitmotifs from the powerlessness they subject their players to. In our study, we tap into Michael Mateas’s critical discussion of the notion of agency (2004) based on Zimmerman’s elaboration on interactivity (2004), Henry Jenkins’s advocacy of player-generated narratives (2004), and Daniel Vella’s concept of the ludic sublime (2015: n.p.), as well as our own previous works approaching such issues from various, sometimes contradictory angles (cf. Schallegger 2019; Schniz 2021) to discuss the potentials of player disempo‐ werment in videogames as a meaningful as well as impactful design strategy. These theoretical perspectives are applied to the critical discussion of six case studies, which were selected to give readers a broad overview of previous attempts to creatively work with restricted or even denied agency in the medium. The case studies address the following videogames: Life is Strange 2 (Dontnod Entertainment 2018), Reigns (Nerial 2016), Prince of Persia (Ubisoft Montréal 2008), Firewatch (Campo Santo 2016), Returnal (Housemarque 2021), and Lake (Whitethorn Games 2021). All of them reveal different, but similarly impactful design choices, as well as their limits. We create broader awareness and deeper understanding of what Juul calls the paradox of failure and tragedy in videogames (2013: 33-46), which seems to go against the superficial design assumptions we see in most commercial games but is at the same time inherently connected to the logic of the medium and its power to affect us. Going against received wisdom, we suggest disempowerment as both a meaning and a highly impactful design strategy for videogames with the potential to renew the medium and provide us with profound insights into our manifold, sometimes contradictory, but also intensely beautiful relationships as human agents with the complex and chaotic world we inhabit. 2 Establishing location and recognizing patterns When confronted with the question of what differentiates videogames from other media, interactivity seems to be the most common consensus among scholars. Eric Zimmerman describes four modes of interactivity, cognitive, functional, explicit, and cultural, explaining that they “are not four distinct categories, but four overlapping flavors of participation that occur to varying degrees in all media experience[s]” (2004: 158). His goal is to pinpoint a partic‐ ular type of interactivity that distinguishes games from other media experiences, or, in Zimmerman’s words “what separates the book from the choose-yourown adventure” (ibid.: 159). He calls this mode explicit interactivity which involves the “participation with designed choices and procedures in a text” 256 Armin Lippitz, René Reinhold Schallegger & Felix Schniz including “choices, random events, dynamic simulations, and other procedures programmed into the interactive experience” (ibid.: 158). He acknowledges, however, that explicit interactivity is not exclusive to (video)games explaining that a “newspaper as a whole is not explicitly interactive, but the lettersto-the-editor section is” (ibid.: 159.). Thus, a combination of at least two of Zimmerman’s modes is necessary to distinguish between what is traditionally seen as non-interactive media and games. The crucial second form of interactivity from Zimmerman’s elaboration is the mechanical manipulation of the given items and resources of a game, or the “utilitarian participation with a text” (ibid.) which he calls functional interactivity. This entails the structure and properties of a text, including material conditions like a table of contents, an index, headlines, fonts, etc., as well as the physical arrangement of elements through tangible effort, like the turning of pages, moving meeples on a board, rolling dice, playing cards, tossing a ball etc. In the case of videogames, the physicality of the action is performed by pressing buttons on a keyboard or controller, or any other handling of an input device, which is mediated to appropriate actions on screen. It has to be acknowledged that for videogames, even this basic form of interaction represents non-trivial effort required for meaningful mediation, if just to record or capture the current state of affairs, in accordance with Espen Aarseth’s (1997) ergodicity of cybertexts such as games. It represents a necessary part of a sequence of interactive capacities to establish meaningful play and consequently gameplay - without functional interactivity there can be no explicit interactivity in games. Weber et al. define videogame interaction “as the possibility for players to manipulate the content and form of a video game and/ or the possibility of a continuous information exchange between the user and the game system” (2014: 83). Based on Aarseth, Stuart Moulthrop calls this form of interaction configuration, meaning “the capacity to transform certain aspects of the virtual environment with potentially significant consequences for the system as a whole” (2004: 60). This goes beyond the physical or dexterous effort (functional interactivity) required to change the state of a game and entails players’ options and conditions for (inter-)action. In other words, configurative interaction is managing the provided state of a game within a particular set of boundaries. The way configurative interaction plays out is different for each game and depends on its rules and gameplay. It is important to recognise that Zimmerman’s func‐ tional and explicit interactivity, as well as his third mode, cognitive interactivity, or “interpretive participation with a text” (2004: 158), are decisive parts of meaningful configurative interaction. Players must know and adhere to the rules Disempowering the Controller - Videogames and the Metanarrative of Agency 257 and boundaries in a game (cognitive interactivity) in order to manipulate the given resources (functional interactivity) on the basis of their decisions (explicit interactivity). So, configurative interaction is the physical handling of pieces or pressing buttons to achieve appropriate effects on screen based on the player’s selection of available options. Chris Crawford (1997) recognises another type of interaction which he calls personal interaction. It entails an emotional contribution by the player, expressed by the way a game is played. He writes: “when we actively participate in a game, we invest a portion of our own ego into the fantasy world of the game” (ibid.: 3). Personal interaction constitutes the style of how players interact with the game world, the strategy they pursue to reach their goals, or the emotional charge of the actions taken in a game. Just as functional, cognitive, and explicit interaction are encompassed by configuration, so is configuration enveloped by personal interaction. The link between these layers of interactivity is the agency players have to express themselves, to configure the game state, by functionally performing the physical actions to explicitly create the desired effects. Agency is experienced when all these forms of interaction sync up to create effects that “relate to the players intention” (Mateas 2004: 21). Michael Mateas explains that agency “is not mere interface activity” (ibid.), as interactivity without any meaningful influence on the experience is, at best, fake agency (Schallegger 2016: 12). Pressing buttons and turning knobs may provide players with feedback based on their interaction but is not necessarily enough to constitute an experience of meaningful agency, if the result of the actions in the game does not correspond to the player’s emotional motive. In other words, a personal interaction based on the knowledge of the rules, restrictions, and options available, through explicit interaction leading to the desired configu‐ ration grants agency to the player. Mateas further claims, “[a]gency is the feeling of empowerment that comes from being able to take actions in the world whose effects relate to the player’s intention” (2004: 21). Schallegger criticises that according to this description “the mere feeling of empowerment is already enough to constitute the experience of agency for a player” (2016: 12), which means that “[f]rom a game designer’s point of view it is […] enough to create an illusion of successfully projecting player intention into a game world, and this player will then experience the feeling of agency” (ibid.). In other words, fake agency is an acceptable form of agency as long as players do not identify it as such (by replaying the game and taking different actions) (ibid.). Alternatively, Schallegger suggests that “even disempowering experiences can provide agency by fulfilling these three conditions: the player has to feel as if 258 Armin Lippitz, René Reinhold Schallegger & Felix Schniz through their meaningful interactions they successfully project their intentions into the secondary (or tertiary) reality of the game” (ibid., original emphases). The effect can most readily be encountered in what Henry Jenkins (2004) calls emergent narrative, which is created, according to Schallegger, when evoked, enacted, and embedded narratives align with players’ successful immersion into the game world (2016: 10). Configurative interactivity paired with agency lends players the potential to exert their own will onto games’ narratives. Videogame makers should try to find ways to create “legible narrative space[s]” (ibid.) as part of their designs; “world[s] ripe with narrative potential” (ibid.: 128). Jenkins explains: “Emergent narratives are not prestructured or preprogrammed, taking shape through the game play, yet they are not as unstructured, chaotic, and frustrating as life itself ” (ibid.). This dichotomy of permission and restriction through aspects and conditions of the virtual landscape, which Schallegger calls freedom and constraint (cf. Schallegger 2016), allows players to creatively interpret, interact, and alter the digital environment and to come up with their own narrative avenues. Thus, game worlds can be “understood as a kind of authoring environment within which players can define their own goals and write their own stories” ( Jenkins 2004: 128). Jenkins proposes “game designers […to] move into the production of game platforms which support player-generated narratives” ( Jenkins 2004: 129). Schallegger calls this phenomenon “post facto narrativised play experiences” (Schallegger 2016: 11, original emphasis). Unlike enacted narratives, emergent narrative experiences do not necessarily require explicit interaction, as con‐ scious and deliberate in-action might create the desired effect as well. The grand narrative properties of videogames — what is told, how it is told, and the virtual environment within which they unfold according to player in‐ teraction — were traditionally understood to be at odds with a game’s mechanic functionality. What erupted in the shape of the “ludology vs. narratology” debates (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 2016: 222-224) during the formative years of academic game studies is still omnipresent in research today. The struggle to consolidate two such fundamentally different qualities of engagement may well be regarded as the most unique, yet untamable quality of videogames. Still, it is the interplay of these qualities that brings forth the importance of player agency to the overall experience of the medium. In order to approach the issue, Jesper Juul thus fundamentally describes the state of any videogame as “half-real” (2005: 195-196). He argues that the systemic framework of a videogame, constituted by its mechanics and the underlying rules upon which they operate, allows the player to engage with a fragmentary representation of its fictional virtual world. Its aesthetic design, in turn, cues the player Disempowering the Controller - Videogames and the Metanarrative of Agency 259 into choosing adequate means of mechanical interaction. Juul’s thoughts find manyfold continuation in the previously discussed spatio-narrative approaches by Jenkins, Schallegger, and others (cf. Nitsche 2008; Rauscher 2015). They all incline towards an understanding of videogames as provisioners of meaning via agency as arising from interaction with a virtual landscape that embeds player experience narratively. The affective quality of virtual landscapes as well as the experiences players may derive from it, however, can also arise in disempowerment — the inability to always exert meaningful agency. Daniel Vella (2015) argues that the inability of players to overcome obstacles in a game instantly may, in fact, be regarded as a central component of a videogame’s gestalt. Whenever players interact with a videogame for the first time, they are treated to a bouquet of audiovisual effects, learn about initial plot points, and engage with entry-modes of interaction (such as learning the controls). However, players are not granted insight into the underlying workings of a game’s code, the engine it operates on, or its working algorithms. While one may learn to navigate and master a videogame better the longer one interacts with it, the mystery of the machine behind it may be approached but can never be grasped to its full extent by the players. Consequently, Vella describes videogames as mental constructs developed by the player […] with the unseen game system — which, in turn, […] suggests that what may be called the “ludic sublime” is a crucial aesthetic moment in the player’s engagement with a game, defined by the player’s drive towards mastery of the game coming face-to-face with the impossibility of obtaining complete, direct knowledge of the underlying system. (Vella 2015: n.p.) By relying on Dark Souls (FromSoftware 2011) for his musings, Vella elaborates on the ludic sublime. Dark Souls is notorious for its steep difficulty and its con‐ sequently demanding gameplay experience in the shape of countless repetitive micro-iterations. In the dark fantasy setting of the game, player avatars, the characters they control and through which they act and configure the game state, repeatedly, resetting the game to the last safe spot they encountered. Progress can only be made if one entire area filled with nigh-instant death encounters is passed in one try. Moreover, Dark Souls possesses what may be described as “arcane difficulty” (suggested by Orland 2022: n.p., in reference to a later game by the same developer) in its presentation of narrative content. The game is notoriously obfuscated in its provision of narrative meaning, dropping players in a virtual world littered with minor fragments of information that take excessive registering and deduction to be contextualised. By sifting through the erratic mumblings of characters one meets in the virtual world, inspecting 260 Armin Lippitz, René Reinhold Schallegger & Felix Schniz its locations, and understanding the descriptions of in-game items, a player is step-by-step able to deduct a subjective meaning for their avatar, even if its individual meaning in a supposed grand plot scheme remains obscure. Likewise, even the more challenging encounters become manageable as a player masters the fundamental controls of Dark Souls. As the game confronts players with narrative and mechanical challenges, it unfolds a sort of carefully earned agency in which players interact with the medium as a sublime entity. Vella postulates that “the feeling of the sublime constitutes a necessary moment in the aesthetic encounter with digital games” (2015: n.p.), an important remark on the intrinsic necessity of challenge in its manyfold incarnations. Dark Souls highlights the supposed clash of mechanics against narrative properties under the consideration of challenge for the evaluation of agency. Schallegger’s position on challenge in videogames, for which he argues that “excluding barriers [produce] a sense of hermeticism” (2019: 145) that may fail to “harness the emotional power of ludic involvement” (ibid.) underlines that players unable to overcome challenges in a videogame are deprived of opportunity to exert meaningful agency. However, and while experiencing a videogame is built on player agency, one must also contextualise difficulty as a paradigm adhesive to (virtual) environment and subjective meaning. Schniz describes dimensions of the videogame experience as “[depending] on the contents of the videogame as much as on the players interacting with and being affected by them” (2021: 197). Only in this interplay, a videogame provides “extraordinary experiences as much as these experiences are necessarily spurred by our innate curiosity and motivation” (ibid.). Failing to overcome a challenge may thus be regarded as an inherent element of agency and, in fact, prove to be distinctly meaningful if properly embedded in a videogame’s half-reality. 3 Case studies In the following, six case studies are provided that shed light on the curious relation of attributes connected to agency. Meaning, challenge, and affect all have impact on how we experience them, rendering the discussion of agency in videogames as centrally important as it is difficult to circumscribe. - 3.1 Life is Strange 2 (Dontnod 2018) Brenda Laurel claims “that the effect that a player’s actions has on the plot needs to be substantial” (2004: 19) in order to experience agency. However, if designed appropriately, even inconsequential (in-)actions have the potential to grant players the feeling of agency. In episode four of Life is Strange 2, the players’ Disempowering the Controller - Videogames and the Metanarrative of Agency 261 avatar, in this case, a Mexican American teenager, meets his long-lost mother. During one of their tense conversations, she tells her son that she often used to sit in silence with his father and that this was a sign that they were good for each other. Immediately after this confession, the player has the option to make their avatar get up and leave if they press a button. It is, however, also possible not to do anything, in order to express the avatar’s willingness to reconcile with his estranged mother. This leads to the game cycling through a series of different shots of the scene, showing the two characters sitting in silence on a bench in front of a motel, mirroring the previously confided story, accompanied by calming (extradiegetic) acoustic guitar music. In other words, players may feel agency by being able not to act, still being immersed in the game. While inaction during this part of the story is inconsequential for the plot of the game, players feel agency over the emergent narrative of their playthrough by virtue of an emotional connection to the characters. The decision not to act immediately, thus ending the scene, becomes a meaningful choice and lets players experience the feeling of agency through inaction if they are immersed in the narrative and suspend their disbelief in the story and the characters of the game, creating a unique emergent narrative. Consequently, this example shows that agency is a central aspect of any videogame experience and connected to many other important components, even if players are powerless to significantly alter the plot of a game. One could argue that the only influence players have on the scene described above is the power of imagination inherent to all interpretative readings of a text and that the program is simply waiting for players to continue. Such claims tie into the reader response form of text analysis (cf. Iser 1989), which pairs interpretation with speculations about possible outcomes, forming mental links and connections of what has been experienced to the readers’ own theories of narrative continuation. However, the major difference to videogames is that in other media the recipients have no power of configuration, story elements are all present, fixed, and in need of interpretation but they stay the same for each reader. Because videogame players are able to configure their own game states, they may be confronted with radically different texts and experiences despite playing the same games. Even if a story structure allows players to reach certain fixed plot points, they might have had significantly dissimilar journeys to get to these events and, thus, their interpretations and speculations are based and depend on their own specific playthroughs. Some players might choose not to try to reconcile with their avatar’s mother and, thus, make the player character (PC) end the conversation as quickly as possible, which results in a radically different experience, certainly on an emotional level, despite the same plot. 262 Armin Lippitz, René Reinhold Schallegger & Felix Schniz 3.2 Reigns (Nerial 2016) While Life is Strange 2 allows for inaction to feel meaningful despite agency not necessarily affecting the narrative, Reigns subverts the notion of challenge by combining trivial interaction with tangled decisions and, thus, shaping narrative development. The game exemplifies how mechanical, rule-based challenge is not an essential part of game design, while retaining enough interaction to still provide a ludic experience. Some videogames have been criticised for not offering enough challenge and, thus, have been disqualified from exemplifying the medium. At best, they have been subsumed under the discrediting genre term ‘walking simulator’. Examples like Gone Home (The Fullbright Company 2013), The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe 2013), or Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (The Chinese Room 2015) for the most part do not offer any gameplay challenges beyond the mere controls to manoeuvre an avatar through the game space. The only difficulties these games offer are of a navigational and/ or a narrative nature. As long as players are capable of traversing the virtual environment, which does not require any coordinated skill or timed actions (unlike, for instance, platformer games), the story can be investigated, interpreted, and potentially deciphered without hindrance (cf. Carbo-Mascarell 2018; Muscat et al. 2016). This is not to say that there is one definitive result or outcome for each of these games. In fact, interpretations as well as the actual stories, including endings, that players encounter may be as diverse as individual players. The same is true for their personal experiences and their emergent narratives while playing. However, gameplay challenges to overcome obstacles through the application of exact, coordinated player skill are not necessarily part of the experience. It can be argued that acts of mentally following a story, suspension of disbelief, and narrative interpretation are challenges, and so one or another form is always present in games. However, these kinds of struggles are not exclusive to games as they apply to any narrative medium. Consequently, challenge, conflict, or struggle (depending on focus and definition) may be elements of videogames, but they do not necessarily feature in all gameplay. Traditionally, videogames restrict access to content through rule-based and mechanical barriers which players need to overcome by developing and applying skills of hand-eye coordination. Many contemporary videogames, however, often do not make progress in the game conditional on player skill. The challenge to traverse these spaces is mostly a cognitive one, just as reading a novel is. The physical interaction can be so trivial and mundane as to be of no more significance than the turning of a page in a book, yet the consequences of choices made still represent an ergodic and, subsequently, ludic Disempowering the Controller - Videogames and the Metanarrative of Agency 263 experience. In the humorous digital card game Reigns the controls are reduced to swiping left or right to pick one of two options the player is continuously presented with. The use of the swipe mechanic is an intentional design choice to establish a comical connection to well-known dating application functionalities and requires next to no physical or dexterous effort. Each decision can influence four different resources to deor increase in value. If any of the four resources is depleted or reaches its maximum, the current king players control as their avatar is killed. This does not, however, result in a game over, but rather a new monarch ascends to the throne and the game continues. Each PC death just means a new chapter, a reset to a balanced set of resources, and a merely cosmetic change in avatar name. The challenge is not one of timed, coordinated interaction, but narrative interpretation of what the characters on the cards want and how player choice would influence the resources of the fictional kingdom. Thus, narrative and mechanical affordances are interlaced with each other. The mental struggle to decipher narrative stimuli differs from player to player but is not a defining characteristic for the medium because, as already mentioned, this criterion applies to all narrative media. An aesthetically pleasing (or upsetting), stylistically difficult (or trivial), or unusually long (or short) novel is still a novel. Interpretations and analyses of the narrative content may vary significantly, but the characteristics to distinguish it as a medium remain the same. Thus, the degree of gameplay difficulty and challenge in a game cannot be defining factors for the medium either. Schallegger postulates that “we can already see a change in design logic” (2019: 13), which might affect a paradigm shift away from games solely focusing on overcoming obstacles to designs that build on a “configurational and affective logic” (ibid.). - 3.3 Prince of Persia (Ubisoft Montréal 2008) With Prince of Persia (2008), Ubisoft Montréal created the seventh main instal‐ ment in the eponymous series started in 1989 with the iconic first Prince of Persia (Broderbund 1989), designed by Jordan Mechner. Intended as a reboot more so than just another instalment, this third-person action-adventure platformer surprised with its aesthetic choices, replacing the realism of its predecessors with a much more abstracted, almost comics-like cel-shaded look using a small number of flat shading colours instead of gradients. It also abandoned punishing gameplay mechanics that train players through repeated failure and gruesome on-screen deaths for dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA). There is no fail state in this Prince of Persia, instead, it reacts to the performance of the player. The core element in this change, and bone of contention for many hardcore fans, is the non-player character (NPC) Elika. The nameless ‘Prince’ and player avatar, 264 Armin Lippitz, René Reinhold Schallegger & Felix Schniz actually a wandering rogue, encounters her in the desert where she leads him to a region of temples and sacred places. She explains that in order to help her seal the escaped Ahriman, god of chaos and darkness, away, the player must collect magical light seeded across the gamespace to revive the sacred trees that held Ahriman prisoner. Gameplay-wise, this is where the platforming comes in: guided by Elika, the Prince must jump and slide through the complex virtual 3D environment to consume orbs of light used to unlock new regions and bring the sacred trees to life again. What irritates fans of earlier games is that whenever the player fails, Elika intervenes. She reaches out, magically pulling the Prince back to where he started his jump, or stepping in front of him casting a magic shield to save and heal him. Elika, Princess of a people originally charged by Ormazd, god of light and order, with guarding the imprisoned Ahriman, is thus not a damsel in distress who needs saving. She reverses the trope by repeatedly saving her less-than-noble ‘Prince’ and - adding insult to injury - also continuously commenting on it in the charming banter between the two. In a videogame culture largely defined by an institutionalised male-domi‐ nated fixation on challenge and mastery, embedded in a socio-cultural context of self-optimisation and neo-liberalism (Schallegger 2019: 141), a profit-minded industry usually reproduces these norms and values in its products and the minds of players. Prince of Persia is one of the rare occasions where a major international studio and publisher dared deviate from this pattern, but pushback led to an immediate return to the traditional formula with the less successful The Forgotten Sands (Ubisoft Montréal 2010). The series then petered out and has not recovered until today, with a remake of The Sands of Time going through a troubled development process (cf. Kim 2022). The perceived disempowerment of the (male) protagonist and player avatar by (female) ‘handholding’, a term frequently used in more toxic sections of the videogame community to refer to support systems and relations of care, becomes a ‘threat’ to player agency, misunderstood as the power to impose one’s will on the environment. In Prince of Persia, this is further reinforced on a narrative and ethical level in the relationship-building between Elika and the ‘Prince’. He is written as a caustic, self-reliant, individualistic rogue, only interested in personal advantage and profit, while she shoulders the collective responsibility of her people in an empathic, caring manner, even giving her life to save the world. Near the end of the game, it is revealed that Elika had died earlier, and out of grief her father made a pact with Ahriman, using the light of the sacred trees to resurrect his daughter. This is what set events in motion. In the final Disempowering the Controller - Videogames and the Metanarrative of Agency 265 confrontation with Ahriman, Elika chooses to give up that life-sustaining light to seal the god of chaos away again. When the dust settles and the shared quest is achieved after 15 to 20 hours of gameplay (Howlongtobeat 2022b), the ‘Prince’ carries her lifeless body out of the temple, the credits roll, but the game does not end. Ubisoft, subverting game design conventions, does not take away player agency at this point. Rather, they chose to leave the player standing there, Elika dead in their arms, in front of the sacred trees they just revived to imprison Ahriman, and they glow with the magical, life-giving light. The player can now choose to end the game, respecting Elika’s wishes and her obligations, or they can destroy those trees, harvest their energies, and resurrect Elika. This frees Ahriman, undoing the quest and condemning the world. Without this ending, Prince of Persia would already be a significant contribu‐ tion in an industry that does not usually question the ethics of its obsession with challenge, individual empowerment, and mastery. Here now, the player is given agency but confronted with the consequences of actually exerting it. Is the world worth more than the life of a single person? Even if we have the power to affect change, is it always ethical to use it? Is our agency worth more than Elika’s, since she chose to give up her stolen life? After having been supported and guided by Elika for the entire game, the player must make that choice alone. They have all the power and the world cannot resist. Those who choose not to end the game but to ‘beat it’ have the wrongness of their choice according to the designer ethics confirmed in the free DLC (downloadable content) “Epilogue”. Here the ‘Prince’ must face a furious, resurrected Elika, and after they escape the desert together, with her repeatedly voicing her anger and frustration because of the utter disregard for her choice and the fate of the world, Elika leaves the ‘Prince’ and the player to face the wrath of Ahriman alone. With Prince of Persia, Ubisoft delivered an innovative, complex, strikingly aesthetic, and affectively charged ludic exploration of the concept of agency, its legitimate uses and limits. Ahead of their time, especially in the AAA (i.e. mainstream) industry, their creative courage did not pay off economically, yet they created a milestone in the development of the medium that is increasingly recognised for its impact. - 3.4 Firewatch (Campo Santo 2016) Firewatch (2016) was designed by Campo Santo as their debut game, and copublished with Panic. While there are many aspects that connect the two games, both being adventures with a strong focus on spatial navigation and traversal, the rejection of a photorealistic art style in favour of a more abstract one with clear lines and lush colours, there are important differences. Firewatch has no combat and is a representative of the walking simulator genre; it also uses a 266 Armin Lippitz, René Reinhold Schallegger & Felix Schniz first-person, rather than Prince of Persia’s third-person perspective, reinforcing player involvement with its main character Henry and his emotional and mental journey. The first sequence sets the tone. Instead of an action-packed introductory cut-scene (an adventure genre staple), the player finds a simple black screen situating events in place and time with text only (“Boulder/ CO, 1975”), followed by the first opportunity to interact, presented in a line of text: “You see Julia”. There is no information - neither extranor intradiegetic - for the player to exert their now established agency in what Zimmerman calls “explicit interactivity” (2004: 158). Yet, the game will not progress unless the player ‘chooses’ this single ‘option’, presented prominently in the middle of the screen. The moment Henry becomes an agent in his virtual life, avatar of the player living vicariously through the semi-permeable membrane of the screen, both he and the player do not have a choice: there is only Julia. The only other option is to switch off the game and not walk in Henry’s shoes for the next four to five hours (Howlongtobeat 2022a). Julia is an irreducible part of Henry’s life. Once the player accepts this premise, the game slowly unfolds. Soft music fades in, and while the Henry/ player conglomerate cannot refuse the attraction, “You approach her” being the only ‘option’ to progress, they can choose how they want to do so. Henry’s personality and the meaning of the ensuing inter‐ action are created by inference. Here Firewatch establishes its understanding of agency, elegantly communicating the limits but also inherent meaning of human influence on complex systems, such as interpersonal relationships on a micro-, or ecological inter-relationships on a macro-level. What matters to Campo Santo is how we make the choices that we get to make. This is not about control but the projection of individual intentionality and ethical responsibility within much larger and complex systems. The choose-your-own adventure style (non-)choices are intercut with scenes where the player controls Henry as a 3D avatar, taking him from his home to the woods. In (in-game) 1985, Julia is diagnosed with early onset dementia, all plans for her academic career and children with Henry are abandoned. Two years later, she is given permanent medical leave, and her as well as Henry/ the player have to accept: “She gets worse”. The player can then choose whether Henry takes care of her himself, or whether he gives her into a professional facility. Here the ethical onus is seemingly put onto the player’s shoulders, but irrespective the situation escalates, and Julia’s family take over. With his world, relationship, and self-image falling to pieces, Henry decides to work in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming as firewatch, bringing the play experience full circle when “You take it” is again the only option in the middle of the screen. The world Disempowering the Controller - Videogames and the Metanarrative of Agency 267 Henry enters is painted in lush colours. There is a vibrancy, a life absent from the earlier section of the game, and in the simulated 3D environment of mountain and forest, Henry tries to find his way back to himself. Besides the exploration of (virtual) nature as metaphor for the exploration of Henry’s personality, the second key game mechanic is the audio-only relationship he develops with his supervisor Delilah via walkie-talkie. When she tries to contact Henry, the player is given a certain time, visualised by a quickly diminishing bar, before silence becomes the active choice. More than just a failure to communicate, it is interpreted by Delilah. Choosing not to choose becomes a valid expression of player agency. Very soon, there are hints that beyond friendship, a romantic opportunity might present itself, and given Henry’s emotional state, the temptation is great to have Delilah provide new direction. The middle section of the game focuses on a mysterious fatherson relationship and an unrequited (queer) love story that happened on the mountain and ended tragically. The resonance with Henry’s experience compels the player to pursue a romantic path with Delilah, but the ending of the game makes the limits of human agency painfully clear. Even if the player has persistently chosen to direct the relationship with Delilah towards a romantic one, hoping to engineer a happy ending, when Henry reaches out to her and asks her to come with him, starting a new life, he is always rejected. The agency the player is given exclusively extends to Henry’s virtual life, like our agency in actual life only extends to the choices we make, if we want to preserve the agency of all equally. There are numerous complex systems and other agencies, both human and non-human, that we encounter in everyday life, and most of them are beyond the reach of our individual agency. Firewatch, with its reduced audio-visual aesthetics, its strongly focused multiple and intertwined narratives, and its relatively small set of simple mechanics, beautifully creates an experience for its player where we encounter the limits of our agency not as constraining or punishing, but merely as a fact of life, a meaningful part of the human condition. - 3.5 Returnal (Housemarque 2021) In the discussion of Life is Strange 2, Brenda Laurel’s claim that agency must be rooted in a substantial impact on a videogame’s narrative structure has been raised and examined by highlighting how even seemingly inconsequential (in-)actions may reward players. In the following, this hypothesis is further counteracted by a videogame which paradoxically frames player agency as seemingly meaningless in order to facilitate deeply meaningful interaction. 268 Armin Lippitz, René Reinhold Schallegger & Felix Schniz Released in 2021, the third-person shooter Returnal by Housemarque has quickly earned a reputation as brutally challenging, yet also mesmerising precisely due to its difficulty. The game maroons players on the distant planet Atropos in the avatar of astronaut Selene Vassos who wants to escape the hostile planet. In order to succeed, players must dodge the traps and sentries of a longgone alien civilisation, avoid falling to death in bottomless pits, and fend off bizarre aliens which attack ferociously at first sight. All these phenomena are incredibly demanding on the player’s motoric skills and reflexes. During the confrontations with larger aliens especially, projectiles may fill almost the entire screen and demand players to manoeuvre Selene with utmost precision, or fail. However, even players able to do justice to the game’s high demands are bound to learn that success was never an option. All of her attempts to leave the planet after completing milestone challenges or reaching crucial plot points in the game, including the game’s final boss battle, lead to Selene’s death, rebirth, and reset. The game always returns to the very beginning of the game at the crash site of Selene’s spaceship Helios every time she is killed. She and the players are stuck in an endless circle of trying and dying. The clue to unravelling the purpose of Returnal’s seemingly futile agency is embedded in the cyclical order of its in-game time and geography. Every death and every alleged escape from Atropos reset the game but also change its layout. Every level of the game consists of a finite amount of pre-designed rooms, rearranged with every death of Selene. Items that players may find in these rooms are randomised at every playthrough, and among them are audio logs that tell of Selene’s progress and understanding of the meaning behind her eternal struggles. In a similar fashion, players are treated to short cutscenes every time Selene dies. While the scenes do not tell a complete story, each one individually offers content that appears to be extradiegetic to Selene’s struggle at first. We see her crashing on Atropos but also playing a piano (by a company named Helios), or two gravestones. Selene also encounters a copy of her childhood home buried amidst ruins on several occasions during the game. Each time she visits, she is treated to a slice of her life on Earth — for example, the door to a child’s room on which the name “Helios” can be read. The game’s harsh difficulty guarantees that players must venture through known areas again and again, always seeing different cutscenes in-between and continuously making new, worthwhile narrative findings while doing so. Playing without failure is possible but ultimately meaningless in Returnal. Only if players fail, and regularly so, they are more and more able to connect the game’s fantastic virtual world to a realistic emotional setup of loss, suppression. Disempowering the Controller - Videogames and the Metanarrative of Agency 269 Atropos is Greek and means “the unavoidable” (Moi 1999: 373). It is also the name of one of the three moirai, ancient Greek goddesses of fate, deciding when a human life should end (ibid.). In Returnal, Selene is stranded in a neverending cycle, creating the metaphor of neverending circumstance. Connecting enough snippets, players may decipher a series of events happening far away from Atropos but that could, at the same time, only take place on a planet right out of a fantasy novel. There are scenes of a car crash, a child named Helios, mementos of a mother who always wanted to travel the stars. By facing the real challenges of Atropos again and again without acknowledging one’s inept agency as failure, players are able to regularly glimpse into the actual horrors Selene is both fighting and evading in her fight on Atropos, the metaphor of loss and coping. The mixture of challenge and repetition mimics an intrusive re-experiencing of trauma. Players experience snippets of tragedy in the shape of flashbacks, intrusive images, nightmares, lack of time allocation and lack of context (Ehlers et al. 2004: 403-407). Returnal thus builds upon an agency of meaningful disempowerment. One cannot win against the cycle but learn to come to terms with it. Healing from trauma never finishes but trauma always resurfaces and we must challenge it again and again. Even when fully mastering the game’s challenges, the circle will always return, keeping players in vivid confrontation with the sublime coping mechanisms of the human psyche. - 3.6 Lake (Whitethorn Games 2021) If one takes Returnal as a proof-of-concept for the thesis that meaningful agency can come to be the face of challenge, the adventure game Lake, set in the 1980s US-American idyll of the small, forest-engulfed town of Providence Oaks, functions as its counter thesis. Players explore a peaceful virtual environment through the avatar of Meredith Weiss, who has left the big city and her highpaying job behind to temporarily substitute for her father, a local mailman. Built on common tropes of popular feelgood entertainment, players follow Meredith’s routine by delivering mail to the town’s residents, meeting friends after work or on weekends, and spending most of her evenings either reading a light romance novel or watching TV. All of these events happen at the complete control and pace of the players, who may take however long they wish to deliver the last parcel of a working day, engage in dialogue with NPCs or opt out of interaction if they so wish. They can freely select within the predetermined choices Lake provides — typically accompanied by a pastoral, sunny view on Providence Oaks and its Pacific Northwest ambience and the same cheerful tunes playing on the mail van’s radio. 270 Armin Lippitz, René Reinhold Schallegger & Felix Schniz The game’s emotional impact builds on nostalgia in the sense of a longing for a cherished past experience that positively affects self-worth (Routledge 2015: 69). Lead writer Jos Bouman cites the ‘feelgood’ TV show The Gilmore Girls as one of his great inspirations for the game’s character interactions (in Weiss 2022: n.p.), which are moreover riddled with pop-cultural references, meant to evoke a feeling of familiarity in its playership. This reliance on a nostalgic appeal is also present in terms of gameplay. Rather than overwhelming players mechanically, Lake functions entirely on the simplest interactions. As the implied counter-thesis to titles such as Returnal, Lake eradicates fail states almost completely. Players are never under any sort of time constraint for their mail route. Delivering mail to a wrong address is impossible. There are no dead ends and no inherently ‘wrong’ choices to make. As Janelle Wilson describes, nostalgia is a longing for security and belonging in what human beings understand as home (Wilson 2005: 32). While the concept of home has suffered the same ontological rupture as other concepts in the postmodern turn (Mayer 1998: 438-439), a fictional pastoral developing fully according to player intent may be just that. Ironically, this absolute freedom to create one’s personal, virtual safe space stands at odds with the idea of meaningful agency. Though players may, as has been mentioned, make choices that impact story progression at several points in the game, influence who their romantic love interest ought to be, and decide how they want to shape their relation with other NPCs, the lack of any negative feedback to any of these outcomes renders agency a scopeless echo chamber of desire rather than meaningful engagement with the self or the environment. When players pursue a homosexual relationship with video rental store owner Angie, everybody seems just as happy as when she pursues lumberjack Robert Harris, irrelevant of the game’s socio-historical context. Players may confront their co-worker Frank about an obvious gambling addiction that almost sees him fired but he will merely shrug it off, expressing that he will never change — and the game’s further, happy-go-lucky tone will not change either, whether Frank is confronted or not. Even when players choose to edit and read contracts for their IT company during their vacation, Meredith giddily slaps away on her home computer, making players wonder if her retreat to a ‘better, simpler past’ can actually be declared as such. It is a common quality of utopian storytelling that individual characters and purposes lose meaning when time and causation lose theirs (Ferns 1999: 21). In the nostalgic virtual snowball of Providence Oaks, where neither historio‐ graphic socio-cultural issues nor player decisions break the rigidness of the daily gameplay framework or the positive spirits of its NPC-inhabitants, players Disempowering the Controller - Videogames and the Metanarrative of Agency 271 are confronted with the ludo-narrative inertia of the eternally beautiful. Even though it is questionable whether Lake has been purposefully meant to be read that way, players may experience it as a meta-statement on the futility of agency in the face of impenetrable bliss. 4 Conclusion This paper discusses the issue of (dis-)empowerment and its role in the analysis and understanding of videogames. Agency, the paradigm according to which elementary interaction with the medium unfolds in a meaningful manner if properly embedded in the system dimensions of a videogame, is identified as the central quality of the medium, which may hence be understood as providing players with experience machines (cf. Silcox 2017). Moreover, the theoretical synthesis provided acts as a reminder that game studies are interdisciplinary by their very nature and that agency is not a vacuous quality. It must be seen in context and interplay with the medium’s systemic properties, including narrative and audiovisual dimensions but also technical limitations, like rules or different haptic input devices. The profound meaning of agency, as it emerges from the argument, unfolds in the orchestration of the experience machine of a videogame. The full significance of these attributes, constellations, and the ways in which they allow various individual experiences to unfold are mapped along a set of various case studies. Life is Strange 2 stresses that meaningful non-acting is also an element of agency. Instead of the medium’s moral imperative to act, the poetic mind, or so it shows, can also create a unique emergent narrative from wilful inertia. Reigns provides a gameplay loop that lets players experience agency over a system and narrative, despite a design void of mechanical, physical challenge, and which renders failure trivial but not meaningless. With Prince of Persia, Ubisoft delivered an experiment of agency detached from the notion of challenge and difficulty. Its design choices which neither punish nor reward failure in the traditional sense of ‘failing to master the game’ provide a narrative embedding of the player’s motivation to exert agency, disregarding their actual capability to do so. Firewatch, meanwhile, delves into the agency of a difficulty built on emotional and ethical challenge rather than motoric coordination. The player experience of agency here is one not based on freedom and mastery but of systemic awareness that posits the individual as a meaningful part interacting with structures much larger than themselves simulating the real-life experience of what it means to be human. Ultimately, the final two case studies portray what may be regarded as the utopian and dystopian fringes of agency in videogames: 272 Armin Lippitz, René Reinhold Schallegger & Felix Schniz whereas Returnal provides a hopeful experience, in the apparent paradox of making agency for the player as difficult as possible, Lake renders agency to be nothing but empty gestures, void of meaning if they are not contextualised in a field of possibilities that also features negative outcomes. Building on these analyses, we have created a broader awareness and deeper understanding of videogames by taking into account the framing of what Juul calls their intrinsic paradox of failure and tragedy in videogames (2013: 33-46), which seems to go against the superficial design assumptions of most contemporary commercial games that are inherently connected to the industrial logic of the medium and its inherent power to affect us. Going against received wisdom, we have suggested an interpretation of disempowerment as both a meaning and a highly impactful design strategy for videogames with the potential to renew the medium and its ecology and to provide us with profound insights into our manifold, sometimes contradictory, but also intensely beautiful relationships as human agents with the complex and chaotic world we inhabit. 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Harrigan (eds.), First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge, MA/ London: MIT Press, 154-164. 276 Armin Lippitz, René Reinhold Schallegger & Felix Schniz Part 3: Perspectives from English Language Education The Power of Literature (Teaching): Experiencing Warsan Shire’s Home Werner Delanoy 1 Introduction Let me start with the question of what the power of literature teaching is in language education. Let me continue with the answer that the power of literature teaching resides in mediating between literary texts and language learners in the interest of a dialogic agenda. This answer raises a series of further questions begging the clarification of what is meant by power, literature, language education, teacher mediation and dialogue. Indeed, all of these keywords have invited conflictual evaluations in past and current debates, and it goes beyond the scope of this essay to offer a detailed discussion. In the following, therefore, one specific perspective will be presented. This perspective brings together (a) a certain notion of dialogue, (b) a definition of literature (teaching) grounded in Reader Response Theory (RRT), (c) a concept of language education fostering symbolic competence, and (d) a teaching perspective inspired by current network-theories. These components form an assemblage aiming for learner empowerment in the interest of democratic, peaceful and cross-cultural conviviality in a globalized modernity. While working on this article I read the poem Home by Warsan Shire (2017, 2022). Engagement with the poem helped me re-experience the power of literature, which according to the approach chosen lies in immersing readers in unfamiliar worlds and challenging existing modes of feeling and thinking. Hence, in my reflections on the power of literature (teaching) Home will provide a reference point throughout my discussion. 2 “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark” This is the opening line of Warsan Shire’s Home. In this poem, Warsan Shire, a British-Somali writer, born in Kenya and now living in the US, writes about forced home-leaving as experienced by young, female and black refugees. There are different versions of this poem in circulation, some published by humanrights organizations like Amnesty International Ireland (2016) or Facing History and Ourselves (2017). Performances of the poem can be found on YouTube, with one animated version co-created by the writer, musicians and graphic artists (Abigail et al. 2017). Parts of the latest version of Home also appear in another poem by the writer (Conversations about Home at a Deportation Centre, 2011). Finally, the poem is included in Warsan Shire’s hot-off-the-press, first full-length poetry collection titled Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (2022). This text brings together earlier versions of Home and parts from Conversations about Home at a Deportation Centre. It also significantly differs from earlier versions as will be explained later. In an interview with broadcaster Kathleen Newman Bremang (McLean, Bremang and Shire 2022), Warsan Shire states that for her “writing is a process to speak with the unspeakable”. She adds that writing has helped her “to regulate [her] emotions”, a statement reminiscent of William Wordsworth’s comments on the regulative function of poetic form as expressed in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (2000 [1802]: 608-611). By contrast, however, in Home “emotion” is not “recollected in tranquility”, but in a state of pain, still immediately felt. Without mincing her words, the speaker in the poem refers to traumatic experiences such as racism, rape and murder. In the light of Shire’s comments, the poem’s power lies in making experience communicable that otherwise may well remain too traumatic to be articulated or too distant to be imagined. In Home, poetic form can partly moderate over‐ whelming emotion. The poem does not offer a regular meter, yet irregularities alternate with regular patterns (e.g., the repeated use of dactyls in the opening line). This can be read as a first attempt to give order to a still overwhelming experience. Highly memorable images abound. The first line can immediately draw the reader into the poem. A similar effect can be achieved with lines such as “no one puts children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land” or “prison is safer than a city on fire”. Such images can help the reader stay immersed in the text. To my mind, they also indicate that a highly painful experience has become expressible, perhaps containable in the form of powerful symbols. In earlier text versions, the setting of the poem remains ambiguous. It could be a deportation center, a safer place somewhere abroad, or the country from which the speaker wishes to escape. As for the first option, the author herself based an early poem, Conversations about Home at a Deportation Centre, on her interviews with refugees in such places. As regards the second possibility, the 280 Werner Delanoy 1 Some of the reactions quoted read as follows: “The/ go home blacks/ refugees/ dirty asylum seekers/ sucking our county dry/ niggers with their hands out/ they smell strange/ savage/ messed up their country and now they want/ to mess ours up […]” (2017). speaker directly quotes the negative reactions to refugees in ‘safe’ countries 1 . This part of the poem ends with the comment that such negative response still is “softer than a limb torn off ”, which may indicate the speaker’s residency in a new environment. Finally, in the 2016 and 2017 versions, the third option cannot be ruled out because of the poem’s finishing lines (“i don’t know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here”). If “here” is still the most dangerous place to inhabit, escape may still be pending. Note the lowercase use of ‘I’ in the finishing lines. Together with the comment “i don’t know what i’ve become”, it can be read as a reference to an unstable self, unsure, perhaps robbed of its own identity. As for the poem’s emotional impact, Home neither invites gushing emotion nor does it tolerate complacency or truth avoidance. To my mind, the text aims for full recognition of the suffering experienced by (black female) refugees. Moreover, the poem holds a mirror up to people in the refugees’ target countries by highlighting their negative reactions. Indeed, an unpleasant truth is brought home to their worlds and dominant attitudes are being challenged. The poem’s shock value can make Home a difficult text to read and teach. Should it be excluded from pedagogical contexts? Judging by the theories informing my approach to literature teaching this must be answered in the negative. Let me, therefore, explain the cornerstones of this approach in some detail. Indeed, the challenges posed by Home necessitate careful reflection upon the poem’s teachability. Such reflection also serves as an inspiration to rethink and re-vision this literature and language teaching philosophy. 3 Dialogue as a foundation for literature and language teaching In literature teaching my intellectual home is a specific version of Reader Response Theory (RRT), which is focused on the interactions between literature and its readers. At the heart of this approach lies a particular notion of dialogue which has allowed RRT to undergo manifold transformations in the light of changing challenges. This understanding of dialogue is rooted in a post- Gadamerian hermeneutics (Kögler 1992), Mikhael Bakhtin’s (1981) writings, Peter Zima’s (2000) critical theory, cosmopolitan concepts of complex dialogue creation in a globalized modernity (Benhabib 2002; Sobré-Denton and Bardhan The Power of Literature (Teaching): Experiencing Warsan Shire’s Home 281 2 For a definition of my understanding of respect, see Delanoy (2022: 125). 2014), and post-humanist theories interlinking human concerns with ecological and technological perspectives (Bennet 2010; Braidotti 2013). Its main characteristics are as follows: a. First, building on a post-Gadamerian hermeneutics (Kögler 1992: 79, 301; 2014: 49), human understanding is viewed as subject to basic limitations resulting from humans’ socio-cultural embeddedness, their limited lifespans, the hyper-complexity of their habitats, and their restricted cognitive and sensory powers. b. Secondly, despite these limitations, humans can enlarge their scope of re‐ flection, empathy and action through confrontation with different perspec‐ tives varying in their degree of otherness (Bredella 2002: 124; Kögler 1992: 25). Zima (1991: 102), for example, distinguishes between “intersubjective” and “interdiscursive” forms of dialogue. In the case of “intersubjective dialogue” the parties involved share important convictions, while in the latter case basic beliefs and values are at odds. “Interdiscursive dialogue” poses more serious obstacles, yet it also offers more radical possibilities for new insight. c. Thirdly, a case is made for respectful engagement with human and nonhuman others, where respect does not stop when other perspectives clash with or call into question one’s own convictions 2 . Respect alone, however, does not suffice to better understand other actants. What is also needed are suitable perspectives and analytical tools (Kögler 1992: 90). d. Fourthly, following Bakhtin (1981: 30), dialogue is an open-ended and cre‐ ative process with no “first” and “final word”, where new problem-, people-, situationand context-specific solutions need to be found continuously. e. Fifthly, dialogue aims for democratically ruled societies, where existing power hierarchies are transformed into more egalitarian structures. In such societies individual and collective needs and interests are acknowledged, seeing every person as an end in its own right as long as their actions do not curtail the freedom of others. f. Dialogue aims for inclusion of as many people as possible. In a globalized modernity, cross-cultural dialogue is viewed as a necessity to address global issues such as ecological crises, economic and technological interconnect‐ edness, or the existence of transnational power divisions. g. In the light of a climate out of kilter, biodiversity in decline, increasingly intelligent robots and computer-generated virtual realities, dialogue can no longer focus on humans alone. Indeed, the humanist credo to place humans 282 Werner Delanoy at the center needs correcting, by fully acknowledging the interdependence of human and non-human actants in polycentral networks (Bennet 2010; Braidotti 2013). h. Dialogue aims for peaceful conviviality where conflicts are addressed and solved through debate (Wintersteiner 2001). Education for dialogue, therefore, heavily rests on the development of communicative capabilities. In other words, education for dialogue is inextricably linked to language education (Delanoy 2002: 133-135). Of course, such a notion of dialogue comes with several caveats. As an idealist concept it often stands in stark contrast to existing realities, which raises questions about its practicability. Here, Miriam Sobré-Denton and Nilanjana Bardhan (2013: 5) refer to the importance of maintaining a hopeful perspective despite “continuing neo-colonial and postcolonial inequities, social and global injustices, terrorism, poverty, ethnic conflicts and wars”. In addition, the com‐ plexities and uncertainties involved can overwhelm, unsettle and incapacitate its participants. In cosmopolitan debates, Thomas Bender (2017: 117), therefore, refers to the importance of scaffolding education for dialogue to keep demands within manageable, dialogue-conducive limits. How does this notion of dialogue relate to Warsan Shire’s Home? Building on Zima’s terminology, I would classify the text as an invitation to interdiscursive dialogue, since the scope of dialogue is widened by drawing attention to a subaltern voice that often goes unheard in dominant debates, where refugees are branded as a collective threat to a host country’s stability. A passage like “no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck/ feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled/ means something more than a journey” can vividly show the despair driving people away from their homes and making them endure incredible suffering. Moreover, the references to host reactions can hold up a mirror to those living in Western countries, thus inviting self-critical introspection in the interest of empathetic perspective taking. Engagement with the poem, therefore, can make its readers mindful of the monstrosity of refugee suffering. In cosmopolitan debates, such an approach aligns with Paolo Lemos Horta’s (2017: 158) plea for shocking recipients out of their comfort zone to confront them with unpleasant reality. As stated above, such an approach can overwhelm its recipients. A major teaching challenge, therefore, lies in retaining the poem’s shock value without placing excessive demands on the learners. The Power of Literature (Teaching): Experiencing Warsan Shire’s Home 283 3 John Dewey together with Arthur Bentley introduced the term transaction in 1949. Dewey’s and Bentley’s terminology conceptually anticipates Wolfgang Welsch’s dis‐ tinction between interand transculturality by more than 40 years, thus raising doubt about the latter’s claim to his concept’s originality (cf. Welsch 1999: 196). 4 Reader Response Theory (RRT) Since its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s RRT has had a lasting impact on literature teaching, and in ELT-debates it is still hailed as the current orthodoxy in the field (Ludwig 2021: 212). To my mind, its success strongly results from its commit‐ ment to dialogue. Dialogue as an open-ended process of transformation through engagement with different positions has empowered RRT to continually and self-critically further develop its scope for reflection and action in the light of changing socio-cultural and field-specific challenges. RRT is inclusive of conflicting perspectives, some of them incompatible with a dialogic agenda (for a detailed discussion, see Bredella 2010: 37-42). My position links back to approaches focused on the interaction between literary texts and their readers. Bredella (2002: 43-45) suggests the superordinate “interactive paradigm” to classify such concepts, while Marie Louise Rosenblatt (1994: 17) uses a different denomination, namely that of “transactional theory”. In this section, the basic tenets of this RRT-approach will be introduced. In addition, some of the concept’s transformations will be highlighted. - 4.1 Engagement with literature as text-guided aesthetic experience Proponents of the interactive paradigm and of transactional theory both view engagement with literature as aesthetically motivated acts of guided meaning creation, where guided by a text, readers give the piece their personal meanings. For both, text and reader undergo transformation in the reading process. Building on John Dewey’s terminology, Rosenblatt (1994: 17) prefers the term transaction to that of interaction. For her interaction implies the idea of “separate, self-contained, and already defined entities”, thus capturing insufficiently the “compenetration of the reader and the text” (ibid.: 12) 3 . However, interaction as discussed by Bredella also implies Dewey’s and Rosenblatt’s understanding of transaction. With its (post)-Gadamerian moorings the interactive paradigm is based on a notion of dialogue where heterogeneous elements meet and merge in the meaning making process (Bredella 2010: 136). Despite the different terminology, I will, therefore, treat the two as one school of thought. What lies at the heart of this approach is a particular understanding of literature as aesthetic experience. The hallmarks of such experience can be summed up as follows: 284 Werner Delanoy 4 Primary forms of aesthetic pleasure include playing with language, different forms of identification with fictional characters ( Jauss 1972: 46), or a preference for gripping plotlines. a. Art is defined as a structured stimulus inviting new insight. As a result, preference is given to challenging literary texts encouraging their readers to further develop their emotional, cognitive and ethical capabilities. Here, concepts like “defamiliarization” (Iser 1978: 87) or the “prolongation of perception” (Dewey 1934: 52) are invoked to underline the power of art to help question and transform habitual modes of feeling and thinking. Prolongation also implies deep and longer-lasting engagement leading to heightened awareness of what would normally go unquestioned (Dewey 1934: 57). b. In addition, aesthetic experience is defined as “anschauende Erkenntnis” ( Jauss 1972: 155). Other than “begriffliche Erkenntnis”, where insight is gained through more abstract deliberation, vivid experience (my transla‐ tion) implies engagement with concrete people and incidents. c. As for art’s relationship with reality, aesthetic experience is viewed as temporary release from the pressures of everyday life to experiment relatively safely with challenging content. Benton and Fox (1985: 2) speak of “secondary worlds” permitting mental experimentation without having to face real-life consequences. As a concrete example Bredella (1996: 3) refers to the difference between “being hungry” and “feeling hungry”. For example, when reading a text like Adam Zameenzad’s My Friend Matt and Henna the Whore (1988) readers can feel with the protagonists the devastating consequences of hunger without having to face starvation themselves. d. Such experimentation remains in contact with primary worlds. For Bredella (2002: 163), art helps its recipients step outside their primary worlds to relate the insights gained back to their real-life worlds. e. They do so by adopting a holistic perspective. In other words, readers do not engage with art with a narrow focus in mind but ask themselves what a text/ artifact as a whole means to them as a whole. Such whole-text and whole-person orientation permits the creation of manifold and unexpected connections between text and reader (Bredella 2002: 156; Rosenblatt 1994: 222-225). f. Aesthetic communication should give its participants pleasure. For RRT, the major challenge has been to combine primary forms of aesthetic pleasure as experienced by “ordinary readers” (Rosenblatt 1994: 138) 4 with finding pleasure in (self-)critical text-reception. RRT-specialists, therefore, The Power of Literature (Teaching): Experiencing Warsan Shire’s Home 285 have defined aesthetic experience as a mix between intensive emotional involvement and self-critical detachment (Benton 1992: 15; Bredella 1996: 18; Rosenblatt 1994: 27, 37). On the one hand, a case is made for strong immersion in secondary worlds. On the other hand, readers are asked to self-critically reflect upon the feelings and ideas evoked during the reading process. As regards Home, the poem can challenge people’s existing knowledge of and attitudes to refugees. The concrete images and the references to real-life atrocities voiced by a speaker in distress give the text a vivid quality typical of “anschauende Erkenntnis”. As a longer poem (about two pages) with some puzzling images (“I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory” [Shire 2022: 25]) and several elliptical comments, the text in its composition can pro‐ long the meaning-making process and invite reflection upon what is presented. By participating in a secondary world, the reader can feel with the speaker from a safe home, that is, without real-life involvement in a shocking reality. By adopting a holistic perspective, readers can bring in manifold associations, ideas, memories and feelings, and reflect upon them in and after the reading process. As dialectical entities, secondary and primary worlds remain interconnected, and the insights gained can feed back into people’s perception of unwanted refugees. The text only partly permits primary aesthetic pleasure (e.g., through use of gripping images). Instead, Home invites a revision of dominant views, cosuffering with the speaker and acceptance of co-responsibility for an unpleasant reality. For RRT this notion of aesthetic experience can serve different purposes. On the one hand, it can help gauge a literary text’s potential for inviting such experience. On the other hand, this notion has served as a learning objective to steer learning processes into a specific direction. Of course, RRT’s understanding of aesthetic experience is a normative construct. As such it is one position among others which can offer different directions for literature teaching. Other positions include the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory with its rejection of primary pleasure, or Cognitive Cultural Studies with its highly positive assessment of such experience as a means to foster empathetic perspective taking (Weik von Mossner 2014). While in the 1970s proponents of RRT explained their reservations about the Frankfurt School ( Jauss 1972: 9-10), RRT’s relationship with Cognitive Cultural Studies, to the best of my knowledge, has not been looked into yet. 286 Werner Delanoy 4.2 RRT in transformation As early as 1993, Christopher Brumfit and Michael Benton (1993: 3) referred to the dialogic qualities of RRT arguing that “it is able to accommodate aspects of, say narratology or feminist theory within its framework as allies in the effort to elucidate the interaction between text and reader which is its focus of concern”. Indeed, RRT has undergone significant transformation through confrontation with other schools of thought, resulting in, for example, a reevaluation of literature in the light of power-critical debates, a shift towards multi-modality and the adoption of network-related concepts to explain textreader interrelationships. Proponents of early RRT, such as Bredella and Rosenblatt, make the literary text the senior partner in the text-reader dialogue. It is the role of art, literature, the literary text to guide its recipients towards gaining new and self-critical insight. In other words, literature serves as the catalyst, and it is the reader’s role to bring the text’s innovative and socio-critical potential alive. Power-critical theories, however, soon offered alternative concepts such as the resisting reader (Fetterley 1978) to highlight literature’s potential implication in unjust ideologies. While in Anglophone countries power-critical approaches had become a mainstay of RRT in the early 1990s (Corcoran 1992; O’Neill 1990), such development happened later in ELT-debates in German-speaking countries (Delanoy 2002: 101-110). Meanwhile, both appreciative and resistant engagement with literature have become firmly established in RRT, thus making the reader an equal partner in the text-reader-relationship. In its early days RRT was mainly focused on written texts. Of course, multi‐ modal texts also existed (picture books, songs, comics), yet they at best played a marginal role. With the rapid rise of visual and digital media, multimodal practices have transformed literature teaching into multimodal education, thus leading to dialogic relationships between RRT-positions and, for example, the multiliteracies approach (Delanoy 2018; Kalantzis et al. 2016). Early RRT still used a relatively simple model of dialogue focused on the single text and the (student) reader. Wolfgang Hallet (2002: 6, 101, 105 cont.) is right when he criticizes such a model as unsuited to the present time. Indeed, in an age of wide-ranging communication networks, mass data transfer, and multimodal communication streams, capabilities need to be developed which allow learners to successfully navigate in a vast body of texts within and outside literary studies. As a result, RRT has been interlinked with intertextual approaches, where the creation of meanings is no longer just a text-reader affair. Instead, teacher interventions, concrete student readings, curricular influences and other contextual factors all co-condition the meaning making process. As a result, The Power of Literature (Teaching): Experiencing Warsan Shire’s Home 287 RRT has turned to network theories to better understand this conglomerate of influences acting upon each other (Delanoy 2021). Moreover, the single-text approach has been criticized by proponents of power-critical perspectives. The term single text here stands for text collections rooted in one specific ideology. Hence, Helene Decke-Cornill (1994: 281) makes it clear that simply reading extensively does not suffice, since people may read the same type of story again and again, and thus remain caught in a narrow understanding of themselves and others. Thus, she (ibid.: 281) argues in favor of text combinations presenting different positions. In addition, preference is given to texts questioning established views and resisting mono-logic closure. Such a position carries particular weight in a digital age where echo chambers supported by partisan algorithms prevent dialogic engagement with other viewpoints. So far, my response to Home has been highly appreciative, that is very much in line with early RRT’s positive evaluation of literature. As stated above, different versions of the poem are in circulation, one being multimodal in approach. In addition, Home will be part of a text-ensemble including other poems written by black, female writers, and more will be said about this in section six. Following Decke-Cornill (1994), Home as a single text can help question dominant views. Moreover, the text does not offer closure since the speaker is still in the middle of coming to terms with her traumatic experience. 5. Literature, symbolic competence and language education The term language education refers to ELT-approaches combining language learning with socio-cultural issues. My understanding of language education is based on Claire Kramsch’s notion of symbolic competence, identity-focused the‐ ories of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and the multiliteracies approach. For Kramsch (2009: 199), symbolic competence stands for “the […] ability to take symbolic action and exercise symbolic power” in a globalized modernity. Of course, exercising symbolic competence goes far beyond the spoken and the written word. For Kalantzis et al. (2016: 1), meaning making has become increasingly multimodal, thus leading to practices, where “written-linguistic modes of meaning interface with oral, visual, gestural, tactile and spatial pat‐ terns of meaning”. In addition, Kalantzis et. al. (ibid.: 7), suggest a multiliteracies approach where students “have a broad communicative repertoire, so they can make and participate in meanings in a wide variety of social and cultural settings”. 288 Werner Delanoy Language education also interlinks with theories of SLA focused on the connection between language learning and identity construction (Block 2003: 64; Norton 2013: 50). Proponents of this approach are critical of perspectives reducing language learning to a mere exchange of information about an already familiar world. Similarly, Kramsch (2009: 189) argues that “traditionally, language education has emphasized the referential or instrumental uses of language and the way it expresses conventional meanings”. Such a concept robs language learning of its power to co-create new life-worlds, and it is illsuited for a globalized modernity where symbolic competences are in urgent demand to help develop new solutions to pressing socio-cultural, ecological, technological or economic challenges. As regards engagement with such issues, Kramsch, Kalantzis et al. and identity-focused SLA-scholars all support a notion of empowerment in line with dialogic principles. For Kramsch literature should play a key role in language education. She argues that “symbolic competence has to be nourished by a literary imagination at all levels of the language curriculum” (Kramsch 2006: 251). For her (ibid.: 251), “language learners are not just communicators and problem solvers, but whole persons with hearts, bodies, and minds, with memories, fantasies, loyalties, identities”. Such a position widely overlaps with RRT’s whole-person orienta‐ tion. Kramsch (2009: 7) also argues that to become symbolically competent attention must be drawn to the formal construction of “perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, aspirations, [and] values”. Similarly, RRT aims for a prolongation of perception leading to increased awareness of form-meaning interdependencies. Finally, for Kramsch (2006: 251) and RRT (e.g., Blau 2003: 211) literature invites complex engagement with life-worlds, thus offering an alternative to simplistic and reductive practices of meaning-creation. As regards Home, the poem can foster symbolic competence in manifold ways. The text goes beyond the conventional by giving people a voice who are often reduced to negative stereotypes in public debates. The poem also combines a restless rhythm with a still futile search for identity, thus making palpable some of the issues obstructing the construction of stable selves in a highly precarious environment. Prolonged engagement with the poem can invite reflection upon the symbolic impact of certain formal devices (e.g., the use of powerful images, elliptical comments or an irregular meter). One of the poem’s realizations (2017) is multimodal in approach, including spoken word, pictures and music. As for the voice of the speaker, the poem is read very fast, with a serious tone throughout and with few pauses. Towards the end there is a longer pause before three of the lines are delivered with a sobbing voice, which is soon choked back to continue with a less emotional rendition. The Power of Literature (Teaching): Experiencing Warsan Shire’s Home 289 As for my interpretation, the speed of the delivery signals a restless, agitated state of mind where the speaker is still driven by the need to escape. To my mind this need is confirmed by the speaker’s strong emotional involvement finding expression in her outburst of emotion. Contrary to the voice, the drawings move slowly, often metonymically highlighting some of the words/ lines in the poem. They show disembodied feet on the run, cartoon-like faces drawn with just a few lines, the word home appearing and multiplying in different sizes. The background is entirely black and the stylized images all come in white. The way I read the pictures, the dominance of black evokes a dark atmosphere, and the single images indicate an experience where a coherent gestalt has not been created yet. The music is slow, minimalistic, repetitive and harmonious with minimal instrumentation. For me, the music stands in stark contrast to the restlessness of the voice and the darkness and incoherence of the pictures. This raises questions about what this use of music may signify and how it relates to the voice and the pictures. 6 Teaching Warsan Shire’s Home In this section, a tentative workplan will be presented, which, so far, has not been put into practice. This workplan mirrors my current understanding of the poem and of the learning/ teaching challenges envisaged. As a multi-component scenario, attention will first be given to the notion of network informing my research approach. Secondly, the focus is on the various literary and non-literary texts included in the workplan. This text ensemble comprises different versions of the poem, an interview with Warsan Shire and, as further specified below, poems by other writers to be read in conjunction with Home. Finally, insight is given into how I intend to scaffold my students’ engagement with these texts. - 6.1 Learning scenarios as poly-central networks In the history of RRT there has been noticeable development towards an increasingly polycentral approach. For early RRT, the literary text represented the main center, that is the main stimulus for enabling aesthetic experience. As stated above, this already changed when proponents of power-critical approaches suggested resistant readings, thus making the reader another central agent for enabling critical insight. In ELT, language learning represents another center, which in some constellations may well override literature learning objectives (Dahl 1986; Mason 2013). Moreover, as of the 1990s the centrality of teacher mediation has received stronger attention. For example, my early research was focused on acts of teacher intervention in literature learning to 290 Werner Delanoy study the impact of teacher moves on learning scenarios (Delanoy 1992,1994). Later, Wolfgang Hallet combined RRT with intertextual (2002) and inter-medial (2015) approaches, thus shifting the focus to text ensembles and multi-modal networks of meaning creation. Recently, post-humanist assemblage theory has been taken on board to discuss the poly-centrality of literature teaching/ learning and the power of non-human actants in this educational context (Delanoy 2021; Wehrmann 2021). Acknowledging the dialogic power of all these contributions, a case is made for studying literature teaching/ learning as a poly-central, highly complex and developing network of interdependent components acting upon each other. Depending on the specific make-up of concrete situations all the components involved can play decisive roles, be they literary texts, student readings, teacher contributions, language learning aims, setting-related factors, technological influences or forces beyond human control (e.g., the Covid pandemic). Despite its differences such an approach shares important characteristics with early RRT. The literary text and aesthetic experience still represent sources of new insight. Integrating emotional involvement and critical detachment still serves as a major guiding principle for structuring learning processes. Finally, RRT’s basic belief is reaffirmed. Texts only come alive, when students can develop a personal relationship with them. - 6.2 Teaching Home as part of a text ensemble For my workplan two different text ensembles can be distinguished. The first one includes different versions of Home plus an interview with Warsan Shire. The second ensemble interlinks Home with Patience Agbabi’s Rappin’ It Up (1995: 61-63) and Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb (2021). In the following, for reasons of space, I will mainly focus on the first ensemble, while the other two poems will only be discussed in passing. As regards versions of Home, I have selected the written version published by Facing History and Ourselves (2017), the YouTube video with spoken word, pictures and music (Abigail et. at. 2017), and the text in Shire’s poetry collection (2022: 24-25). I have already discussed the first two, and hence I will only focus on the text in Blessed the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head. This version differs in important ways from the other two. First, it is structured like a prose text with paragraphs and two separated parts, while in earlier versions use is made of run-on lines and continuing stanzas. To my mind, this gives the 2022-version a more coherent quality, as if the speaker meanwhile had gained some distance from her traumatic experience. This is also confirmed by omission of the line “anywhere is safer than here”, which comes The Power of Literature (Teaching): Experiencing Warsan Shire’s Home 291 at the end of earlier versions. It seems the speaker now lives in a new place although the absence of a clear sense of self is re-confirmed, however, without the lower-case ‘i’ (“I don’t know what I have become”). This comment plus the references to the new hosts’ negative reactions are printed in italics. Again, I have read this added emphasis as a structuring device enabled by the distance gained. As stated above, the poem now comes in two parts, with the first part condensing earlier versions and leaving out most of the physical violence. The second part, however, abounds with shocking images (e.g., “a truckload of men […] pulling out my teeth and nails”) and ends with rape. This may indicate that the speaker now can directly address such experience, while this was still impossible before. Yet, such directness may be experienced as too overwhelming by student readers. When scaffolding readings of Home, thus, I would not start with the 2022-version, unless the second part is bracketed out. Home will be included in a course unit focused on New Poetry: Black Female Voices. Let me add that the texts are not grouped around a common theme like leaving home. Instead, the emotional state of the speaker served as the basis for text selection. The other two poems are Rappin’ it Up (Patience Agbabi) and The Hill We Climb (Amanda Gorman). Rappin’ It Up presents a strong, confident, black and female voice turning her back on white, classical poets by finding her identity in feminist rap. The humor of the text and its catchy rhythm can make engagement with the piece a highly pleasurable experience. The text also invites controversial responses through its criticism of classical writers (e.g., Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth) and male sexist behavior. While in Home, pain, suffering and struggle for survival take center place, the speaker in Rappin It Up can playfully use her anger to present a confident and forceful self. Amanda Gorman’s poem, read during Joe Biden’s inaugural address, is also a confident plea for a democratic world threatened by disruptive forces such as racism or populism. As with the video of Home, the video of Gorman’s reading can be studied to reflect upon the symbolic power of this multimodal performance. Let me conclude that in my teaching unit Home will be placed between the other two texts, with Agbabi’s poem coming first and Gorman’s piece following Shire’s text. That way engagement with a painful reality can be framed by two texts far more optimistic in approach. - 6.3 A workplan for teaching Home Building on Benton and Fox (1985: 11-12), my scaffolding of literature learning processes follows a stage-by-stage model. As regards different stages in the reading process, a distinction is made between feeling like reading, getting into the text, being/ staying involved in the text and getting out of the text (Delanoy 292 Werner Delanoy 2002: 68-75). Indeed, engagement with Home requires some careful planning throughout the reception process. In the following, learning activities will be suggested for all the stages. The main challenge lies in making aesthetic experience possible despite the shocking perspective portrayed. The activities have been designed for a course on literature teaching offered every semester in the ELT program at Klagenfurt University (Austria). Most of the students taking this class are in the second or third year of their studies, and course participation is limited to 25 students. My preferred seminar room for this class offers flexible furniture which can easily be rearranged for group work activities. The technical equipment in the room (computer, projector, screen) permits easy access to the internet. The time frame envisaged is 90-120 minutes spread over two weeks. While in the first session about 30 minutes will be allocated to working with Home, the full 90 minutes of the following session will be reserved for follow-up work. (a) Feeling like reading and getting into the text For this stage, the focus is on two versions of Home, the written version from the Facing History and Ourselves homepage and the multimodal YouTube video. The activities suggested can be applied to both stages, that is they function as stimuli to motivate learners to engage with the poem and they should also facilitate entry into the text. To get started, the title and some lines from the text will be presented (“no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark”; “no one puts children in a boat unless the water is safer than the ground”; “beg, forget pride, your survival is more important”). The extracts are put next to a picture taken from the internet that shows Warsan Shire at a poetry reading. The students are then asked to bring in any comments triggered by the stimuli. Let me add, that these lines were chosen for their memorability, the first one having triggered my interest in Home. Moreover, working with snippets as a pre-reading stimulus has repeatedly proven a powerful approach to create student interest on previous occasions (Delanoy 2007). Next, the video is presented twice in the seminar room without providing a written text version to follow the speaker’s rendition. The students again are invited to voice any ideas, feelings, associations, images, likes and dislikes evoked by the piece whether they concern the spoken text, pictures or the soundtrack. This task does not ask for a coherent understanding of the piece, the focus being on first impressions. The holistic focus and the preference for first impressions hopefully can invite wide student participation. In addition, this approach also aligns with the whole-person orientation suggested by RRT. The Power of Literature (Teaching): Experiencing Warsan Shire’s Home 293 The first unit ends when students have had sufficient opportunity to voice and discuss their first responses. (b) Being/ staying involved in the text As home assignments, the following activities require intensive involvement with the poem and the video. The students are asked to read the full poem, watch the video again, and then mark all the changes to the written text made by the speaker in the video. That way, repeated engagement with Home can foster an ongoing, thorough and differentiated understanding of the piece. The changes between the written poem and the spoken text, however, mainly concern details and do not affect the overall thrust of Home. I am aware that focus on these details can divert attention away from some of the more general issues addressed by Home. On the plus side, however, students can experience themselves as producers of a new text, that is of a transcript still unavailable in written form. In addition, the activity entails a highly concentrated approach, thus adding further depth to the reception process. Being done with their work, the students then jot down their answers to the following questions: • What is your overall response to Home? • Who is speaking? How do you see the speaker? • What did you feel when you read the poem and watched the video? • Are there specific lines, pictures, sound elements that have attracted your attention? If yes, in which ways? • What has remained unclear? • Which do you like more, the poem or the video? Why? Please, comment on any likes or dislikes. • Any other comments. In line with RRT’s credo that a text only comes alive when readers give it their personal meanings, most of the questions ask the students to report on their personal responses to Home. Treating literary texts and their readers as equal partners, appreciative and critical comments are invited. In addition, engagement with the questions also implies stepping back from immediate involvement with Home. The students reflect on their reception processes, noting down their answers. For the follow-up session they bring along their documents to present them in class. (c) Getting out of the text At this stage the focus is on how learners leave a text’s secondary world (De‐ lanoy 2002: 74-75). Ideally, students have developed a positive relationship with 294 Werner Delanoy Home based on immersive engagement and (self-)critical reflection. Moreover, they are motivated and able to report on and further develop their findings. Again, none of these objectives can be taken for granted, and even less so in language education where the foreign language can prove an additional barrier. Hence, meeting each of these objectives may require acts of teacher intervention. As for my teaching project, the target language is no real issue because of the high language proficiency of the students. As in earlier projects, one of my central tasks will be to structure the sharing of responses with the help of pair-work, small-group and plenary discussions. In addition, my interventions should help identify thematic clusters, elicit further responses and redirect the students’ attention to text passages or video sequences. This being a course for trainee language teachers, the students finally reflect upon the workplan and its realization from the perspective of language and literature teachers, making suggestions and developing strategies for future improvement. This is where the unit will stop. However, if the students wish to continue with Home, workplan reflection and improvement will be preceded by some post-reading task-options from which the students can select one activity. One task is to read the text-version in Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head. As further options they could storyboard sequences for a new video or watch Kathleen Newman-Bremang’s (2022) interview with Warsan Shire (available on YouTube) and think of questions they would like to ask the writer. If none of these meet the learners’ interest, the students can self-choose an activity. Let me restate that this workplan has not been put to the test yet. As an assemblage, it aims to bring together different versions of Home, university students of English attending a literature teaching course and particular settingrelated factors (a certain time-frame, a room with flexible furniture, certain technological equipment). In the light of assemblage theory (Delanda 2016), taking out or adding an element can have wide-reaching systemic repercussions. For example, if the students started with the version in Shire’s poetry collection, reading the second part may discourage them from any further engagement with the piece, thus rendering impossible an aesthetic response, where safe experimentation can feed back into primary life-worlds. Or, if the text was read with younger, less experienced students both age-related factors and more limited language abilities can send shock waves throughout a system. Or, if another wave of Covid necessitates a return to virtual teaching/ learning the interactions between texts, students and teacher would also be affected in multiple ways. The Power of Literature (Teaching): Experiencing Warsan Shire’s Home 295 7 Conclusion Let me return to the question of what the power of literature (teaching) is in language education. Let me restate that the position outlined is grounded in a certain notion of dialogue, a specific RRT-approach and its transformations, a multimodal concept of symbolic competence, and a poly-central research and teaching perspective inspired by assemblage theory. Literature as aesthetic experience is presented as a catalyst for gaining new insight, and language and literature learning can help empower learners to co-create personally meaningful, democratic, peaceful and eco-friendly life worlds. As a dialogic concept, this position comes with limitations and seeks confrontation with other perspectives to further its scope for action and reflection. Yet, this summary only partly reflects my current state of mind. I am still grappling with the shark’s teeth, and the ground I stand on does not feel solid. I still feel Home in my bones, and every new reading permits new findings. On TV, I see a boat of refugees arriving at a port in Southern Italy, and I wonder whether the speaker is on board. Maybe, this can better explain my understanding of the power of literature. Making my students experience some of this power has inspired my literature teaching throughout my career. References - Primary Sources Abigail, P., M. Garret, P. Haley, V. 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Post-inclusive Education, Diversity and Multilinguality in ELT Anita Millonig 1 Introduction One of the consequences of globalization is that, for most people, encounters with speakers of various languages have become commonplace and much more frequent than in the past. Linguistic landscapes are changing as people cross borders, learn new languages and communicate with others. Apart from becoming acquainted with elements of other languages through personal contacts, the internet offers a vast amount of resources to perceive or even study foreign languages. Particularly in urban areas and among young people, hybrid forms emerge. The borders between languages themselves become more fluid as people mix languages and make use of languages which they may only have limited knowledge of in order to communicate with each other. What we experience has been referred to as a multilingual turn by various authors, and it also raises new questions about how to teach languages at schools today. In this article, I want to discuss implications for English language teaching. The presented ideas developed out of a research project during which I carried out a school ethnography at an Austrian lower secondary school (middle school). The insights I gained from accompanying one school class over the course of a year were linked to further research and theories from a wide range of relevant disciplines, and were also informed by my own teaching experiences with plurilingual learners and in dialogue with prospective English language teachers who attended courses I taught on the subject of multilingual and multicultural classroom settings. Multilinguality has more than one meaning in the context of teaching English. On the one hand, it is descriptive and points to the fact that a growing number of pupils is plurilingual 1 . On the other hand, it is prescriptive as teachers are required both in school curricula for English language teaching and in more general guidelines for teachers of all subjects (Unterrichtsprinzipien) to include and make active use of the various languages children may have acquired previously. Moreover, a Council of Europe Policy (2014) aimed at fostering plurilingualism by enabling EU citizens to learn more foreign languages, requires language teachers to rethink their educational practices. This affects English as a school subject in particular because of its prominent position in school curricula. As a consequence, English language teachers are faced with multiple challenges. 2 Institutional challenges The teaching of any subject takes place in certain contexts and is to a large extent bound to these contexts. Austrian school policies put a strong focus on the acquisition of the national language, German. Gogolin’s (1994) findings on the monolingual and monocultural habitus operating at German and Austrian schools are still valid. Teachers thus have to balance contradictory interests since they have to follow and act out national state and governmental interests (and power) which are still based on latent ideas of homogeneity (uniformity) such as homogeneity of languages, homogeneity of cultures, and homogeneity of populations, which are at the source of state ideologies of language and identity. ( Jessner and Mayr-Keiler 2017: 89) One may argue that the English language classroom should not be affected by this situation to the same extent as other subjects. One may even expect that the teaching of a foreign language could add another perspective to deficit perspectives related to learners’ knowledge of the German language. Schmid- Schönbein argues that the foreign language classroom could be a place where this kind of pressure and problematization was not prevalent (Keßler and Paulick 2010: 258). On the contrary, learning another language could be easier for those who are already experienced in foreign language learning. Psychologically speaking, it may also raise pupils’ self-esteem when they find themselves in a situation where they can show competence. Unfortunately, they do not always get a chance to show competence, because English does not tend to be considered a priority for learners who still need to improve their German skills. Children with a so-called migration background are “generally at greater risk of leaving education without having completed more than a lower secondary level of 302 Anita Millonig 2 https: / / ec.europa.eu/ eurostat/ statisticsexplained/ index.php? title=Migrant_integration _statistics_-_education#Share_of_early_leavers_from_education_and_training 3 https: / / www.coe.int/ en/ web/ language-policy/ young-migrants education” 2 . This happens despite another policy of the Council of Europe on the linguistic integration and education of children and adolescents from migrant backgrounds 3 . High achievement in language courses is, however, an indicator for success in all other subjects, and could thus even help lessen these learners’ risk of dropping out of school early. Hu (2004: 72) found that teachers’ attitudes toward migration and multilingualism are often founded on or at least influenced by unilateral negative and unscientific public discourses in media, politics and society. It is interesting to look at other countries from this perspective. Cummins states that students tend to perform better in countries such as Canada and Australia that have encouraged immigration during the past 40 years and that have a coherent infrastructure designed to integrate immigrants into the society (e.g. free adult language classes, language support services for students in schools, rapid qualification for full citizenship, etc.). (Cummins 2015: 98) He explicitly compares this to “countries that have been characterized by highly negative attitudes towards immigrants (e.g., Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany)” and points out that even second-generation students tend to perform very poorly in these countries, which is alarming because they will typically have had significantly more exposure to the country’s language and culture than first generation immigrants (Cummins 2015: 99). 3 Traditional English language classrooms A kind of monolingual habitus has also been described for the field of SLA which plays an important role within foreign language didactics. There, learning another language is often presented “as an ideally hermetic process unconta‐ minated by knowledge and use of one’s other languages” (May 2014: 1). May, who proposes a multilingual turn in the wake of superdiversity driven by globalization, laments that mostly, only critical applied linguistics pay attention to the “dynamic, hybrid, and transnational linguistic repertoires of multilingual (often migrant) speakers” (ibid.: 1). ‘Mainstream’ applied linguistics with their focus on native speaker competence and monolingual norms either ignore learners’ existing language repertoires or even perceive them as detrimental to the learning process (ibid.: 2). Post-inclusive Education, Diversity and Multilinguality in ELT 303 A number of studies have dealt with the question how English language teachers treat multilingualism. Elsner (2015: 84) points out that for most foreign language teachers, multilingualism is neither an advantage nor a disadvantage but still gets largely ignored in class. The languages pupils have knowledge of are not included in ELT, teachers often act as if the class consisted solely of monolingual learners, and German is considered the sole basis for learning English - for one thing, because it is closer to English than other languages, and for another thing, because teachers are not prepared to deal with other languages. Both Jakisch (2015: 280 ff.) and Hu (2003: 295) come to the conclusion that most English teachers have a too narrow understanding of their own professional role: Instead of viewing themselves as language teachers in general, they restrict their scope to the field of English language teaching. They do not consider themselves competent to include languages they have not studied. This reflects the views on language teaching purported by traditional SLA and calls for substantial changes in teacher training programs, too. Hu (2003: 212 ff.) also investigated how plurilingual learners experience their foreign language classes at school. Her findings show that students consider their previously learned languages as well as their language learning experiences as very important for their own biographies and identity constructs. There is a huge gap between what they experience at school, where they feel that their languages are not welcome, and their daily lives, which are characterized by the use of multiple languages and mixed forms. The ways in which foreign languages are taught at school force them to blank out all other languages apart from German in the learning process and are not experienced as motivating. Hu does not approve of some of the interviewed teachers’ resolution in terms of teaching plurilingual students: They problematize the situation and resort to more German language use. She argues that English ought to be used as much as possible in class and that, on the basis of English, connections to other languages should be established more frequently (Hu 2003: 301). Jakisch (2015: 84) points out that ELT is in need of modernization and radical changes in order to fulfil the task of becoming more inclusive of other languages and to prepare students to act within a world characterized by growing multilinguality. She considers it important, however, to find a balance so that ELT does not get overburdened with additional tasks at the expense of teaching English (ibid.: 93). For one thing, it would be vital to reflect critically on the dominance of the English language, and to make visible the advantages of plurilingualism to the learners (ibid.: 90 ff.). For another thing, intercultural learning ought to play a more prominent role in the learning process (ibid.: 304 Anita Millonig 4 https: / / www.collinsdictionary.com/ de/ worterbuch/ englisch/ inclusion 94 ff.). Furthermore, the German language should be used as a springboard to invite learners to draw comparisons between different languages (ibid.: 324). Drawing comparisons and thus activating learners’ already existing knowl‐ edge is not only supported by general constructivist ideas about learning but also by neurolinguistic findings which show that languages are not acquired completely separately and independently of each other. They are not repre‐ sented in separate brain areas but there are overlappings between them as well as connecting networks. Computerized tomographies show that children who learned two or more languages at an early age have particularly strong networks which enable them to acquire further languages more easily. In addition to such findings from neurolinguistics, psycholinguistic models based on tertiary language education have been developed. These models present language learning as a form of interaction between all languages an individual has come in contact with. Plurilingual learners implicitly draw from their complete language knowledgebase when learning a new language (e.g. learning new words or understanding texts) (Elsner 2015: 77 ff.). Summing up, there are various reasons to reconsider traditional ELT. In the following, I want to link this requirement to another much-disputed goal of contemporary schools and show how the inclusion paradigm may be helpful in pointing out the direction ELT could take. 4 Preparing for a change: The inclusion paradigm The inclusion paradigm is by definition all-encompassing. Doert and Nold (2015: 23) point out that inclusion as a concept is neither restricted to educa‐ tional contexts nor to particular groups of people. It includes any aspect of heterogeneity such as gender roles, ethnicity, nationality, first languages, social milieu, religion and other belief systems and worldviews. It is directed against categorizations and is related to developments in society as a whole. A definition offered by the Collins English Dictionary describes inclusion as “the policy or practice of making sure that everyone in society has access to resources and opportunities” 4 . - 4.1 An inclusive view of migration Looking at society as a whole, it can be stated that today, migration has become a defining factor of the globalized world we live in. Societies all over Europe are changing, the idea of national cultures and national languages is getting more Post-inclusive Education, Diversity and Multilinguality in ELT 305 and more obsolete. To accept and acknowledge migration as one of the defining factors of the globalized world we live in, that is as ‘normal’, means to give up on the idea of deficient individuals who need to be integrated into an, in fact, fictitious reality. It is also worth noting that the rise of migratory movements is manifested in two directions. Not only are we confronted with a rising number of ‘newcomers’, but the pupils we teach today are themselves more likely to migrate than ever before. Steinbach and Leiprecht (2015) argue that schools need to prepare their students for this rise in mobility and that they have to find ways to deal with diversity in productive ways instead of fighting it by means of selective procedures. Despite changing realities, schools are very slow in reacting. Migration is still treated as negative and disadvantageous. Steinbach and Leiprecht’s suggestion of a new perspective on newcomers will still sound unusual or even provocative to some. They ask why it is that migration always gets portrayed as negative and problematic instead of considering people with experiences of migration and their children as a kind of ‘avantgarde’ of future developments (Steinbach and Leiprecht 2015: 14). 4.1.1 Post-inclusion Yıldız and Heydarpur (2018) argue for a more holistic view of inclusion which they refer to as “post-inclusion” (Postinklusion). Post-inclusive schools in this understanding are schools for all that take the individual, linguistic, social, cultural and religious diversity of their students as a starting point for all considerations in an endeavour to provide equal chances for each and everyone. What really matters in a post-inclusive context are no longer the differences between individuals, but the differences and ambiguities within every individual. In today’s globalized world we are all moving within different, permanently changing contexts full of contradictions and tensions. Thus, we are continually required to invent ourselves anew, i.e. work on our identity constructs by integrating the various experiences we make. This ‘permanent biographization’ can offer important impulses for learning and helps bring forward a more globalized, transcultural and transnational reality replacing the methodological nationalism which is at work at schools on the institutional level. - 4.2 A (post)inclusive view of education Pedagogy cannot replace politics; however, as Gert Biesta (2016: 101) points out: “Bildung should be understood as a “response” to a “question” - we might even say an educational response to a political question”. Today, more than ever, the most urgent political question has become how we can live peacefully and in 306 Anita Millonig 5 https: / / www.gilesig.org mutual respect with others. The teacher’s role in this “has to be understood in terms of a responsibility for the ‘coming into the world’ of unique, singular beings, and a responsibility for the world as a world of plurality and difference” (Biesta 2016: 9). One pedagogical approach which takes up this challenge is global learning/ education. It involves developing skills in critical thinking, cooperative problem solving and perspective taking, accompanied by “attitudes of global awareness, cultural appreciation, respect for diversity, and empathy” 5 . Recently, global education has gained more importance in foreign language teaching. According to Christiane Lütge (2015), there has been a global turn which necessitates new approaches in the English language classroom. There is an urgent need to deal with problems and issues which cannot be handled within national boundaries and to develop a thorough understanding of the interconnectedness of ecological, cultural, economic, political, and technological systems. Students need to realize that while individuals and groups are some‐ times different from each other and view life differently, they also have common human needs and wants. A multilingual and multicultural classroom setting offers the ideal venue for global topics. It is suprising that, so far, “language and communication (in particular across languages) are rarely mentioned in the global education discourse” (Viebrock 2015: 50). - 4.3 A (post)inclusive view on language and language learning The general task of fostering plurilingual competences must not be regarded as an additional burden. There are indeed approaches which can be implemented easily into one’s teaching routine and which actually enhance the teaching of English. I also want to argue for a more inclusive perspective on the learners in terms of their languages. Busch (2017) introduces two helpful terms through which plurilingual competences can be understood in an inclusive way because they allow for a very broad definition which does not strictly differentiate between migrants and/ or bilingually raised children on the one hand and pupils who have not had the same exposure to foreign languages so far: language repertoire and heteroglossia. Both terms can be related to Wandruszka’s (1979) famous proposal that everybody is plurilingual because of one’s internal pluri‐ lingualism which includes standard language, dialects, sociolects, knowledge of outdated expressions etc. and because everyone has the potential to become plurilingual (external plurilingualism). An individual’s language repertoire also includes dialects, ways of expression as realized through different styles, registers, codes etc. It is open in the sense Post-inclusive Education, Diversity and Multilinguality in ELT 307 6 I experience this frequently with adult German learners who have to pass standardized tests for their right of residence. The negative effects of educational poverty can hardly be overcome later in life. that speakers choose what to use out of their repertoire (in contrast to the more traditional sociolinguistic view that language use is a defining marker for specific groups). The second term, heteroglossia, is additionally concerned with the relation of language use to factors in the environment. Each way of speaking makes reference to certain social discourses, involves different elements of the language repertoire and is thus better described as different voices an individual makes use of. The term heteroglossia goes back to Michail Bachtin who interprets the different voices of a speaker as forming a dialogue of languages or language varieties within the speaker’s mind. It would be important, too, to create more inclusive ways of assessment. Dynamic assessment is based on sociocultural theories of human development and founded on the understanding that language is the most important symbolic tool, or medium, for thinking and learning. Since the most basic function of language is, in Vygotskian terms, social, and “languaging” is a social act, learning has a social dimension. A testing situation is also a social situation, even more so when language competence is tested. When “individuals are understood as co-constructing abilities and knowledge with the people and artifacts integral to their contexts” (Swain et al. 2011: 118), one sees that there cannot be a neutral testing situation. Dynamic assessment makes pro-active use of this fact, the goal being “to modify learner performance through the testing process itself ” (Swain et al. 2011: 128). Rather than leaving the learner alone (in order to practice error correction with a red marker later), the teacher would “push the learner to rely on his/ her own agency” (Swain et al. 2011: 128) and would offer support through offering suggestions, asking questions and helping the learner “to language their decision-making processes” (ibid.: 128). That tests always have to be done individually and without mediational help (collaborative dialogue with the teacher, asking a peer, consulting a dictionary or the internet etc.) is only a certain cultural practice, a way of doing which is not neutral either and which can further disadvantage students with a so-called low socioeconomic status (SES) 6 . Finally, an inclusive perspective of language learning must also look at the target language itself. This is about the question of which variety of English to teach. For a long time, British English was considered to be the norm and desirable standard. Considering the number of English speakers around the world it might nowadays be more helpful to aim for mutual intelligibility instead of the performance of native speaker competence 7 . “Communicative 308 Anita Millonig 7 After all, as Pavlenko and Lantolf point out: “The individual may feel comfortable being who he or she is and may not wish to ‘become’ a native of another language and culture” (Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000: 170). competence” ought to be replaced as a goal by “dialogical competence” (Ahrens 2004: 11). - 4.4 A (post)inclusive view of language teaching 4.4.1 Didactics of plurilingualism Didactics of plurilingualism is aimed at establishing an integrative language competence made up of all languages and language learning experiences a learner has had and in which all these interact with each other. By means of drawing on prior experiences and already existing knowledge, synergy effects should be achieved. The basic assumption is that plurilingual people can develop heightened (meta)linguistic and (meta)cognitive abilities if these abilities are stimulated and fostered. Referring to findings from empirical studies, Bredthauer describes three positive effects of applying didactics of plurilingualism to teaching: a. for the learners, in terms of language awareness, interlingual transfer com‐ petence, language competence, language learning competence, motivation for language learning; b. for teachers, in terms of increasing awareness of synergy effects; c. on the classroom setting, in terms of more learner participation and joy of learning. (Bredthauer 2018: 280) The different concepts share some pedagogical principles, such as stimulating interlingual transfer, training language awareness and conveying learning strategies. A contrastive study of language features plays a crucial role in this endeavour and constitutes a didactic core element to serve these three principles. It can include all layers of languages: lexis, syntax, pragmatics, semantics, and discourse. In general, a more inclusive view of language teaching would be about including other languages in the learning setting. Elsner (2015: 87) argues that inclusion in ELT foremost depends on the willingness of teachers to accept the inclusion of various languages into their teaching routines. Only if learners experience opportunities for discovery learning, for making autono‐ mous, constructive language observations and drawing comparisons between Post-inclusive Education, Diversity and Multilinguality in ELT 309 8 Most pupils I interviewed told me that they regarded their German skills as helpful for learning English. They also created mixed forms when searching for words, e.g. ‘entcome’. During my school ethnography, I saw that English was sometimes used in the preparatory German classes to help learners. Later, in the English class, however, the teacher would often remark with great amazement and even disappointment that some pupils’ English skills were better than their German skills. The teacher did not take into consideration that the learners may have studied English for a longer time than German (which was sometimes the case as I could easily find out by asking pupils to fill in a questionnaire on their priorily acquired languages). 9 I could witness this at the school where I was. For instance, one pupil pointed out to the teacher that the past tense form ‘lay’ looks similar to the German past tense form ‘lag’. Such occurences were usually ignored by the teacher. languages, they will develop a more positive attitude towards their already existing language skills and become able to make productive use of their preknowledge. Schnuch (2015: 127) points out that many plurilingual learners may already have been negatively affected by demotivating language learning experiences at school or in kindergarten. If their plurilingual competences were not appreciated in their learning process, learners may start to regard their first languages as a burden rather than as a resource for language learning. Suppose there is a newcomer to a class who does not understand the teacher’s instructions. Why should another student not be allowed to help the newcomer by means of a language the two of them share? Likewise, when there are tasks for groups which are cognitively demanding, why would one not allow learners to take notes in a language they feel more confident in? It may even be advisable in some cases to let learners discuss a task in their first language before solving a task in English. Cummins suggests “encouraging immigrantbackground and socially marginalized students to use their L1 as a cognitive tool for carrying out academic tasks” (Cummins 2015: 106). Harmer (2015: 51), too, points out that teachers need not worry if students for instance discuss their answers to a reading comprehension in pairs in their L1, and that one could “use sensible activities which maximise the benefits of using the students’ L1” such as “translation exercises, or specific contrasts between the two languages in areas of grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation or discourse”. Making use of the German language in the English language classroom is not per se negative either and even more productive in a multilingual classroom setting 8 . Comparing and contrasting German and English will be done by most, if not all, learners anyway 9 . However, one must not treat German as the ‘norm’ from which to deduce all explanations; and of course, it should not be used without a pedagogical purpose. 310 Anita Millonig 10 I experienced this frequently. One learner whose English skills were very good used the English book to study German words. When it comes to the dimension of singular words, phrases or language pe‐ culiarities like for instance correlative conjunctions, a comprehension problem may be solved very quickly and effectively if pupils can offer a translation to each other in a language the teacher does not know. Often, they are too afraid to do so; however, if a teacher does not interfere but rather shows an interest, they will eventually do it more frequently which will automatically lead to comparisons between different languages. Problems with vocabulary will often arise due to the way vocabulary is presented in English course books for the German market (two colums, English vs. German) 10 . There may be problems related to the learners’ proficiency of German. Quetz (2004: 185) suggests using books produced in English for the world market which cannot but use intralingual explanations. 4.4.2 Language awareness and metalinguistic awareness Within the field of didactics of plurilingualism, very ambitious and extensive ideas have been developed, some of which have also been put into practice at selected schools, i.e. in special programs. Interesting as such projects may be, they do not serve the majority of teachers working in traditional settings. What one can take from these projects, however, is the idea of creating stronger networks between teachers of different languages at a school and working out syllabi which make it easier for pupils to transfer their acquired knowledge in one language to others. What does make sense and can be included easily is the promotion of language awareness in the English language classroom. Language awareness as a concept goes back to the 1980s when it was very popular in the United Kingdom. It has been defined as “a person’s sensitivity to and conscious awareness of the nature of language and its role in human life” (Donmall 1985: 7, quoted in van Lier 1996). The development of language awareness starts quite naturally in early childhood when children start to play with words, invent new words and expressions and gain more and more “control over the building blocks of language” (van Lier 1996: 75). These abilities are necessary prerequisites when it comes to learning how to read and write. Metalinguistic control is achieved once the verbal description of linguistic features becomes possible. As Kramsch (2010) has shown in various examples, people who learn a language as a foreign language characteristically look at features of the new Post-inclusive Education, Diversity and Multilinguality in ELT 311 11 I could witness a great playfulness with words from different languages among the pupils at middle school. 12 One brief example: In one of my German language classes, I taught the word ‘chaotic’ which is ‘chaotisch’ in German, and to illustrate the meaning, I pointed at my desk with lots of scattered papers. One student asked me if the word can only be applied to tables, and it took me some time to realize that he read the word as ‘chao-tisch’ (‘Tisch’ meaning table in German). language in unique ways that are different to the ways in which a person who speaks the same language as their first language will look at the same language features 11 . This is largely because for the L1 speaker most features are automatized and thus provide no cause for wonder 12 . At the same time, learning a new language will of course raise one’s L1 awareness. Van Lier (1996: 18-19) criticizes that the “enormous potential for cross-fertilization between native language and foreign language(s)” has been “insufficiently exploited in the schools” notwithstanding the fact that this “could be an important vehicle in the development of higher cognitive skills and critical thinking”. He further argues that critical language awareness (CLA) should be fostered in language teaching because of “its careful scrutiny of language as a form of social practice, or discourse” (emphasis in the original). In an interview, he states that to him, it is impossible to separate language and education. Language growth will not only increase cognitive skills (both thoughts and their expression) and improve social development, but language is also the key to achieving equality in education and that relates basically to the way language is used in educational institutions not just to transmit information, but also to either liberate the student or turn him or her into a conformist, a “homo docilis” as Foucault put it. (van Lier 1994: 52) He therefore advocates stronger connections between language and pedagogy, as realized in some approaches to language pedagogy and particularly within the field of educational linguistics. For the latter, he recommends a number of relevant topics such as language choice and language policies or the area of “correctness” which does not only have to be presented to learners as a set of rules not to be questioned but contains many interesting aspects in terms of power and socio-cultural contexts in general. He points out that dealing with such questions will involve traditional linguistic study but that it will be more effective and beneficial because “such study is now motivated by a real-life question that requires an answer” (van Lier 1996: 89-90). Apart from raising learners’ critical language awareness, it pays off to assign importance to both the cognitive and the affective/ emotional dimension. 312 Anita Millonig 13 During my research project, I found that the teacher did not have any knowledge in this regard, which became evident in various situations. In an interview she said that she could not possibly find the time for this, i.e. she did not consider it her responsibility. However, she took a great interest in my project and learned many things about her pupils she had not been aware of. a) affective/ emotional dimension: Learning a language is a process accompanied by emotions and it is individual in the sense that it involves various aspects of identity. Therefore, prior language learning experiences, identity concepts and attitudes towards both acquired and new languages need to be integrated in teaching practices. This dimension is also relevant in helping learners identify their language learning strategies, improving them and applying them to the new language to be learned. A prerequisite is the teacher’s interest in his/ her students: Which languages have they learned already, how and for how long? Which country are they from, did they live in other countries as well? How are their names pronounced properly? 13 The language portrait (Sprachenportrait) is a very good instrument to start with; Schnuch (2015) further recommends language portfolios, language diaries or language identity texts. Identity texts are a powerful tool in foreign language teaching, particularly when dealing with learners from marginalized and disadvantaged societal backgrounds. This will often be learners from families with low socioeconomic status and/ or with a home language different to the school language. These learners also often have poorly developed literacy skills in their first lan‐ guages. To Cummins (2015), who recommends identity texts and has published vastly about their usefulness and about ways of designing and applying them, it is clear that low achievement “among immigrant-background students is not caused by home use of a language other than the school language” but that schools often do not provide enough support “to enable students to develop academic skills in the school language” (Cummins 2015: 107). For him, it is essential to maximize learners’ engagement with literacy and to help them to become able “to use language powerfully in ways that enhance their academic and personal self-concept” (ibid.). Ideally, this should also involve students’ home languages. It is a well-established fact that children whose literacy skills in their first languages are not developed (because their school carreers have been disrupted due to the family’s migration, or because they may not have had access to schooling in their countries of origin) suffer from severe problems when it comes to learning new languages as well as academic content. Although this is an area which is to a large extent beyond the teacher’s sphere of influence, even the willingness to find out about such circumstances Post-inclusive Education, Diversity and Multilinguality in ELT 313 and a general attitude that will help teachers promote first language education at their schools or to talk to parents about the importance of such training may bring about some positive results. Strengthening literacy skills is also about the provision of resources, for instance in the form of a school library which offers books in various languages; the teacher, too, should see himself/ herself as a provider of resources, or to use an expression from van Lier (2000: 253), should offer “a rich semiotic budget”. Putting a strong focus on expressions and negotiations of identity is far more to Cummins et al. (2015) than making learners feel better. They argue that iden‐ tity issues are directly related to patterns of achievement and underachievement, particularly when learners are members of social groups who have experienced discrimination from the majority. Referring to Ladson-Billings (1994: 23, quoted in Cummins 2015: 106), they state that in order to “counteract the negative effects of societal power relations” students need to be treated as competent. They must be helped to develop “identities of competence”. One feasible way to reach this are multimodal creative texts that are related to students’ identities. Cummins et al. describe identity texts as a way for schools to “respond to the devaluation of identity experienced by many students and communities by exploring instructional policies and strategies that enable students to use their emerging academic language and multilingual repertoires for powerful identity affirming purposes” (Cummins et al. 2015: 555). Concrete ideas include for example self-identity collage portraits, where learners draw themselves from a photo and frame the product with text completing the statements: I am / I love / I remember / I believe. Furthermore, collaborative story books can be created, for example, learners can be asked to contribute a story to a book about the same moment around the world (with drawings, stickers, print-outs). Another idea suggested by Cummins et al. is collecting New Year’s traditions from all over the world or carrying out biographical interviews with family and friends. Yet another suggestion would be (re)writing poetry, translating songs or collecting favourite words in different languages. 314 Anita Millonig Espy Figure 1. Title page of a collaborative book The language portrait is also a tool which can be applied quite easily in the classroom. It was first published in the 1990s in a German journal for elementary school teachers and contained the silhouettes of a girl and of a boy. Students should colour different body regions to describe where they would locate the different languages they know. This is, however, not restricted to official languages but ought to include dialects and even particular ways of speaking to particular audiences, like the language one uses with their cat or dog for instance. Following this, learners present their language portrait in class. According to Busch (2018: 2), these portraits “offer the possibility of reflecting on one’s communicative repertoire both from the ‘inner’ perspective of the experiencing subject-body as well as from an ‘external’ perspective of the objectbody”and they can elicit a narrative in the first person. Moreover, they offer speaking practice and means for learners to get to know each other better. Post-inclusive Education, Diversity and Multilinguality in ELT 315 14 https: / / storylearning.com/ blog/ stephen-krashen-language-learning 15 The children I interviewed stated univocally that they liked stories best in their English classes. Figure 2. Example of a language portrait from a university course There is a strong link between narratives and identity. Hu (2019) refers to Ricoeur who argued that it is not possible to separate our existence “from the account we can give of ourselves”. Through telling our own stories, we create our identity. “We recognize ourselves in the stories that we tell about ourselves” (Ricoeur 1985: 214, quoted in Hu 2019: 20). Not all narratives need to include biographical elements, though; narratives in general have a way of bringing people from different backgrounds together, and they are, as Krashen points out, a powerful tool for language learning 14 . Focusing on narratives and identities will also boost motivation because of feelings of acceptance, joy and relevance 15 . Ushioda (2011: 222) advises teachers to engage with their learners “as ‘people’ rather than as simply ‘language learners’” and to create opportunities for them to “speak as themselves”, this way raising motivation and increasing learner 316 Anita Millonig autonomy, the latter being, in my opinion, one of the most essential principles which should guide all teaching efforts from the beginning. b) cognitive dimension: This is the area of language comparisons. It is important to point out that while it is definitely useful for a teacher to have some knowledge of other languages in the classroom, it is not strictly necessary. Simple open questions in the fashion of “What is it like in other languages you know? ” will suffice, and after all, there is a lot of ‘learning by doing’ involved. Ahrens (2004: 12) likewise advocates an unsystematic comparison of languages as opening doors to other languages, creating curiosity, and motivating language learning. This can be done easily, can be related to current topics dealt with in the English classroom and does neither require extra time nor extra resources, i.e. materials. The problem is rather, as Quetz (2004: 184) points out, that teachers often find it hard to ask such questions. Teachers tend to have high expectations of themselves as regarding their role as the most knowledgeable person in the setting, i.e. classroom. Meißner (2004: 156) argues that teachers who have not been trained for this task find it difficult to step out the known terrain of being the expert of one language. This is, however, exactly what is required of them because the monolingualism of the teacher must not detriment the plurilingualism of the learner. Hu (2004: 70) emphasizes the necessity of a perspective which does not define multilingualism primarily on a linguistic basis for which accurate knowledge of (dis)similar language features is required. It is the learners as people who should be at the centre of attention because not acknowledging the learners’ languages implies a lack of cultural and personal acknowledgment and appreciation. Valuing the entire person needs to take languages into account, and such a valuation will encourage the maintenance of already learned languages as well as the acquisition of further languages. The possibilities for comparisons are vast, and one’s own fascination and curiosity about language(s) will undoubtedly yield new ideas related to classroom content once the general principles have become clear. A few examples are presented here. One could use the terminology of other subjects as an area for investigation (e.g., in biology, the Latin term ‘appendix’ is used in English whereas German created the word ‘Blinddarm’; a dandelion is a ‘Löwenzahn’ in German, etc.). Characters in stories and fairy-tales have different names in different languages, and likewise, pupils’ names may have certain meanings to explore. Moreover, one can look at phrases and idioms, also considering their pragmatic aspects: How does one say ‘hello/ how are you’ in different languages, and what are typical answers to these questions? How do you indicate respect for elderly people, grown-ups or in the professional field in different languages? Post-inclusive Education, Diversity and Multilinguality in ELT 317 16 I have been doing this myself for two years now with Russian, and learning the language has frequently been helpful when engaging with learners from various Slavic language backgrounds. Moreover, students attending my courses on learning and teaching in multilingual and multicultural classroom settings have chosen a language they want to learn and kept a journal on their learning process. The outcomes are very positive, both in terms of students’ reflections and the general atmosphere and motivation in class. How do you attract a cat’s attention? Which letters do you use in writing to show amusement in different languages (hahaha/ jajaja/ hihihi etc.)? A focus on form is also possible: Does your language have grammatical cases and if so, how many? How do you form the plural in different languages? Why does orange juice consist of two words in English but just one in German? What other kinds of juice can you think of? (Schnuch 2014: 135). Furthermore, one could also move beyond syntax and ask: What are characteristics of poetry in different languages? How do you tell or summarize a story in different countries? etc. One rich pool of inspiration is offered by memes distributed on the internet. The more interest a teacher shows, the more autonomous pupils will become in contributing their own observations in class. Some authors (e.g., Königs 2004; Mercer 2016) argue that prospective English teachers should learn a new language from scratch and reflect on this process. This will not only make them more sensitive in understanding the emotional aspects involved in language learning but will also make them more aware of opportunities for language comparisons 16 . 5 Conclusion Multilingual classrooms are not only becoming more widespread in Austrian schools, they also offer vast opportunities for making language learning more effective and more fun. Taking on an inclusive perspective, it can even be argued that all classrooms are to some extent multilingual. If we as language teachers take seriously the demands placed on us in the form of European policy papers on language teaching, pupils with a migration background and inclusion, we need to find ways to integrate the didactics of plurilingualism. We also need to develop a professional attitude that enables us to see that investing in learners’ identities and taking into account the emotional dimension is vital for (language) learning processes: How could language teaching bring about success when it adresses the head or brain, including a minor number of cognitive functions while forgetting that it is a concrete human being with a particular living situation who is supposed to perform the speaking and writing? (Peterlini 2019: 85, my translation) 318 Anita Millonig Various helpful concepts have been developed over the years, not all of them related to multilingualism, some of them even dating a long time back, but either they have not been made productive for multilingualism or they did not receive enough attention in mainstream English language didactics. Among these are (social) constructivism, educational linguistics, global learning, learner autonomy, and narrative and identity-related approaches. Teacher attitudes and a general sensitivity are particularly important regarding the fact that the school as an institution is still to a large extent characterized by procedures of selection, homogenization and - as a consequence - instances of discrimination. In a way, teaching could thus in a sense be seen as a “subversive activity” as Postman and Weingartner (1975) phrased it 50 years ago. What they said about the basic function of education, namely “to increase the survival prospects of the group”, which “in a rapidly changing environment” requires us “to identify which of the old concepts are relevant to the demands imposed by the new threats to survival and which are not”, is more urgent today than ever before (Postman and Weingartner 1975: 195). To create mutually respectful and genuine relationships is one decisive aspect in terms of human survival, and to focus on students’ identities in the EFL-classroom can definitely add to the quality of both studentteacher and student-student interactions. References Ahrens, R. (2004). Mehrsprachigkeit als Bildungsziel. In K. Bausch, F. Königs and J. Krumm (eds.), Mehrsprachigkeit im Fokus. Arbeitspapiere der 24. Frühjahrskonferenz zur Erforschung des Fremdsprachenunterrichts. Tübingen: Narr, 9-15. Biesta, G. (2016). Beyond Learning. Democratic Education for a Human Future. London/ New York: Routledge. Bongartz C. and A. 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Erziehung und Unterricht, Mai/ Juni (5-6), 1-11. 322 Anita Millonig Teaching Academic Writing to Undergraduate Students of English in Klagenfurt: From the Word to the World Ursula Posratschnig & Günther Sigott 1 Introduction This paper is a welcome opportunity to take stock of the considerations that shape the teaching of academic writing at the University of Klagenfurt’s Department of English. A rich body of research informs the strand’s teaching philosophy and practices, and a multitude of requirements and objectives determine classroom assignments and activities. The following provides a review of the theoretical background based on which academic writing skills are taught to undergraduate second language students of English here in Klagenfurt. It will address the power that lies in both the teaching and learning of these skills, the myriad sub-skills involved in effective academic writing and the complex relationships between them, the role of critical language awareness and mindful language use, and the role of feedback in the teaching and assessment of academic writing. 2 Initial considerations It is an undisputed truth that teaching comes with immense responsibility in a social and interpersonal sense, and with great power in an institutional sense. The impact of actions, feedback or support modelled by teachers is felt by students (who may be training to be teachers themselves) and may influence their beliefs, values, world views, and their very lives. In institutional settings, teachers operate within “power structures that can dramatically impact […] students’ lives and futures”, which gives teachers the “ethical obligation to scrutinize our assumptions about what we do” (Leki 2003: 316). This is true not just in a general sense, but also as regards academic writing, with writing being the dominant tool in testing knowledge and cognitive skills in academia. It is written exams that often serve as “gate keepers with the political purpose of sorting and categorizing those who will and those who will not enjoy the privileges that may come with education” (Leki 2003: 326). Both teachers and students need to be aware that the stakes are even higher when the subject in question is a language as powerful as English is in the world today. Given the immense proportion of research that is conducted and communicated in English across all disciplines, the ability to read, process and employ scholarship from this tremendous global, online academic community is a powerful thing. “English is now used for over 90 % of global scientific com‐ munication”, and scholars have become an increasingly globalized community (MacKenzie 2015: 2). An analysis of dominant academic discourse in the field of global citizenship education, for instance, has shown that “global literature on global citizenship education is massively dominated by western, Englishspeaking states, especially the USA, and by the type and form of knowledge favoured in these societies” (Parmenter 2011: 369). And this may be even more pervasive in fields of study other than global citizenship education, which actively aims to counter such hierarchies and create a more egalitarian global society. Such “epistemological monoculturalism” and its repercussions must be further investigated, along with the colonial patterns that deliberately or unwittingly continue in “current politics of knowledge production” (ibid.: 370). The broader category of education has also been connected to power, and requires close scrutiny regarding its role in the 21 st century. Much of western formal education can be interpreted as a perpetuation of colonial values and practices, which is exemplified by the fact that individuals literally everywhere in the world attempt to learn English and use corporate products in an effort to better themselves economically. However, it is a system in which success is re‐ served for a very small elite and which operates at the expense of environmental sustainability, as urban consumer culture seems to be the sole model to which everyone aspires (Black 2010.) Education of this kind falls under the so-called PISA paradigm (Hartmeyer 2005: 23), in which education is conceived as a tool to enable individuals to participate in neoliberal, global economies, and in which educational aspirations are closely aligned almost exclusively with economic interests (ibid.). Education for the 21 st century, where severe social injustice and imminent ecological collapse are the most pressing global concerns, should do more than prepare individuals for the global labor market and serve international corporations that may have destructive impacts on a cultural, social and environmental level. Global citizenship education presents an alternative con‐ ception of education that is grounded in the so-called UNESCO paradigm, in which education should also pursue ethical goals like social justice and 324 Ursula Posratschnig & Günther Sigott environmental sustainability (Ban 2012). Global citizenship education and its critical perspective on educational contexts and practices has in the meantime been incorporated into both B.A. and B.Ed. curricula at our department where it also informs and shapes the teaching of academic writing. 3 The writing program At the Department of English in Klagenfurt, undergraduate students in English and American Studies attend a series of three courses that are designed to convey academic writing skills and to improve English language proficiency. These compulsory and consecutive courses are attended by both B.A. and B.Ed. students who enter the program at a high B2 proficiency level and aspire towards C1/ C2 in the course of their studies. The first-level course introduces first semester students to the ground rules of written academic work and the organization of academic paragraphs. The second-level course then guides them from paragraphs to academic essays, and the third-level course focuses on research-based assignments and term papers. In addition, students in the B.A. curriculum attend a fourth writing course focused on writing B.A. theses. Most textbooks on academic writing agree on and convey a number of basic ground rules that initiate students into undertaking the composition of written work in academic settings. These ground rules are conveyed to students in their first semester, and include considerations about the nature of the academic writing process and the conventions to which effective essays and term papers should ideally conform. At entry level, students learn that they enter the academic community with the very first assignment they submit, and that they must follow a number of very specific rules and guidelines from the start. Much more than in secondary education, they are held accountable for the quality and reliability of the texts they create. They are required to approach writing projects with a critical mind regarding the content they convey, which must be based on theoretical or empirical data and expressed in academic language. The latter is characterized by the use of formal style and specialist terminology. Moreover, academic writing requires subject specific knowledge that students acquire in the course of their studies, and which they are encouraged to maintain up-to-date independent of their course work. Further requirements are a basic familiarity with research methods and the adoption of highly systematic approaches, such as the students’ ability to justify choices and decisions when doing research and writing. This means that students should be able to verbalize their rationale for choosing a particular topic and for how they decide to approach and write about it. They also learn early on that any claims or Teaching Academic Writing 325 arguments must be substantiated with reliable, scholarly resources, which must be used to illustrate, confirm or refute hypotheses. Working with resources in a scholarly way requires effective reading skills along with the ability to extract, summarize, paraphrase, and synthesize information, and the expertise to cite and reference source materials in a transparent way. Students also learn that plagiarism means incorporating another author’s insights, opinions or ideas without proper acknowledgement of the source, verbatim or in words to that effect, and that it is a serious offence that may have quite dramatic consequences (Karall and Weikert 2010). While there tends to be agreement on such basic ground rules as outlined above, discourse conventions inevitably vary across fields of study, disciplines, and even departments, and there is much debate about whether a single academic discourse can be defined and taught to ESL students (Cushing Weigle 2009: 20). In addition to teaching the above ground rules, it is thus important to convey this limitation to students and encourage them to maintain flexibility in the face of rather diverse requirements they may encounter. These will include having to work with different stylesheets or following other varying context specific requirements, which they often have to do when they study more than one subject or write in more than one discipline. 4 Writing in English The majority of students at Klagenfurt’s English Department have acquired writing skills in German in their previous formal education and it is important to clarify that there are different expectations of texts written in English. For instance, German academic texts have been described as non-linear in comparison with English academic texts, and - in an attempt to avoid negative labelling - they are also called “versatile and multi-faceted […] by virtue of their digressiveness” (Siepmann et al. 2008: 4-5). It is not uncommon to encounter digressions that may provide additional explanations or background, or socalled excurses in them. This mode of text organization may be perceived as putting strain on readers from the “Anglo-American” context, where text organization is described as “linear” and “symmetrical” (ibid.: 4). What this means is that writing an English academic text is not achieved by merely translating a text that was planned and formulated in German (or another language), but that there are notable discrepancies in “‘intellectual style’ and educational traditions” (ibid.: 20) that come into play. German academic texts often require some effort on the part of the English-speaking reader to follow a somewhat non-linear development of ideas, but in the Anglo- 326 Ursula Posratschnig & Günther Sigott American tradition of academic writing, the development of ideas is represented by a “straight line” and there is a clear preference for “subordination” and “hierarchical organization” (Ostler 1987, Yorkey 1977 and Kaplan 1966, cited in Leki 1992). Readers presume that “the writer makes explicit the connections between propositions and ideas in the text so that readers do not need to infer these connections on their own” (Cushing Weigle 2009: 21). The term writer-responsible has been used to denote this feature of English academic writing (Hinds 2001), which makes explicit that it is the writer’s duty to convey information clearly and coherently (Siepmann et al. 2008: 20). It is important to raise students’ awareness of these differences in academic writing traditions early on in their writing program, so as to enable them to produce texts that adhere to the expectations held by readers of academic text written in English. Another expectation held by readers of professional, and particularly aca‐ demic texts written in English is to find the key argument or information at the beginning rather than the end. Williams (1990: 106) presents several reasons why writers may postpone their central claim or point until the end of their text. Student writing may be influenced by the convention in certain genres other than academic writing to develop a proposition gradually and culminate in the main point at the end of the text. Another very likely reason may be discovery, where writers convey their journey through the source material with the same sense of importance as their actual point. Williams also lists failure to revise as a reason for delaying the main point of the text, which also applies particularly to student writers. They may not yet be sufficiently aware of the point-first expectations exhibited by their readers, and during the drafting process they may not be clear about what their point is going to be until they discover it near the end of their text. And instead of making the required revisions, they may simply decide to leave it there. While it is important to familiarize students with these conventions typical of English academic writing (linear development of ideas and texts, readerresponsible use of language, paragraphing conventions) in order for them to produce successful texts, they must also be questioned critically. It seems that the global dominance of English in science and academia unduly privileges these conventions and thereby exerts dominance over other ways of thinking and writing. Scholars from remarkably diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds research and publish in English, and accepting as great a diversity of rhetorical models has been demanded accordingly. Kaplan (1966), Hinds (2001) and others have thus been criticized for their “reductionist, essentialist and deterministic notion of discrete, static, homogeneous cultures and discourse patterns” (MacK‐ enzie 2015: 8) and it is argued that more perspectives and approaches should Teaching Academic Writing 327 become accepted, given that “English is a lingua franca, and not just a native language in global academia” (ibid.: 18). - 4.1 The paragraph in English academic writing It is of utmost importance in English academic writing to organize text by using a very specific form of paragraph structure in which readers expect information to be packaged and presented to them. The use of the paragraph as a central building block in technical writing can be traced back as far as the 15 th century and has been called “clearly indigenous to the English composition” (Tebeaux 2011: 219). Even early examples of paragraphs display the properties of unity, organization and coherence, and have initial sentences that present their emphasis or topic. They are also characterized by conciseness and readability, which are achieved through the use of “Anglo-Saxon sentence structures” consisting of “subject-verb-object sentences and phrases designed to be direct and easy to process” (ibid.: 221, 249). This tradition continues in contemporary definitions of the paragraph, where it is conceptualized as a “psychological [unit] of textual information”, consisting of a “coherent set of ideas, typically with a main theme and supporting information” that “can be summarized in a single sentence” (Grabe and Kaplan 1996: 353). This single-sentence summary is found at the beginning of the paragraph, where it announces its content or emphasis, and constitutes its base. It is called topic sentence and subsumes under its scope all sentences that follow (Siepmann et al. 2008: 65). Textbooks sometimes use the umbrella metaphor to demonstrate how the topic sentence covers everything inside the paragraph (Reid 2000: 17). Ideally, it also reveals paragraph rheme, which is what the writer will claim or state about the theme of the paragraph (McCarthy 1991: 56). The widely agreed upon formula for the academic paragraph thus goes: “paragraph = issue + discussion” (Williams 1990: 92). Paragraphs, moreover, should be organized in such a way that they contribute to the clear and linear flow of information that is typical of English academic writing. They are expected to present information systematically and “make a contribution to the ongoing argument” of the larger text (Siepmann et al. 2008: 65). This means that the body of a paragraph must abide by the same conventions that establish unity and coherence in essays or term papers. In effective paragraphs, unity is achieved when every sentence that follows the topic sentence “contributes to developing the core idea” and does not go beyond the scope of the paragraph (Barr Reagan et al. 1994: 283), and coherence is achieved when writers connect the relationships between thoughts and ideas very clearly and thereby “enable readers to follow a writer’s train of thought 328 Ursula Posratschnig & Günther Sigott effortlessly” (ibid.: 289). It is therefore crucial for students to learn that coherent writing does not allow for unexpected shifts in point of view, attitude or tense, while it depends heavily on the effective use of transitional words and phrases, repetition of key lexical items, parallel structures, and pronouns whose antecedents are unambiguous (ibid.). The discussion or elaboration of the topic constitutes the body of the paragraph, which is usually followed by the concluding sentence. The latter may not always be necessary in paragraphs that are part of a sequence in a longer text like an essay, term paper, or article, but it is required in longer standalone paragraphs, where it signals the end of the paragraph and reiterates its central message for the reader, either by summarizing the most important in‐ formation, or by paraphrasing the topic sentence (Oshima and Hogue 2006: 13). In advanced academic writing, the concluding sentence should not only mirror the topic sentence, but also illustrate the “’cognitive gain’ of the paragraph” and, depending on the context, it may also anticipate the topic of the following paragraph (Siepmann et al. 2008: 65). - 4.2 Modes of development Paragraphs, like essays and other longer texts, can be further subcategorized on the basis of their internal pattern of organization. Using these different modes of development purposefully allows writers to approach a question, idea, or concept systematically and to communicate content to the reader clearly and coherently. Thus, student writers must develop awareness for these different modes of text development and acquire the concomitant phraseology in order to produce effective texts. Enumeration is usually seen as the most basic mode of developing a paragraph or essay. Writers use enumerators such as firstly or in addition to guide the reader through a series of ideas or topics (Siepmann et al. 2008: 311). It usually requires exemplification, illustration or substantiation of the enumerated items, which in turn requires the use of lexical structures like such as or for example (ibid.: 321). Other modes of development tend to be classified as “definition (by taxonomy, by function, by example, by analogy), description (spatial, temporal, process), classification, comparison and contrast, problem and solution, cause and effect, analysis, and synthesis” (Grabe and Kaplan 1996: 352). Each of them also comes with a specific set of fixed phrases (e.g. as a result, similarly, on the contrary) that writers should use effectively in order to guide the reader through the text. Teaching Academic Writing 329 4.3 From paragraph to essay The ground rules, conventions and principles of text organization discussed above apply to paragraphs, academic essays and other longer texts that students typically write during their studies. While the essay in a broader sense “remains notoriously difficult to define” (Aczel 2003: 7), the academic essays that students in English studies are asked to write share a number of well-established characteristics and require a clearly defined set of skills. Such academic essays should consist not only of descriptive elements, but present an argument or make a case on the basis of scholarly resources; and they require writers to be able to arrange information in the best possible (logical) order, produce effective paragraphs (as outlined above), provide an introduction and a conclusion, formulate points with adequate clarity and credibility, and undergo thorough revision (ibid.: 6-7). In the same way as paragraphs, essays also consist of an introduction, a body and a conclusion, with the previously described paragraph patterns occurring first and foremost in body paragraphs. Introduction and conclusion paragraphs, however, deviate from that pattern in that they do not start with a topic sentence. Instead, introductory paragraphs begin with general remarks on the topic of the essay, which are intended to introduce the overall topic and attract the reader’s attention. The mode of development is then from general to specific, which is illustrated very effectively by the funnel metaphor. The introductory paragraph then culminates in the thesis statement, which is the last and most specific sentence in the introduction. It should give the specific topic of the essay and will sometimes mention subtopics or forecast the organization of the essay. The thesis statement is to the essay what the topic sentence is to the paragraph (Oshima and Hogue 2006: 59-60). Concluding paragraphs also deviate from body paragraphs, in that they develop from specific to general. Their purpose is to mark the end of the text, to repeat the thesis of the essay, and to convey final thoughts to the reader, which may include an outlook on future developments, a recommendation, or a call for action (ibid.: 72). 5 The process of writing Students also learn early on that academic texts are not usually produced in one sitting, but that it is a longer and more complex process that requires a number of skills and types of knowledge, and that is typically divided into different phases or stages. The complexity of the writing process was described by Hayes and Flower (1980, cited in Cushing Weigle 2009: 23), whose model comprises “the writing assignment and the text produced so far, the writer’s 330 Ursula Posratschnig & Günther Sigott long-term memory, including knowledge of topic, knowledge of audience, and stored writing plans, and a number of cognitive processes, including planning, translating thought into text, and revising” (ibid.). Considerations regarding the social and physical environment of the writer were added to this model by Hayes (1996, cited in Cushing Weigle 2009: 23), who focuses on the “profound influence of technological innovations” of text processing devices. In addition, they highlight “the important roles that motivation and affect play in writing”, meaning that students will show more willingness to work towards improving their skills when they learn that they will do better depending on how invested they are, rather than through any assumed “innate abilities” (ibid.). Flower and Hayes (1981, cited in Siepmann et al. 2008: 21) also distinguish separate but at the same time mutually dependent stages in the writing process, which include planning, writing proper, and editing. These stages are linear in that one precedes the other naturally in writing, but experienced writers tend to engage in these processes simultaneously, “with planning, writing proper and editing all involved during the same session” (ibid.). Experienced writers also tend to expend more of their resources on outlining their plans and on implementing revisions throughout the writing process, while beginning writers initially focus too heavily on “making surface changes to the text” (Cushing Weigle 2009: 23). Reflecting on the nature and relationship of these phases or stages of the writing process may help students to develop more effective writing strategies. The importance of planning is emphasized in the writing classroom because writing cannot be effective unless the writer has thought about the content and organization of the assignment sufficiently before creating a first draft. While it is true that writers’ “best thoughts have the annoying habit of coming half way through the composition” (Aczel 2003: 8), this problem (if conceived as such) can be relativized by thorough planning and thinking ahead. “Good writing is the result of good thinking” (Aczel 2003: 8) and it is usually very clear to the experienced reader how much thought and reflection has gone into a written assignment. - 5.1 Thinking to write and writing to learn Critical thinking skills seem to be as closely related to good writing skills as good writing skills are to successful learning outcomes. On the one hand, adequate writing skills are usually taken as an indicator that students “have mastered the cognitive skills required for university work”, while a lack thereof is taken to mean the opposite (Cushing Weigle 2009: 5). On the other hand, and particularly in higher education, “writing is seen not just as a standardized system of Teaching Academic Writing 331 communication but also as an essential tool for learning” (ibid.). This means that the process of writing does not only serve the purpose of conveying content, but - through the understanding and contemplation it requires - simultaneously allows writers to broaden and transform their knowledge. Writing “frequently leads to new knowledge and may change a writer’s view of what [they are] trying to communicate”, which is referred to as knowledge transformation (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1987, cited in Cushing Weigle 2009: 33). Libraries and the internet may provide information, and instructors may do their part, but it is only the students’ genuine own efforts to process and synthesize these sources and write academic texts like research papers that “can reveal to them the accuracy and integrity of their own thoughts” (Fitzhugh 2014). - 5.2 Reading skills and academic writing Effective reading skills also play a crucial role in the successful completion of academic writing tasks. There is consensus that “better readers are, in general, better able to collect, organize, and connect information in their writing” (Grabe 2006: 246). They are also better able to evaluate their own writing critically, to identify their mistakes, and find ways to rectify them (Hayes 1996, cited in Cushing Weigle 2009: 27). Summarizing, paraphrasing, and working with a number of diverse resources, all of which are standard requirements in academic work, also depend heavily on effective reading skills. Yet they cannot be taken for granted in all first-year students, many of whom may have difficulty in selecting and summarizing information, establishing relationships between ideas and concepts, or using the material to substantiate their argumentation ( Jamieson 2013: 18). It also appears that beginners experience more difficulty in working with a number of texts simultaneously, because the first text they read will shape their writing most heavily, while more experienced writers show more flexibility in working with multiple texts that they are better able to interpret and integrate into their writing (Grabe 2006: 246). Being able to approach texts critically is also frequently stated as a prerequisite for success in academic work. It includes the “recognition of weak or spurious arguments” and such “that are supported by opinions rather than by factual information” (Grabe and Kaplan 1996: 355). Critical reading is another skill that students cannot be assumed to have, but should be taught explicitly with sufficient opportunity for practice (Grabe and Kaplan 1996: 346). A multitude of tasks can be used to provide students with ample opportunity to practice reading skills. They include, for instance, a discussion of the writing task at hand regarding the expected outcome, ways to achieve that outcome, and the criteria the assignment has to fulfill in order to be regarded as effective 332 Ursula Posratschnig & Günther Sigott (Grabe 2006: 255). Moreover, students should be asked to complete a range of diverse tasks, such as writing summaries or reader responses, or writing essays under exam conditions and time pressure. They should also be encouraged to develop analytical approaches to texts, including awareness of the authors and their linguistic strategies in communicating information, and how these may relate to the student writers’ own efforts. It is equally important to raise students’ awareness of how academic texts are organized so that they better comprehend them in reading and produce them more successfully in writing (ibid.: 256). - 5.3 Research and referencing Working with scholarly resources requires a rather complex set of skills that begins with awareness of the distinct approaches and methods in each discipline. The analysis of literary texts or cultural artefacts, which constitute primary sources, normally entails the response to a research question about these primary sources (Siepmann et al. 2008: 41). The written assignment may include a combination of the student’s original research (ideas, observations or annotations) and consultation of secondary sources, such as academic articles and books (Middeke et al. 2012: 500). A linguistic mini-article, on the other hand, will be based on qualitative or quantitative research about particular linguistic phenomena, and focus on the interpretation of findings from textual databases including questionnaires or corpora (Middeke et al. 2012: 500; Siepmann et al. 2008: 47). Regardless of the discipline, students will benefit from an introduction to the local library services, scholarly databases, and strategies for internetbased research, including the evaluation of the credibility of sources found there. Incorporating scholarly resources into one’s own writing requires good reading skills and language proficiency, as well as diligence and attention to de‐ tail, but also an understanding of how and why external sources of information must be indicated clearly to the reader. On the one hand, claims and arguments must be substantiated with evidence, which necessitates the consultation of scholarly resources. On the other hand, it is a serious offence to use the latter as if the ideas and insights were one’s own. Doing so without proper acknowledgement of the authors constitutes plagiarism. Much of basic academic writing instruction therefore entails practicing note-taking and summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting and referencing, and clarifying the differences between these specific skills. Students also need to practice formatting text and references according to a particular stylesheet, while they should be reminded to maintain a sense of flexibility in responding to diverse requirements specific to different disciplines or subjects. The judicious use of resources should also be addressed, Teaching Academic Writing 333 along with the necessary balance between the writer’s own thoughts, ideas, and interpretations, and those presented in the source material. Students need to become aware that “quotation, although essential for an academic text, should always remain subservient to the argument of that text” and that writers should demonstrate the significance of a quotation to the point they intend to make (Siepmann et al. 2008: 35-37). - 5.4 Writing in a second language Learning to write in a second language poses a number of additional challenges at least in the early stages of students’ academic careers. Language proficiency, or “control over the linguistic elements of a second language” (Cushing Weigle 2009: 36), is an important aspect of successful writing, especially when its lack diverts the writer’s attention from what Hayes (1996) calls “higher-order issues of content and organization” (cited in Cushing Weigle 2009: 36). While writing skills themselves may be transferrable into the second language, particularly at more advanced levels of proficiency, it is true that “second-language writers plan less, revise for content less, and write less fluently and accurately than firstlanguage writers”; and their writing process may be interrupted by extended periods of dictionary work to ensure accuracy in word choice and grammar (ibid.). In addition, a lack of English language proficiency may cause difficulties with reading the source materials or even with processing the instructions for a given writing task, and may thus impede the successful completion of that task. It can often be observed, for instance, that novice writers produce texts that do not fully represent their actual thoughts because language concerns require such a high level of attention that what they originally wanted to say escapes their memory before they can record it accurately (ibid.). - 5.5 Vocabulary in academic writing instruction The explicit instruction of academic vocabulary has been confirmed to play a central role in EAP contexts. Academic success seems to be connected very closely to both the comprehension of academic vocabulary in reading and its accurate use in writing (Coxhead and Byrd 2007: 143). Initially, both first and second language writers have to acquire the vocabulary and sets of expressions that are typically used in academic contexts, as “the native academic writer does not seem to exist” (Römer 2009: 99). This somewhat relativizes the assumed advantage of first language academic writers, as “native and nonnative apprentice academic writers lack very similar sets of expert academic English phraseological items” and “both groups of students may need similar training […] on their way to becoming more proficient writers” (ibid.). These 334 Ursula Posratschnig & Günther Sigott findings suggest that the “native/ non-native distinction” be abandoned in favor of “experience or expertise” at advanced levels of academic writing (ibid.). The literature thus recommends that writing instructors should help students expand their academic vocabulary through explicit instruction by, for instance, working with the AWL (Academic Word List, see Coxhead and Byrd 2007). It comprises items that constitute up to 10 % of any academic text regardless of the discipline, and is therefore of immediate value. Writing instructors should also clarify that students’ focus should not be on learning single or isolated lexical items, but also on collocations and lexical sequences in which these items usually occur, and on using lexical items accurately in their lexicogrammatical context (Coxhead and Byrd 2007: 143). - 5.6 Grammar in academic writing instruction Academic writing also requires performing at a high level of grammatical accuracy, which is often regarded to be of equal importance as text organization or content, because good control over grammatical structures allows writers to convey distinct meaning in the same way that deliberate lexical choices do (Frodensen and Holten 2003: 148). Grammar, therefore, plays an important role in the academic writing classroom, and particularly second language writers benefit from, and even require, explicit grammar instruction (Lightbown 1998, cited in Frodensen and Holten 2003: 144). Text analysis and text production exercises are suggested as classroom activities that should encourage students to notice the use of particular grammatical structures. Such activities are particularly effective if they correspond with the students’ level of language proficiency. Discussing grammatical features of the students’ own texts and those of their peers is also regarded as conducive to improving grammatical accuracy, as is the inclusion of activities that require students to use grammatical structures actively (Frodensen and Holten 2003: 155). It is the writing instructor’s responsibility to provide individualized feedback not only on content and text organization, but also on lexical and grammatical errors in writing. Such feedback is necessary to help students become aware of instances where their formulations do not correspond with acceptable expressions in English, and to enable them to better edit their writing by pointing out systematic errors (Frodensen and Holten 2003: 144, 147). Given that the writing process is not linear, but conceived as a recursive and cyclical activity consisting of several distinct but overlapping stages and multiple drafts, it is important to consider the point at which the writers’ attention should best be drawn to instances of grammatical inaccuracy. At initial stages of the writing process, writers will focus on content and the organization of the text, and may Teaching Academic Writing 335 delay “low level” concerns regarding language use and accuracy. Student writers may even be encouraged to attend to global issues before local ones, as carefully revised passages of text may eventually be omitted during global revisions that improve the structure of a text. Delaying attention to grammatical accuracy may also stem from the belief that student writers are not able to attend to global and local concerns simultaneously (ibid.: 145). However, feedback on content, organization and grammar simultaneously and “consistently throughout the drafting process” has been shown to be more conducive to improving writing than focusing on only one dimension, as particularly ESL writers’ language related errors are not corrected without L2 writing instructors’ intervention (ibid.). 6 Mindful language choices Attention must also be paid to the implications of language use, both in a general sense and in the particular case of English. The linguistic turn established the widely accepted reconceptualization of language, in which it no longer only “mirrors or refers to reality”, but where “reality is a product and function of language and is not to be found outside of language” (Middeke et al. 2012: 90). Language, in other words, has the power to shape realities and because English is so widespread and influential, it is crucial to analyze its use and implications critically. The concept of critical language awareness also recognizes the dialectical relationship between language and society, both of which experience mutual influence in that language is influenced by social factors, but language use in turn impacts society (Fairclough 1996: 8). Moreover, critical language awareness directs attention to “important social aspects of language, especially aspects of the relationships between language and power, which ought to be highlighted in language education” (ibid.: 1). It thus aims to analyze the central role of language in “sustaining and reproducing power relations” and is even regarded as “a prerequisite for effective democratic citizenship” (ibid.: 3). It plays a prominent role in teaching academic writing, where additional objectives should be to question language use and to act responsibly when judging the implications of particular lexical or grammatical choices. Language, and how individuals choose to use it, may either play a role in the perpetuation of oppressive cultural myths and exploitative social hierarchies, or it may aim at their elimination. It is both an indicator and a driver of social change and there is a multitude of examples of how lexical and grammatical choices have deeply political and social implications. For instance, the use 336 Ursula Posratschnig & Günther Sigott of pronouns in academic writing has changed dramatically over time, with only masculine pronouns being used in formal writing in the past. He or she and her or him was then used in an attempt to achieve a more egalitarian representation of the binary genders, and the gender-neutral singular they is currently recommended, also by major style guides such as APA, in order to avoid the exclusion of non-binary individuals (Ludbrook 2022). There have been many developments in language use towards greater inclu‐ sivity and the exposure of gender, race, class or species privilege. For example, scholars have suggested replacing the term plantation with labor camp because plantation is regarded as laden with “false memory and romantic myths”, while labor camp better represents the actual realities of slave labor (Landis 2015). In terms of grammar, the use of passive voice is frequent in academic writing, often for objectivity and formal style. However, its use must be viewed critically where it may conceal an agent and their responsibility for injustice. The use of passive voice, for example, masks human responsibility for animal cruelty in factory farming (Stibbe 2015: 154). Writing instruction should pay heed to these developments and sensitize students to “mindful […] language choices and their relationship to oppression and marginalization” (Smith-Harris 2004: 14). The overarching objective should be to develop student sensitivity towards such grammatical and terminological issues and to work towards the elimination of oppressive hierarchies in language use. 7 Assessment Summative assessment in the Writing Program is based on a CEFR-inspired analytic rating scale with modifications and additions to make it compatible with the curricular contents of the writing classes. The scale consists of the four dimensions Task Achievement, Textual competence, Grammar and Vocabulary. It spans the CEFR continuum from B2 to C2 but is divided into three levels of increasing proficiency in order to enable more finely-grained assessments on each level. Level 1, the lowest, thus spans CEFR B2 (minimum) to C1 (excellent), level 2, the intermediate, spans CEFR B2+ (minimum) to C1+ (excellent), and level 3, the highest, comprises CEFR C1 (minimum) to C2 (excellent). Courses in the Language Program are allocated to one of these levels. On each of these levels, student performance is assessed using the Austrian 5-point scale with 5 indicating insufficient performance, 4 minimum performance and 1 expressing excellent performance. However, the three levels are related to each other because they represent partially overlapping sections of the CEFR continuum from B2 to C2. For instance, a 1 on Level 1 will correspond to only a 2 on Level Teaching Academic Writing 337 2, and only to a 4 on Level 3. The link to the CEFR becomes clear in that CEFR C1 corresponds to a 4 on Level 3, a 2 on Level 2, and a 1 on Level 1. However, a 2 on Level 1, a 3 on Level 2, and a 5 on Level 3 are still in the CEFR C1 band, albeit at a lower level, too low for a pass grade in Level 3. This overlapping system makes it possible to provide the more finely-grained assessments by means of the Austrian five-point grade system with the grades at the individual Levels still being relatable to the more coarsely grained CEFR levels. By contrast, formative assessment is centered on the notion of error. Errors trigger feedback, which is discussed below. - 7.1 On the role of error in the teaching of academic writing Error plays a central role in the teaching of academic writing. Without error, the interactive process, which the teaching of academic writing is, quickly comes to a halt. Writing, like speaking, is a highly interactive process, in real life and particularly in teaching. In the teaching of writing, the interaction is initiated by providing the student with a purpose of writing, which is the aim of a well formulated writing prompt. The prompt constitutes the first move in an interactional sequence. At the heart of the prompt lies the writing trigger, i.e., a statement or a question to which the students are supposed to react in their writing. The prompt also specifies the discourse function of the text required. This includes the readership, the text type (e.g., argumentative, descriptive, narrative, expository) and any specific aims (coming to a conclusion, a recommendation, a value judgement, etc.). The prompt also states the required length and any features that the student should pay particular attention to, like coherence, balanced representation of opposite points of view or the like. Much of the nature of the student text is determined by the prompt. The amount of detail in the prompt also provides in large part the basis for the instructor’s expectations. These, in turn, are crucial when it comes to assessing the writing. In fact, expectations are the basis for identifying errors. The second move in the interactional sequence is feedback. Feedback has tra‐ ditionally been classified as positive or negative. Positive feedback may reinforce choices that the student has made in their writing, offers positive face, thereby making the student feel good. However, by its very nature, positive feedback does not focus on aspects that fail to satisfy the instructor’s expectations. Identifying such aspects has the potential to be face threatening, demotivating, and may detract from student well being. Hence, this kind of feedback is commonly referred to as negative feedback. However, it is this kind of feedback that identifies challenges for the student. Ideally, understanding these challenges 338 Ursula Posratschnig & Günther Sigott by seeing them as a goal for further development, and starting on the itinerary towards that goal, is arguably the driving force behind further development of writing competence. For this reason, feedback deserves prominent attention in teaching academic writing. In practice, detailed feedback that offers the student a point of reference for further development is negative feedback, which is necessarily based on error. While the terms ‘error’ and ‘negative feedback’ tend to attract associations of negativity, they are by no means intended to be negative or pessimistic. But in order to remove any aura of negativity, a neutral term might be used to denote an error, which gives rise to feedback. Feedback trigger would seem to be a viable solution. Thus, an important task of the academic writing teacher consists in identifying feedback triggers in students’ writing. While teachers of academic writing have identified feedback triggers for decades if not for centuries, the history of attempts to understand the reasoning that lies behind identifying feedback triggers is much shorter. In modern times, its inception may be seen in the emergence of ‘error analysis’ (see, e.g., James 1998). However, the approaches used to describe errors seem to lack an important distinction. Most instructors presumably make this distinction when marking student papers, but it has rarely been named, exemplified and discussed in the applied linguistics literature. The distinction is between the substance and the scope of a feedback trigger. This distinction was first suggested by Lennon (1991), who used extent and domain, and was reinvented by Dobrić and Sigott (2014, this volume), who coined the terms substance and scope. An instructor who identifies a feedback trigger always pays attention to two distinct but related aspects. One aspect is to determine how much of the text needs to be changed in order for the text to become better. The other aspect, which often tends to be ignored or taken for granted, is how much of the text needs to be seen for the instructor to even become aware of the need for change. The first aspect is referred to as the substance (Dobrić and Sigott 2014, this volume), and the second as the scope. Example 1 shows a feedback trigger for which substance and scope are WORD: [Example 1] We learn a lot about the atraktions. Here the error is recognizable by looking only at the word atraktions and it can be corrected by changing the word to attractions. In Example 2 the situation is different: [Example 5] Yesterday our class was in the “House of Music” in Vienna. There you can see lot of things of Mozart or Beethoven. Most of the time we were listening to strange noises. It was very great fun. Some stations were a bit boring, but it was okay. Teaching Academic Writing 339 It was very interesting and next week we are going to have a test about classical music. I hope I did that well. The funniest thing was that we missed the train back home. So we had to wait two hours. In the meantime we went shopping. I didn’t know that there are such great shopping centers in Vienna. I liked it very much there because it’s very interesting and exciting. You can learn a lot there. Here the error only becomes recognizable when context beyond the sentence is taken into account. For this feedback trigger the scope is TEXT but the substance is PHRASE. Correcting the error will involve changing did to will do, thereby changing the structure of the verb phrase. The notion of scope, particularly when scope reaches the size of sentence or text, seems ideally suited to help students see the repercussions that changing a word or a phrase can have on the whole fabric of a text. Scope seems an ideal medium for highlighting coherence in text. It is therefore a potent concept in providing feedback. Feedback, then, involves identifying the feedback trigger in terms of its substance and scope. Feedback triggers will only be recognized against the background of ex‐ pectations held by the instructor, which emanate from the writing prompt. Consciously or subconsciously, instructors have a possible text or a set of possible texts that would count as an acceptable response to the prompt latent in their minds. This latent construct serves as the basis for an authoritative reconstruction, a version which formulates the student’s intention but with the substance changed so that the error has disappeared. The challenge is to keep substance to a minimum, thereby asking for minimal change. This idea is not new. Many practitioners have followed the principle of correcting as little as possible while still arriving at an error-free student text. This principle could be referred to as minimal correction. Once feedback triggers have been identified, the instructor has to decide how to communicate the feedback. In fact, there are numerous ways in which feedback can be communicated to students. It is helpful to describe feedback with regard to various dimensions such as (Cabot and Kaldestad 2019; Hall 2022): • Global / local • Focused / unfocused • Directive / nondirective • Elicitative / nonelicitative • Metalinguistic / nonmetalinguistic • Oral / written Global / local refers to the size of the text portion that the feedback addresses. Feedback which addresses text function, organization or content usually con‐ 340 Ursula Posratschnig & Günther Sigott cerns more than individual sentences and can be referred to as global. By contrast, feedback that is focused on small units of text such as a word or phrase can be referred to as local (Hall 2022). Feedback is here characterized with regard to substance. Feedback may be limited to global substance (above sentence level) or to local substance (below sentence level). It may, however, be focused on global and on local substance in one feedback round. If the instances of feedback on a text in a feedback round are focused on the same substance level, the feedback is said to be focused. If, on the contrary, feedback is focused on various substance levels in the same text in one feedback round, then the feedback is said to be unfocused. Feedback may be directive or nondirective (Sigott et al. 2021). Nondirective feedback is limited to identifying the feedback trigger. If the scope - substance approach is applied, the feedback trigger will be identified by stating its substance (e.g. word). If no further information is provided, the feedback can be regarded as nondirective. If, by contrast, additional information is provided that is intended to help the writer arrive at an improved version, the feedback can be said to be directive. Directiveness of feedback is a matter of degree. A first step towards directive feedback consists in stating the scope of the error. This directs the writer’s attention to the portion of text that contains elements which clash with the substance. This clash may be syntactic, semantic, stylistic, textlinguistic or pragmatic. A next step could be to focus the writer on the element of the scope that clashes with the substance. At this stage the learner can be asked to consider the relationship between the scope and the substance from a syntactic, a semantic, a stylistic, a textlinguistic, or a pragmatic point of view. This process amounts to gradually taking the student near their zone of proximal development (Vygotsky 1978) and is entirely in the spirit of interactionist dynamic assessment (Lantolf and Poehner 2011). Once all attempts at eliciting an acceptable change of the substance have not been successful, the learner may eventually be offered the improved version by the instructor. The feedback has then reached the extreme level of directiveness. It should have become obvious by now that providing directive feedback may involve a stepwise approach, in which the writer is offered increasingly focused help on their way towards the correct version. Feedback which goes beyond merely identifying the substance by giving increasingly focused help without, however, offering a correct version, is called elicitative. It counts as elicitative as long as the writer has a chance to still offer an improved formulation. Once the instructor has provided the improved formulation, the feedback has ceased to be elicitative and has become nonelicitative. Teaching Academic Writing 341 Feedback can also be characterized with regard to the extent to which it uses metalinguistic terms. Feedback that avoids metalinguistic terms that are not part of everyday language such as word, sentence, or text, can be termed nonmetalinguistic. The more technical terminology is used, such as phrase, clause, cohesion, coherence, register, etc., the more metalinguistic the feedback becomes and the more it relies on the students’ language awareness and metalinguistic knowledge to be comprehensible. No matter which feedback choices the instructor takes, all feedback can be communicated in written or in oral form. Error gives rise to feedback. Feedback is pivotal in teaching academic writing. Determining which feedback is effective under which circumstances is a challenge for applied linguistics research in the years to come. It is to be hoped that the question will give rise to theses and articles, and the teaching of academic writing in the department and beyond will benefit from the results. 8 Conclusion Teaching and learning academic writing are extraordinarily complex endeavors which entail a plethora of separate but mutually dependent skills and con‐ siderations. These range from reading and research, critical thinking, text organization and linguistic accuracy to concerns of critical language awareness. Particular importance must be attached to the nature and effects of feedback on student writing and its role in student progress. Simultaneously, curricular objectives and classroom activities are subject to the interplay of distinct power relationships in this context. On an institutional level, these include student-teacher relationships and privileges that come with academic literacy. In the broader context of education, teachers and students must navigate the oftentimes conflicting objectives of being able to compete on neoliberal labor markets on the one hand, and issues of social justice or environmental sustain‐ ability on the other. Finally, language is itself a site where power relationships are negotiated continuously. 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Amerstorfer & Clara Kuncic 1 Introduction This chapter addresses the empowerment of pre-service teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) in terms of equipping them with the relevant knowledge, attitudes, and skills (Mercer et al. 2019) that they need for their future careers. These include an ability and willingness to broaden the objectives of EFL lessons beyond linguistic competences, a curiosity to explore teaching resources and methodologies that diverge from the mainstream, and a desire to pursue lifelong professional development (Amerstorfer 2021, 2022; Mercer et al. 2019). With these goals in mind, we, the authors of this chapter, create learning situations in which students explore the demands of their future profession in a creative manner by engaging in meaningful, collaborative activities that lead to sustainable learning (Hmelo-Silver 2004). We want to raise in our students an awareness of the diversity of people, global and situational issues, and other challenges young people face in today’s world. We also want to spark their desire to explore innovative teaching approaches and resources for their own classrooms. Ultimately, we want to empower students to be the best teachers they can be, striving for lifelong professional development. From our experience, problem-based learning (PBL) provides an appropriate educational framework to achieve these ambitious goals. PBL has been used in pre-service teacher education at the Department of English at the University of Klagenfurt since 2013 with continuous success discernible in classroom observations, regularly collected student feedback, and academic research (Amerstorfer 2020; Amerstorfer and Münster-Kistner 2021). Over the years, the self-designed PBL course materials have been repeatedly evaluated and revised to accommodate the altered demands imposed by society, educational policy makers, the Covid-19 pandemic, and, last but not least, the wishes and criticism of students. In this chapter we scrutinise the perceptions of students of PBL, specifically their motivation, interest, and academic engagement, in a preservice EFL teacher education course. 2 Student motivation, interest, and academic engagement Student interest and motivation are crucial prerequisites of academic engage‐ ment (Amerstorfer and Münster-Kistner 2021; Mercer and Dörnyei 2020). The concepts are strongly linked although it has not been entirely clarified how they influence each other. What is known about student motivation, interest, and academic engagement builds on research-based conceptualisations and a large body of academic literature. Observations in our own classrooms and our practical teaching experience at school and university confirm the theories included in this section. It is a challenge to define motivation due to the complexity of the topic (Dörnyei and Ushioda 2011). Multiple attempts have been made in voluminous handbooks of motivation (e.g., Elliot et al. 2018; Lamb et al. 2019) and other texts with comprehensive literature reviews (e.g., Csizér 2020). There seems to be consensus that motivation can be described as a driving force or reason why a learner selects a learning activity and puts effort into it. One theory related to motivation, self-determination theory (Deci and Moller 2007; Deci and Ryan 1985, 2002), explains a synergy of external and internal influences on motivation in order to control three fundamental psychological needs: “autonomy, a need to feel in control of one’s own actions; relatedness, a need to belong or feel connected to other people; and competence, a need to feel capable or accomplished” (Williams et al. 2015: 106). The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (Ryan and Deci 2000) is commonly known and frequently taught in teacher education courses. It recognises the origin of an individual’s motivation. A person who is naturally curious to learn something and who engages in learning because they find it “inherently interesting or enjoyable” (Harackiewicz and Knogler 2018: 334) is considered to be intrinsically motivated. Extrinsic motivation, in contrast, is typically connected to the prospect of some kind of gain or the avoidance of a loss. For instance, a learner could be extrinsically motivated to perform well on an exam in order to get a good grade, which would admit them to a desired school or university programme. They could also be extrinsically motivated to perform well to avoid the feeling of having disappointed a parent. Another frequently mentioned theory in teacher education that is related to learner motivation is Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory (1994). It 348 Carmen M. Amerstorfer & Clara Kuncic distinguishes between learners with a mastery goal orientation, who gain satisfaction from learning and ultimately being able to master a specific skill or knowledge, and learners with a performance goal orientation, who gain satisfaction from comparing their knowledge and skills with others. Motivation can describe the state of an individual or their actions, which may be linked to a specific task or activity. Interest, which is a contributing component to students’ intrinsic motivation and academic engagement (Amerstorfer and Münster-Kistner 2021; Hidi 2000; Hidi and Renninger 2006; Krapp 2002), is always connected to an object of interest. In the context of foreign language learning, a student can, for instance, be interested in a particular task, topic, book, language, or accent. A general interest in learning something new would, as Harackiewicz and Knogler (2018: 335) point out, be conceptualised as being “curious (Grossnickle 2016), open to experience (Goldberg 1990), or as having a growth mindset (Dweck 2006)”, that is believing that “one’s intellectual abilities and personal qualities can be improved” (Dörnyei 2020: 60). Interest activates the cognitive functions required to learn something in situations where students simultaneously experience positive emotions towards an object or issue of interest. It can “energize higher levels of performance” (Harackiewicz and Knogler 2018: 336) and can make learning seem “relatively effortless” (ibid.). Students can be interested in something because of an individual inclination (individual interest) or because of task features that many people would find appealing (situational interest; Hidi and Renninger 2006). Interest is not neces‐ sarily a spontaneous, immediate event. It often develops and can fluctuate across time. It can grow, peak, stagnate, and shrink. The trajectory of students’ interest development is difficult for teachers to predict and notice because interest depends on many factors such as personal preferences, situational circumstances, and group dynamics in a class. Academic engagement is similarly complex and majorly dependent on stu‐ dent motivation and interest. Students who are motivated to complete a task and interested in the topic of the task are likely to engage in it wholeheartedly. In a previous publication, we identified seven components that are essential for academic engagement in pre-service EFL teacher education: • cognitive engagement (i.e., thinking related to the involvement and partic‐ ipation in academic tasks), • metacognitive engagement (i.e., managing and reflecting on cognitive actions), • affective engagement (i.e., regulating emotions), • social engagement (i.e., interacting with peers and teachers), The Power Within 349 • task engagement (i.e., meaningfully engaging with learning materials), • communicative engagement (i.e., communicating effectively in writing, speaking, and non-verbally), and • foreign language engagement (i.e., using the foreign language for academic purposes). (adapted from Amerstorfer and Münster-Kistner 2021: 2-3) These seven components of academic engagement are strongly interconnected with much overlap and contingent on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of individuals (Amerstorfer and Münster-Kistner 2021). We find that academic engagement in tertiary education fundamentally differs from academic engage‐ ment in secondary or primary school (Finn and Zimmer 2013; Linnenbrink and Pintrich 2003; Marks 2000; Skinner and Pitzer 2013) because older students are more mature and confronted with different issues compared to younger ones. Their personalities, academic skills, and life circumstances have progressed, and they often have more autonomy in comparison to younger learners regarding individual decision-making (Amerstorfer and Münster-Kistner 2021). From our experience, an increased amount of autonomy leads to more responsibility, which can increase internal pressure (e.g., higher expectations of oneself) as well as pressure from others (e.g., higher expectations of parents, peers, and teachers). Experiencing pressure can have both positive as well as negative ef‐ fects on the motivation and academic engagement of individuals, the magnitude of which depends on individual personality features (e.g., self-concept) and the relationships with those who impose the pressure. For instance, a career-driven parent who expects no less than excellence can lower a student’s motivation and willingness to engage academically because the student may feel that there is no possible way to ever satisfy such aspirations. In contrast, group dynamics can be very motivational and lead to intense engagement if a group of peers get along well and support each other (Mercer and Dörnyei 2020). A high degree of responsibility in the classroom due to raised learner autonomy can also lead to rewarding situations for individuals, which can lift their self-esteem and self-confidence, and consequently increase their motivation and academic engagement. Students who set themselves SMART goals (i.e., goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timebound; Mercer and Dörnyei 2020: 140), individually or in groups, are likely to experience rewarding moments and to gain positive reactions from others. This goes to show that with regard to academic engagement, the expectations learners have of themselves and the expectations others have of them can cause vigorous movements in both directions, boosting or depressing academic engagement. Further powerful forces in the dynamics of academic engagement 350 Carmen M. Amerstorfer & Clara Kuncic can be cultural norms, the social standing of individuals in a group, the overall educational context, as well as student-teacher relationships (Amerstorfer and Münster-Kistner 2021). Moreover, the methodological approach teachers apply in the classroom can be essential for learner motivation, interest, and academic engagement. - 2.1 Promoting motivation, interest, and academic engagement in the classroom Learner motivation and interest are key ingredients of academic engagement and often discussed together due to their inherent cohesiveness. Dörnyei (2020) takes a critical view of a carrot-and-stick approach to motivation in the classroom. Rewards and punishments have been “some of the chief engines of institutionalised learning for several millennia” (Dörnyei 2020: 54) executed via grading systems in educational institutions around the globe. Nevertheless, educational psychology considers this approach outdated and endorses the strengthening of intrinsic motivation and a growth mindset (Dweck 2006) instead. Completing an intrinsically motivating task can be a rewarding ex‐ perience in itself. Such tasks make external reinforcement unnecessary and create a much more fulfilling learning experience overall - for individuals and for groups. It seems to be paramount to that effect that students realise the educational value of what they are doing in class. Moreover, they need to feel empowered to improve their academic and personal abilities, which can be achieved in activities with increased learner autonomy and precise, realistic goals (Bandura and Schunk 1981; Mercer and Dörnyei 2020). With regard to promoting interest in educational settings, Harackiewicz and Knogler suggest two complementary options: 1. Build on existing individual interest: Provide content material and tasks designed to facilitate the connection of academic content to be learned with already existing interests. 2. Generate situational interest: Provide stimulating tasks, activities, and materials that use universal structural features (i.e., problems, challenges) in order to trigger and maintain situational interest for all students. (Harackiewicz and Knogler 2018: 342; see also Pintrich 2003) As teachers we can engage students deeply in learning activities and maintain their attention by creating classroom situations that appeal to the interest of individuals and by establishing situational interest. However, Harackiewicz and Knogler’s advice to build on existing individual interest requires an up- The Power Within 351 to-date knowledge of students’ interests, which can be achieved explicitly, by asking learners directly about their interests, or implicitly, by finding out in a subtler manner, for instance, through peer group observations or informal chats during break time. In whatever way, showing an interest in the lives of students beyond the classroom is a quality that caring teachers possess (Amerstorfer and Münster-Kistner 2021). It contributes to positive student-teacher relationships and increases student motivation and academic engagement (Amerstorfer and Münster-Kistner 2021; Banegas and Pinner 2021; Henry and Thorsten 2018). With regard to implementing the interests of students in learning activities, Mercer and Dörnyei (2020: 137) suggest “hands-on tasks, opportunities for collaboration, well-structured learning tasks with the chance for exploration and discovery, stimulating and appealing input, links to learners’ lives and pursuits, appropriate challenge, and opportunities for meaningful choice”. Based on our own teaching experience, classroom observations, virtual and face-toface conversations with students, and student responses in structured course feedback and empirical studies (Amerstorfer 2020; Amerstorfer and Münster- Kistner 2021), we believe that PBL meets these expectations. 3 Problem-based learning (PBL) PBL is a powerful and effective teaching approach because it generates situa‐ tional interest, is highly student-centred, and requires intensive teamwork. Students are confronted with close-to-life problems to be solved collectively as a team. In a step-by-step approach, they identify the overall problem, analyse its various layers, and define clear goals of how it can be solved (see Amerstorfer and Münster-Kistner 2021 for details). The course instructor does not take the traditional role of a teacher but is instead a silent observer and facilitator who only intervenes if the situational circumstances demand it or if the group asks for it (Hmelo-Silver 2004; Moust et al. 2007). During the problem analysis, the complexity of a problem may grow and new aspects of the issue may emerge. It is not necessarily the objective to solve a problem entirely as this may not even be possible, for instance, if solving the problem would require new laws to be enforced or curricula to be revised. What counts is the effort students put into the problem-solving process, their academic engagement as individuals and team members, and their personal learning gain. During each class meeting, students take on different roles, which rotate every class meeting. In our course, they can be chairperson, scribe, or regular participant. The chairperson is the moderator of the meeting who leads the group through the problem scenarios. The scribe keeps track of time, takes 352 Carmen M. Amerstorfer & Clara Kuncic notes during group discussions, and shares the notes with everyone after the meeting. The scribe of one lesson becomes the chairperson of the following lesson because they are best prepared for leading any subsequent discussions and tasks (Amerstorfer 2020). The remaining students are regular participants who share their knowledge, discuss experiences and ideas, agree on learning goals, and carry out self-study tasks in between class meetings in order to contribute to the problem-solving. - 3.1 PBL in a pre-service teacher education course at the Department of English PBL has been applied in a pre-service EFL teacher education course at the University of Klagenfurt since 2013. The course takes place once a year and encompasses 15 weekly class meetings with a duration of 90 minutes each. It is linked to an internship of 30 hours, which students complete at a local secondary school where an experienced in-service teacher acts as their supervisor. The requirements for the successful completion of the course are regular attendance and active participation in the class meetings as well as a reflection paper at the end of term. The students’ achievements during the semester are continuously recorded by the course instructor and account for 50 % of the final grade. The other 50-% are assigned to the quality of the term paper. The university course covers topics that are relevant to the theme of the internship and other issues that early-career English teachers may encounter in real life. The topics hence encompass diversity and inclusion in EFL class‐ rooms, lesson and activity planning, lesson observation, material development, time management, instruction-giving, team-teaching, setting and correcting homework, giving constructive feedback, as well as brain-friendly learning and teaching. Before the first class meeting, the students read a short introduction to the PBL methodology (based on Moust et al. 2007). Moreover, they receive a course guide, which clarifies the course requirements and grading system in a transparent fashion. The course guide furthermore contains all problem sce‐ narios to be discussed during the semester, a list of literature recommendations, and other useful resources. The problem scenarios are made-up descriptions of problematic situations, which Stefanie and Paul, two fictitious pre-service EFL teachers in a similar situation as the actual students, encounter. Their characters are used during the problem-solving processes to avoid uncomfortable situa‐ tions in class, such as losing face in front of others or admitting knowledge gaps (see Section 6). The course guide has been continuously revised and updated since its first implementation at the Department of English. In order to optimise The Power Within 353 the course materials and to support research about PBL, all students have so far been engaged in feedback activities during the semester and at the end. 4 Research design and methods We conducted a research project to investigate the perceptions of three cohorts of EFL teacher education students regarding the PBL course. The aim of the project was to find out how PBL can contribute to empowering future EFL teachers. Particular attention was paid to student interest, motivation, and academic engagement as previous research has identified these as pivotal components of successful and sustainable learning and skills development among other factors (Amerstorfer and Münster-Kistner 2021). We also aimed to look at the other side of the coin and scrutinise any negative aspects that the participants noticed. Investigating both positive and negative features of PBL in the opinion of students provided a comprehensive impression that can help us to improve the course syllabus, design, and materials for future students. It furthermore contributes to our professional development as teacher educators and to the body of research-based literature about didactics and PBL in higher education. There were three groups of students (33 students in total) in the teacher education course described in Section 3.1 in the winter term 2021/ 22, two of which were taught by Carmen and one by Clara. 32 students (24 female, 8 male) volunteered to participate in the study. After the completion of the 15-week course, they were asked to reflect on their experience with PBL in an opinion paper, which was not included in the course assessment. Specifically, the participants were asked to describe their perceptions regarding the advantages and disadvantages of PBL and to provide any constructive suggestions for the improvement of the course. The empirical data were analysed and interpreted as follows. We identified expressions of opinions and perceptions in the participants’ responses and coded them according to their content. During the coding, we eliminated data that were references to literature rather than expressions of own experience or opinions. Information that was irrelevant to the aim of this project was also excluded from the data analysis. Then we sorted the codes according to common themes and created respective umbrella terms (see sub-headings in italics in Sections 5.1 and 5.2). Finally, we selected quotations that represent general trends as well as students’ opinions that particularly affect our work with the PBL methodology to emphasise the main findings in the original words of the participants, for whom we used codes (St1-St32) to preserve their anonymity. 354 Carmen M. Amerstorfer & Clara Kuncic 5 Student perceptions of PBL in the EFL teacher education course - 5.1 Advantages of PBL in teacher education According to the students’ perceptions, the advantages by far outweighed the disadvantages and concerned the PBL methodology in general, the contents of the PBL course in the pre-service teacher education programme, learning in PBL, the students’ personal engagement, peer cooperation and communication, and certain features of learner psychology. PBL methodology The different roles students take in PBL stood out as advantages, albeit they were sometimes perceived as challenging (see below). Both the fact that there is a chairperson and a scribe as well as the experience of embodying these functions were highlighted as beneficial for the whole group and on a personal level. Growing into the assigned role (for example the chairperson) requires in-depth analysis of the problem before class and coming up with certain questions if the discussion comes to a halt. The most beneficial and difficult role, in my opinion, is that of the scribe, because they ensure that everything is written down in a structured way that can later be utilized by each participant of the class. (St2) In the opinions of the participants, PBL represents a welcome change of teaching methodology that is easy and fun to conduct. They praised the transparent, flexible, and goal-oriented nature of the course structure and syllabus as well as the step-by-step approach to problem solving. According to the participants, other benefits of the PBL methodology are its suitability for online learning and compatibility with other approaches. The transparent structure of the entire course is extremely helpful throughout the semester. We knew what topics will be covered and the order as well. The internal arrangement of steps was also a welcome guideline for orientation. Even though we sometimes mixed up some of them, it usually turned out well in the end and provided us with nicely organized protocols. Furthermore, the flexibility of the overall structure allowed us to embrace the opportunities of including other plans […]. This technique also offered a highly goal-oriented input. Since each topic was introduced with a problem to be solved, we knew exactly what the issue is and what we want to find out and clarify. Therefore, it is not simply one-sided input but targeted knowledge acquisition. (St9) Course contents The participants described the contents of the PBL course as advantageous due to their authenticity and relevance. They felt that the topics discussed prepare The Power Within 355 preservice teachers well for their future profession and that they expand the horizon of trainee teachers. […] what was particularly interesting to me were the teaching activities, which were based on scenarios close to reality. In my opinion, this method stands out among other methods by its practical relevance. Almost all problem situations could have really happened to one of us students, which has made it easy to empathize with Stefanie, the person from the scripts. (St24) I learned a lot throughout the semester (this includes tips and tricks, models and systems than [sic.] can be used and applied etc.) that can and will be of help in my future teaching career. There is nothing more important than classes that do exactly what this class has done: preparing students for their job. (St13) Learning in PBL According to the participants, the student-centeredness of PBL and how it fosters self-directed learning are great benefits. The students specifically praised that they had control over the choice of tasks and that there were opportunities to reflect on their own learning processes during the course. These reflections led to experiences described as deep, increased, sustainable, and long-term learning, which the participants contrasted with rote memorisation in other courses. When students work on their own and not just listen to a teacher, they learn more and more effectively. […] The Problem-Based learning approach gave me the opportunity to think about the topics first or think back to some situations where I have already been confronted with those topics in real life situations before I got an [sic.] input from a professor. (St11) I think that it also helped me a lot that one had to search for information oneself to solve the problem, because I learn a lot more by searching and solving the problem myself than if the solution had already been prepared and I would have just had to learn it by heart. (St21) The participants furthermore remarked that PBL activates previous knowledge and brain activity and described PBL as effortless learning that does not require any pre-skills. Instead, according to the participants, PBL provides opportunities for the development of a large range of “universal abilities and behaviours” (St3) that are relevant to future EFL teachers. The ones explicitly mentioned were skills for attentive listening, effective and respectful communication and negotiation, efficient team collaboration, effective leadership, constructive problem solving, (digital) knowledge exchange, autonomous learning, (online) 356 Carmen M. Amerstorfer & Clara Kuncic literature research, time management, self-organisation, as well as critical, deep, and creative thinking. Individual engagement The participants praised PBL for the reduced workload and study time compared to more conventional teaching approaches in other university courses. More‐ over, they liked the active engagement and the targeted preparation that is required of all participants in PBL, which, in their opinion, leads to further positive effects like intensified, effortless learning processes and better learning outcomes. […] another advantage is the preparation: As everyone has to prepare for the next class meeting, everyone has something to say. I am convinced people often do not comment on something because of a fear to say something wrong or stupid. The preparation one has to do for problem-based learning classes, however, eliminates this issue. (St16) One could say that the learning process happens more or less automatically because one is so actively involved in the lessons. (St15) Peer cooperation and communication The intense peer collaboration and interaction in PBL were highlighted as great advantages. The participants specifically emphasised the constructive group discussions during class meetings as well as the collective research that they continuously conducted during the semester. In the next lesson we shared our findings, and I was surprised how much knowledge we were able to produce; this once again showed me how important it is to work together as it simply makes solving a problem and collecting material way easier. (St5) I think it is also a great advantage that in groups students can learn from each other’s experiences and knowledge. All students can contribute their opinions and different views on a topic and therefore you have a broader view of the different topics. (St11) Not only did we acquire the teaching content in a totally different way, but we were also encouraged to work together as a team like I have never experienced it in any other course. (St24) Learner psychology Regarding learner psychology, the participants noted that PBL increased their motivation and self-confidence. The latter concerned their confidence as stu‐ dents, future EFL teachers, and speakers of EFL. They described the learning The Power Within 357 environment as psychologically safe and casual and found PBL to be a rewarding experience. All active participants are students, which spreads the feeling of equality and lowers the fear of being judged for saying something unsuitable. (St24) Class time not only provided me with a familiar and peaceful environment but it also gave me the safe space to apply all of what I knew and learned about being a team and see which approaches and ways work best for me. (St8) - 5.2 Disadvantages of PBL Since the collected data are based on the participants’ personal opinions, expe‐ riences, perceptions, and attitudes, some of the abovementioned advantages were also perceived as disadvantages by some individuals. We identified a few such issues that concern the following themes: the PBL methodology as such, a lack of authenticity in the problem scenarios, learning in PBL, flawed cooperation and communication among peers, the engagement of individuals, and aspects concerning learner psychology. Some of the issues were put forward as hypothetical problems that did not actually occur in the course. Overall, disadvantages were scarcely mentioned in the participants’ responses. PBL methodology Some participants noted that PBL may not be suitable for all learners and all topics. However, their worries concerned themselves in their future profession as EFL teachers in secondary schools rather than using PBL in adult education, for which it was originally designed. One student found the PBL course materials “restraining” (St25) due to a perceived rigidity and would have liked the teacher to “introduce her own ideas and material” (St25) instead. According to the participants, PBL processes can be confusing in the begin‐ ning, specifically in relation to the increased learner autonomy, the problem definition, and the information synthesis after the research phase. These are serious concerns because PBL is only effective if each of the steps in the process is successfully completed before the next one. […] some might struggle to really grasp or understand the problem. If you don’t understand the problem, you can’t do proper research. (St3) The roles of chairperson and scribe were experienced as challenging and stressful by some. 358 Carmen M. Amerstorfer & Clara Kuncic I must also admit that I was very stressed when I had to chair the meeting and I am not sure if I learned that much in that meeting because I was so focused on doing well in leading the class. (St21) […] also the scribe usually experiences some pressure to perform since they are responsible for all the notes. If any technical difficulties occur or the handwritten notes vanish, the entire group must suffer the consequences and repeat the group session. (St4) Luckily, this never happened in any of the groups. Unauthentic problem scenarios Opposed to the majority, two participants found that the problem scenarios lacked authenticity. They found that “incorporating more depth would add increased purpose to our group’s attempts to find solutions” (St22) and that “some scenarios and tasks were far-fetched” (St26), which complicated the problem-solving in their opinion. Learning in PBL Since “problem-based learning depends on already acquired experiences” (St1), one participant was concerned that, hypothetically, a lack of prior knowledge may cause problems during class meetings. Peer cooperation and communication PBL may become a challenge if students do not get along well with one another because they depend on the participation and contribution of all group members. Some participants hypothesized that this may disrupt the work efficiency and impact the creativity of students although it did not concern them directly. I can hardly see any disadvantages of this method, but this is certainly also due to the fact that our group was very efficient and had a really strong participation. I can imagine that this method can become a problem if the group does not participate and only a few of the students actively contribute to solving the problem, because then the method misses its point. Especially with students in earlier semesters I can imagine that they have a harder time interacting with other students and need a little more guidance to interact profitably with their peers. (St21) […] if the group does not fit together, the method of problem-based learning will simply not work or at least not work efficiently. (St7) Some students also might lose their creativity when working with classmates they dislike. (St4) The Power Within 359 An imbalance of students’ contributions in class as well as an unequal division of the self-study tasks between class meetings were also perceived as bearing po‐ tential for conflict. Moreover, group discussions and decision-making processes were mentioned as likely problem areas although one participant noticed an opportunity to grow from such challenging situations. […] the discussions were a challenge as not only my opinion was of value but also the opinions and thoughts of other colleagues. […] with the help of PBL I learned how to approach and handle disagreements but more importantly I learned how to work in teams and how to accept and work with different opinions and thoughts on certain topics. (St8) Individual engagement Some participants experienced PBL as more time-consuming in comparison to other courses as it requires thorough preparation and consistently active participation. One participant highlighted that the problem analysis, which is a fundamental step in the PBL process, may lack depth without the intensive engagement of individual group members. I felt that after the first few sessions, as our group adjusted and became comfortable using the PBL method, we were just going through the motions of steps 1-5 to get to the perceived ‘real’ point of the class, creating our own learning goals or homework, which was then independently fulfilled and reported on in the following class. Rather than really utilizing the steps to critically analyze the problem given, it felt as though we were just going through the motions to get our homework assignments and end class. (St22) Learner psychology One participant mentioned that PBL may cause phases of self-doubt, frustration, anxiety, and distress. They felt that the synthesis and sharing phase at the beginning of each lesson may cause feelings of insecurity regarding individual students’ own competences. The participant emphasised that especially for perfectionists it can be challenging to share the workload with other group members. The participant was furthermore concerned that negative experiences with PBL may be harmful and may impact student grades, which in return could leave students with negative feelings “towards future group work at university” (St4). Another participant regarded the class meetings as unpredictable because they are mainly run by students rather than professional teachers. The same participant voiced concerns about the teacher’s perception of the performance of shy students. 360 Carmen M. Amerstorfer & Clara Kuncic I personally am not a fan of it [PBL], because if you do not contribute because of shyness for example, the teacher would think that you are not well prepared, and the other group members will forget about you and contributing will get harder each time. (St20) - 5.3 Additional findings In addition to reporting their own experience as students in PBL, some partici‐ pants also examined the perspective of the teacher. They reckoned that PBL is time-consuming for the teacher as it requires profound preparation and material development. Creating the necessary scenarios as well as preparing some material can be very time consuming for teachers. This means that each teacher must decide for him/ herself whether the effort is worth it or not. (St15) They furthermore considered that the role of facilitator may be unusual for both teachers and students because the teachers are required to stay in the background during class time and the students miss a classical “role-model teacher” (St14) in PBL. In problem-based learning, the teacher should act as an observer in the background, which might be an uncomfortable role for some teachers who are used to play [sic.] a more dominant role in the class. (St18) One response could not be categorised as advantage or disadvantage because its wording does not indicate how the participant felt about the intense participation required in PBL. Since I am now in my sixth semester of studying English, I am aware of the differences in the requirements in terms of active participation. It is depending on the teacher and the type of the course how much active participation is requested. However, none of the courses I have taken before, has ever demanded such a high degree of involvement. (St24) Finally, a few students added comments to compliment the course instructors on the manner in which the course was held. 6 Discussion of the findings PBL was mainly perceived as effective and effortless, which seems to be related to the inherently interesting nature of the tasks in the course and consequently increased motivation (Harackiewicz and Knogler 2018; Hidi and Renninger 2006; The Power Within 361 Mercer and Dörnyei 2020). The participants’ opinions regarding the intensity and the workload involved in PBL were two-minded. While some perceived the invested time and effort as more intense, others claimed that the workload and study time were less in comparison to other courses with conventional teaching methods. However, given the large variety of topics and tasks covered in the course, we are doubtful whether their perception mirrors reality. We believe that the participants’ experience may be blurred in this regard by the positive emotions they experienced during the course. In the sense of “time flies when you’re having fun”, perhaps the students did not realise the large amount of time and effort that they really invested. Although it is true that they could divide the self-study tasks among all group members, we do not know the amount of time that they actually spent on the course outside of class, for instance, by doing online research, engaging in exchanges with peers and internship supervisors, taking notes during the school internship, and how this time would compare to the homework in other courses. Beside a general feeling of enjoyment, the data indicate that PBL increases the willingness of students to engage in learning processes because of a sense of safety inherent in the learning environment and fostered by the peer collaboration. Rather than the students themselves, it is the fictitious characters, Stefanie and Paul, who endure all kinds of problems that pre-service and early career EFL teachers may encounter. They question their foreign language abilities in English, struggle with confidence issues regarding their developing teaching skills, and discover knowledge gaps about policies in EFL education, to name a few. It seems to be easier and less threatening to discuss the problems of someone else than openly owning up to any personal struggles in class. Instead, the students can preserve their individual situations if they wish to do so and demonstrate empathy with Stefanie, Paul, and others who might experience similar problems. As a team they can correct their errors, reveal alternatives, provide guidance, and solve their problems. Teamwork, in this sense, is a powerful tool that facilitates a safe, communal learning environment. However, not all students love teamwork. Some are more inclined to work by themselves. Some may have perfectionist tendencies and doubt whether others can generate outcomes that resemble equally high quality standards to those that they set for themselves. PBL includes both individual study and team collaboration. The students can autonomously influence the intensity and manner in which they engage in learning activities in and outside of class. Although their personal expectations of the quality of the outcomes may be different, together they cater for an overall high standard. Previous studies show that situations in which peers learn from peers are more effective than 362 Carmen M. Amerstorfer & Clara Kuncic teacher-centred classroom practices (Boud et al. 2001), so, we hypothesise that this would be the case for PBL too. Learning in teams and by self-conducted research involves the students more intensely and authentically in learning processes than listening to the lectures of a teacher. Furthermore, getting advice or feedback from peers is usually less threatening and easier to accept than from a teacher who still has a natural appeal of authority regardless of the teaching methodology they apply and how friendly and caring students perceive them overall (Amerstorfer and Münster-Kistner 2021). Although some participants voiced an initial scepticism towards group work, discussions, and decisionmaking in PBL, they acknowledged the potential to learn from the difficulties entailed in group processes. Their mindsets prepared them to conquer these challenges and solve Stefanie’s and Paul’s problems. They managed to appre‐ ciate individual differences, handle disagreement, and respect the opinions of others in order to achieve the goals that they had set for themselves and the group. This study confirmed that PBL goes beyond the transmission of subjectrelated knowledge. The participants highlighted that they trained a large number of competences including interpersonal skills, team-management and leadership skills, problem-solving skills, research skills, creative and critical thinking skills, communication and presentation skills, digital literacy skills, and self-organisation and metacognitive skills, which resonates with and exceeds the findings of Savin-Baden and Howell Major (2004). In our context, metacognitive skills include planning ahead, structuring learning processes, time management, handling learning contents flexibly, and transferring knowledge from other sources, which seem to be essential for language teachers who are responsible for syllabus and lesson planning, material design and development, as well as implementing government policies. Communication and interpersonal skills are further cornerstones for teachers as they are important prerequisites for positive student-teacher relationships and learner and teacher wellbeing (Amerstorfer 2023). The PBL course is connected to the practical internship at school and aims to equip preservice teachers with the competences they need to be successful and content in their future profession, to act as positive role models, and for self-directed, life-long learning (Amerstorfer 2020; Hmelo-Silver 2004). The participants praised the transparency of the course contents, the overall setup, and the continuous assessment. We concur with Mercer and Dörnyei (2020: 111) that “[h]aving a clear sense of direction will help [students] to keep focus, remain on task and evaluate their own progress towards task goals”. Telling students in advance what exactly is expected of them during the semester gives them a feeling of security. The progression of the course becomes The Power Within 363 predictable to them, individual and group goals can be set realistically due to the communicated framework conditions, which increases the obtainability of the desired outcomes. The students can make autonomous decisions and are in control of the learning processes (Hmelo-Silver and Barrows 2006). They can preserve the energy of worrying about what may or may not happen and instead invest it in deep, critical, and creative thinking. They can carefully unfold each problem, ensure that no important aspects are accidentally overlooked and mind that no necessary actions are skipped. The first steps in the process, understanding the problem and identifying the various layers of the issue, are paramount and sometimes underestimated by students. From our experience, problem statements and their intended purposes may be interpreted differently by individuals, which can lead to problems in later phases of the problem-solving process. It is intriguing to imagine what different outcomes a single problem scenario might achieve if students were to work them out individually. Perhaps we should design such a learning activity to demonstrate that the joint discovery and definition of the related issues is of utmost importance. It could be an eyeopener for students and purposefully implemented as such at the beginning of the course in the future. Despite mostly positive feedback, we received two negative comments about the problem scenarios being far-fetched or unauthentic. Designing PBL course materials is indeed tricky because the material designers have to put themselves in the shoes of early-career and pre-service teachers. One important component to consider is the curriculum, which predetermines some of the parameters and influences the syllabus of the course. Another vital factor is the evolution of education in general and its impact on practical aspects of being a teacher today (Amerstorfer 2022). Both must be considered in the material development alongside other aspects such as local idiosyncrasies and characteristics of the types of schools at which the students will probably be employed in the future. Over the years, the course materials have hence been continuously revised, and course graduates have been involved in the design of problem-solving tasks. Nevertheless, the issue that there are always a few individuals who perceive the tasks as unauthentic has remained. We are tempted to ascribe the problem to the diversity of students because everyone’s perception is different. We all have individual preferences, have made different experiences in the past, and are influenced by our personal socio-cultural contexts. What one student finds an authentic problem may be perceived by someone else as implausible. Unfortunately, despite the criticism, the participants of this study did not make any constructive recommendations as to how the authenticity of the problem scenarios could be improved. 364 Carmen M. Amerstorfer & Clara Kuncic Some participants mentioned that the roles of the chairperson and scribe can be challenging and that PBL lessons can be somewhat unpredictable. We concur but would like to note that challenges can lead to increased motivation, better performance, and increased self-confidence in educational settings (Dörnyei 2020; Mercer and Dörnyei 2020; Williams et al. 2015), specifically if solving them leads to success. It is important for PBL material designers to find a suitable level of difficulty for each task, to include some challenges that are manageable, and to enable the prospect of an immediate reward when students reach a positive outcome. They must feel good about their joint achievement. Also, the unpredictability of learning situations is generally perceived as motivating for students (Dörnyei 2020; Mercer and Dörnyei 2020; Williams et al. 2015). Not knowing exactly where a problem is leading evokes the interest of students and increases their academic engagement (Mercer and Dörnyei 2020). “[T]he key is letting learners find out things for themselves and not presenting them with information - offering them opportunities to discover things on their own” (Mercer and Dörnyei 2020: 108-109). The suitably difficult challenges and the curiosity-raising unpredictability are two characteristics that we believe PBL shares with gamified foreign language tasks (Kapp 2012). They can trigger feel‐ ings of momentary uncertainty but in the long run, the positive emotions usually outweigh the negative ones, particularly if students have the opportunity to support each other in a team. Moreover, PBL is a controlled process in which the course instructor has the authority and responsibility to intervene when necessary (Hmelo-Silver 2004; Hmelo-Silver and Barrows 2006) to avoid feelings of frustration. 7 Conclusion We are grateful to our teacher education students for sharing their opinions and experiences with PBL. They were excellent participants in this study because they already understand some principles of pedagogy and didactics, which sensitises their perceptions and helps them express themselves comprehensibly. Their views are invaluable to us as teacher educators and PBL material designers. We thank them for supporting our research and professional development in an unprecedented manner. The expectations of EFL teachers today are tremendous. Their job goes far beyond teaching vocabulary, grammar, and communication skills. Besides linguistic competences, they are expected to teach factual knowledge about, sensitivity towards, and an understanding for anglophone cultures, literature, and people. Furthermore, they are expected to develop in young people an array The Power Within 365 of must-have skills that are characteristic of living, studying, and working in the 21 st century (Amerstorfer 2022; Mercer et al. 2019). We promote PBL in teacher education because we believe that it is a great way to integrate multifaceted skills training at university, to foster a growth mindset (Dweck 2006) in pre-service teachers, and to encourage them to consider teaching approaches beyond traditional practices. With PBL we empower teacher education students to become self-deter‐ mined, self-confident, and forward-thinking EFL teachers. 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Foundations of Problem-Based Learning. Berkshire: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press. Skinner, E. A. and J. R. Pitzer (2013). Developmental dynamics of student engagement, coping, and everyday resilience. In S. L. Christenson, A. L. Reschly and C. Wylie (eds.), Handbook of Research on Student Engagement. New York: Springer, 21-44. Williams, M., S. Mercer and S. Ryan (2015). Exploring Psychology in Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Power Within 369 Understanding EMI Teacher Empowerment: What Does it Mean and How Can it Be Enhanced? Irena Vodopija-Krstanović 1 The growth and power of EMI English medium instruction (EMI) is an innovative educational phenomenon which has been spreading across universities at an unprecedented scale (Dearden 2015). Recent years have not only seen the increased importance of English language education, but also of education through the medium of English (Galloway et al. 2017; Macaro 2021). Having become widespread, EMI is dubbed an “unstoppable train” (Macaro 2015: 7) and a “galloping” phenomenon, which has become “pandemic in proportion” (Chapple 2015: 1). This rapid growth of EMI programs has been predominantly taking place in the European Higher Education Area, where the expansion of EMI has resulted in a 1,000 per cent increase in the number of programs since 2002 (Wächter and Maiworm 2008, 2014), and a staggering growth of 77 % since 2017 (British Council 2021). However, of the 157,278 bachelor’s and master’s Studyportals programs offered, the vast majority (81.7%) are still located in the “Big Four anglophone destinations” (British Council 2021). As as result, more than a half (63.8%) of international non-EU students in Europe attended English-speaking universities in the United Kingdom, in the period 2008-2016 (European Commission, Joint Research Centre, McMahon et al. 2018). It should be noted from the above that EMI has become a key factor in the process of internationalization of higher education in Europe, which, in recent years, has enabled the strengthening of the global presence of universities (Macaro et al. 2018). Through EMI, locally-oriented institutions have expanded on the higher education market to attract culturally and linguistically diverse students and teachers, and offer internationalized curricula (Saarinen and Nikula 2013). It is then hardly surprising that the growth of EMI is particularly significant for universities in ‘non-native’ English speaking countries for which it is a means of gaining leverage on a market traditionally dominated by univer‐ sities from Anglophone contexts (McCambridge and Saarinen 2015). Evidently, EMI has become a vital factor in empowering and enabling universities in non-English speaking countries to extend their global reach and compete with institutions from Anglophone countries (Sakurai et al. 2010). Through a policy of English (cf. Vodopija-Krstanović and Janjetić 2015) and EMI, these institutions can now play a powerful role in international academic competition in the new global economy (De Costa et al. 2020) and claim their share of the global export industry (McCambridge and Saarinen 2015). In other words, EMI has gained importance in non-English-speaking universities as its introduction allows them to compete in the “educational arms race” (Graddol 2006: 40) and reap some of the benefits enabled by programs in English (Cots et al. 2012). As Graddol (2006) points out: Higher education is becoming globalised alongside the economy, and English is proving to be a key ingredient - partly because universities in the English-speaking world dominate the global league tables, and partly because English is proving popular as a means of internationalising both the student community and teaching staff. (73) Among the principal characteristics of EMI are that it improves institutional competitiveness, increases international mobility, enhances prestige, boosts rankings, and attracts international (fee-paying) students (Macaro et al. 2018). Through EMI and a policy of internationalization, universities have diversified their faculty and students (Gregersen-Hermans 2012). However, the relationship between EMI and internationalization is far from straightforward as EMI is both a driver of and reaction to internationalization (Galloway et al. 2017). The implication of this process is that universities are left with little choice but to offer EMI programs, and it appears that the introduction of EMI is sometimes a mandatory strategy rather than a voluntary one. It is now widely acknowledged that universities which do not introduce EMI will be left behind in the competitive race to internationalize academia, diversify the faculty and student body, and compete on the global market (cf. Galloway et al. 2020). However, with the spread of EMI, there have also been growing concerns about the extent to which it has perpetuated the dominance of English and marginalized local languages and cultures (Doiz et al. 2013). In addition, EMI has been criticized for bolstering neoliberal policies in transnational higher education, which is reflected in increased levels of inequality and restricted accessibility (De Costa et al. 2020). In essence, English “as a language medium of power and prestige” (Toth 2016: 102) has marginalized the humanistic ideal of education as a public good (cf. Locatelli 2018). Taking into account the complexity and multifacetedness of EMI, as well as the potential challenges EMI teachers face, this chapter aims to provide a better 372 Irena Vodopija-Krstanović understanding of EMI teacher empowerment and the factors that empower teachers for EMI, thus enabling them to develop their skills and competences, to manage their personal growth and development, and to resolve potential difficulties. The chapter is divided as follows. The next section focuses on EMI teachers and discusses the challenges they face while teaching through English. Section three describes the theoretical framework, context, participants and research method. Two research questions related to conceptualizations of EMI teacher empowerment and the factors which contribute to empowering EMI teachers are also presented. Section four provides insights into EMI teacher empowerment. Finally, in section six, the conclusion gives a summary of the key findings and suggests some possible implications of the study. 2 Teaching and teachers in EMI For better or for worse, EMI is changing the landscape of higher education and setting different requirements and expectations of teachers, students and curricula. In the increasingly multilingual and multicultural universities, EMI entails the teaching of academic subjects through English to students who are not L1 speakers of English, by L2 English-speaking teachers in contexts where English is not the native language of the majority of the population (Hellekjær 2010; Macaro et al. 2018). Furthermore, EMI is highly contextualized and affected by local factors, resulting in a wide variety of policies and practices (Dimova and Kling 2020). In fact, numerous local and global variables impact EMI, and contrary to popular belief, it is more complex than a mere change in the language of instruction and has direct implications for teachers, students, teaching, and learning (Drljača Margić and Vodopija-Krstanović 2020). One of the central questions raised with respect to teachers in EMI is how the English language impacts teachers and students, and the teaching-learning process. In fact, concern has been expressed whether EMI teachers can deliver the same quality of teaching in a foreign language as in their native language, and whether they are able to adapt to the needs of students for whom English is a foreign language (Drljača Margić and Vodopija-Krstanović 2022). Given the multifarious EMI contexts, it is generally acknowledged that EMI stakeholders have diverse levels of proficiency (Macaro et al. 2018), which can affect teachers’ and students’ performance and the quality of instruction (Dafouz and Nuñez 2010; Mahboob 2014). Namely, for teachers with modest language skills, English indeed poses a serious problem as some teachers may first “have to teach [themselves] before [they] teach [their] students” (Borg 2016: 20). In fact, studies have shown that EFL teachers who are non-native speakers of English Understanding EMI Teacher Empowerment 373 (cf. Davies 2013; Mahboob 2005; Vodopija-Krstanović 2011) may face new forms of challenges in the classroom, which may affect their self-perceptions, among other. In a similar vein, L2 English-speaking EMI teachers may face language difficulties, which may have adverse effects on their performance and self-esteem. Another likely difficulty for teachers is that they may not necessarily have the pedagogical content knowledge (cf. Shulman 1987) to teach complex content through English. Furthermore, teachers may lack knowledge of English for teaching purposes (Freeman et al. 2015), and may not have the intercultural competence to facilitate “an inclusive, intercultural dimension to [their] teaching”, and enable internationalization (Leask 2015). In light of the above, it seems fair to state that instruction in a foreign language to students who are diverse in terms of their linguistic, cultural and educational backgrounds, and proficiency levels (cf. Kim et al. 2017: 467), requires that EMI teachers have skills and competences in three domains: language, pedagogy, and intercultural communication (TAEC EMI Handbook 2019). Of these three domains, to date, most attention has been given to language, possibly because weak language skills are easily identifiable and the ability to communicate effectively in English is a basic skill for effective teaching, while weak English language proficiency is a cause for concern (Dafouz and Nuñez 2010). Challenges arise in the EMI classroom when teachers with insufficient language skills cannot express themselves adequately and find it difficult to interact freely in English (Guarda and Helm 2017). Because of this, they have to devote extra time to preparing lessons and often have to learn their presentations by heart, which they reproduce (verbatim) in class (cf. Airey 2015). Since they have to explicitly focus on their language, their lectures are usually teacher-fronted and rather monotonous (cf. Drljača Margić and Vodopija-Krstanović 2017; Macaro 2018). If teachers cannot interact spontaneously, fluently and accurately, they cannot offer multiple explanations and varied examples of course content (Wilkinson and Gabriëls 2021). Instead, they may even have to reduce and simplify material (Chapple 2015). What is more, it is unlikely that they can provide extensive feedback or answer questions which may arise in class (Belyaeva et al. 2021). As for pedagogical content knowledge, mention has been made that EMI cannot be considered a translation, i.e., an English version of a course or program taught in L1. However, not all teachers have the pedagogical skills for EMI, nor are they aware that teachers should be able to adapt their teaching to support their students’ needs (Mahboob 2014). What EMI teachers should be able to do is scaffold students’ learning to help them overcome the possible challenges incurred by their limited linguistic resources (Mahan 2022). Furthermore, given the teachers’ linguistic and pedagogical limitations, it is doubtful whether they 374 Irena Vodopija-Krstanović use innovative problem-based collaborative tasks and other interactive studentcentered methods, which actively engage students in the learning process, or whether they have to resort to lecturing on memorized and rehearsed class material (Drljača Margić and Vodopija-Krstanović 2017). Considering the fact that internationalization is a key strategic goal of higher education and EMI, it mandates the explicit introduction of the intercultural dimension into universities (Knight 2008). With the increased international orientation of higher education, the development of EMI programs, and the ensuing diversity of today’s world, intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has become a basic competence which underlies everything that we do (Deardorff and Jones 2012). However, in EMI, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to ICC, in spite of the fact that lecturers encounter difficulties dealing with diversity in the EMI classroom (Lauridsen and Lauridsen 2017). A plausible explanation for this could be that ICC is a complex notion difficult to operationalize and define, and the existence of numerous understandings of ICC and what it entails perplexes EMI teachers (Deardorff 2006). What has also contributed to misconceptions about ICC is that it has been incorrectly assumed that cultural contact is sufficient for ICC, which will develop automatically in the multilingual classroom (Lauridsen 2017). By the same token, it is taken for granted that the presence of international students is sufficient for intercultural communication to take place, and that by virtue of teaching in English, EMI teachers will be able to meet the needs of international students (cf. Lauridsen and Lauridsen 2017). In reality, however, international and intercultural learning opportunities are not available to all EMI students, and teachers do not necessa‐ rily have the ICC to integrate it in the curriculum (Lauridsen 2020). Namely, they may not have developed “an international and intercultural mindset, along with reflexive awareness of colonial histories and global hierarchies” ( Jones et al. 2021: 335). It is probable that many EMI teachers may not be ICC cognizant and may not know how to introduce inclusive teaching practices and ICC-sensitive teaching (cf. Deardorff 2009) In view of the foregoing, it seems fair to state that teaching through the medium of English should be responsive to cultural, linguistic, and educational diversity (Lauridsen and Lauridsen 2017), and that EMI teachers need a very specific set of teaching skills and competences. Therefore, EMI teacher training and development is essential for effective teaching (Drljača Margić and Vo‐ dopija-Krstanović 2018). However, contrary to expectations, in Europe, the training of EMI teachers has not been given the attention it deserves (O’Dowd 2018). Furthermore, an EMI teacher knowledge base that could ensure quality assurance and empower teachers as professionals has not been articulated in Understanding EMI Teacher Empowerment 375 the literature. As a result, there is a vast diversity in policy and practice in EMI, a wide array of EMI teacher profiles (Macaro et al. 2021), as well as an absence of international EMI teacher certification (requirements) (Macaro and Han 2019). 3 The study The theoretical grounding for this study is based on the understanding that teacher empowerment stems from teachers’ command of the subject matter and teaching skills (Glenn 1990). Empowerment is a key notion in education as it highlights personal growth and development (Ashcroft 1987). Specifically, em‐ powerment increases teachers’ motivation and confidence in their knowledge, and helps them “develop the competence to take charge of their own growth and resolve their own problems” (Short 1994: 488). Moreover, it strengthens teachers’ belief that they can confront new circumstances, address challenges, and “have the skills and knowledge to act on a situation and improve it” (Short 1994: 488). Given the challenges EMI teachers face, it is important that they feel empow‐ ered as “[t]he benefits of teacher empowerment [include] increased teacher job performance, productivity, improved teacher morale, increased teacher knowledge of subject matter and pedagogy, and in the end, higher student motivation and achievement” (Keiser and Shen 2000: 119). In other words, empowerment is intertwined in the very fabric of effective EMI and can help EMI teachers better tackle the complex EMI endeavor (cf. Tsui 2017). - 3.1 Aim and research questions Based on the discussions above, the aim of this study is to gain insights into how EMI teachers perceive empowerment, and which factors foster the empowerment of teachers for EMI. Specifically, the study was guided by the following research questions: RQ1: How is the notion of EMI teacher empowerment conceptualized? RQ2: Which factors contribute to empowering teachers for EMI? - 3.2 Context and participants The research was carried out at a mid-sized Croatian university. Purposeful sampling was used, and the participants were selected because they can inform understanding of the research questions (Miles and Huberman 1994). The participants in this study were ten EMI teachers, who, on average, had 11.4 years of experience ranging from 3 to 22 years. All were L1 speakers of Croatian and 376 Irena Vodopija-Krstanović L2 speakers of English. Based on their experience of teaching through English, they assessed their language skills as very good or excellent, on a scale of one to five, where five is excellent and one insufficient. Eight teachers rated their knowledge with a four and two with a five. All indicated that they would like to take part in teacher development for EMI and work on further improving their speaking skills, which they considered to be the most relevant competence for EMI. In this study, the interviewed teachers were assigned identification codes ranging from T1 to T10. - 3.3 Research method This qualitative case study draws on semi-structured interviews with ten EMI teachers (Creswell and Creswell 2018). The interviews, which lasted approximately 45 minutes, were conducted in the teachers’ native language, and translated into English for the purpose of this study. The data analysis was guided by the research questions and consisted of organizing the data into themes through a process of coding and categorizing (Creswell and Creswell 2018). The main limitation of this study is the reliance on one form of qualitative data. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the findings will offer new insights into EMI teacher empowerment and that by analyzing the intersection of teacher empowerment and EMI, the study will fill the gap in EMI research. 4 Empowerment in EMI: Teachers’ voices This section investigates teachers’ perceptions of EMI teacher empowerment. First, it shows how teachers conceptualize empowerment in EMI, and second, it illustrates how teacher empowerment can be enhanced and what factors can contribute to empowering EMI teachers. The findings indicate that the notion of teacher empowerment is closely as‐ sociated with knowledge of English, teacher efficacy, teacher-student dynamics, teaching competence, teaching experience and professional growth, autonomy, power and decision-making opportunities, and the EMI phenomenon. As for the factors which foster EMI teacher empowerment, they include language proficiency, the English language as a source of power, teacher efficacy and the ability to tackle difficult tasks, professional development, professionalization of the EMI teacher profession, EMI teacher certification, participation in an international community of practice, social change, and decision-making. Understanding EMI Teacher Empowerment 377 4.1 Conceptualizing teacher empowerment When asked to describe their understanding of EMI teacher empowerment, the majority see it as associated with knowledge of English in terms of proficiency, fluency, accuracy, and vocabulary range (cf. Drljača Margić and Vodopija- Krstanović 2022). Specifically, proficiency helps them feel in control in the EMI classroom and become more confident in their teaching, and thus more effective. Considering that teachers’ weaker language skills can lead to lower self-confi‐ dence (Drljača Margić and Vodopija-Krstanović 2022; Pun and Thomas 2020) and that proficiency in English impacts the teachers’ sense of empowerment (cf. Wang 2021), proficiency is believed to be an essential prerequisite for effective instruction and for enabling teachers to teach equally well in English as in their native language. This is especially the case of university professors who have high status professions and, if perceived as not adequately proficient in English, risk losing face in the classroom. […] empowerment means being proficient, fluent, just knowing English well enough not to have to think about it… being able to express any idea without hesitating, having a good vocabulary, and not making many mistakes. I’m a professor and I must, must know English well enough. This really makes it possible for me to handle the classroom and be an authority to students. If I come across as incompetent […], what kind of an impression will I make? […] that I don’t know what I’m talking about. (T1) For me empowerment is mastery of English. It’s the beginning and end of everything. It means that I can do everything well in EMI, nearly as well as in the course I teach in my native language. […] I have to demonstrate the expected level of English […] an acceptable level of performance. (T4) Empowerment is also associated with teacher-self efficacy or belief in the ability to effectively handle professional tasks and challenges (Barni et al. 2019). It is described as a positive feeling that everything went well in class. … when students are active and engaged, that’s when I feel empowered. It is like riding on the crest of a wave, that’s invigorating. (T2) However, empowerment is not necessarily a stable and permanent feeling, as it depends on teacher-student dynamics. Negatively perceived classroom dynamics evoke feelings of insecurity and inadequate teaching competence. Conversely, it is the positive classroom dynamics which foster conditions that enable student learning, and thus empower teachers. In EMI and all other classes, regardless of the language of instruction, empowerment is directly linked with student performance, their leaning experiences, and what they 378 Irena Vodopija-Krstanović learned in class. […] It’s not a dichotomy, empowered or not empowered, this changes from one day to the other, even during a class. When things don’t go as planned, if I feel that I am not coping well […] then I think that I should be doing a better job. […] when I’m able to turn around a negative situation and land back on my feet, it makes me feel empowered and I believe in my competences and my actions. (T3) Similarly, a teacher also explains that teaching competences and acclaim for teaching excellence contribute to teachers’ sense of empowerment. If publicly acknowledged, they have a long-term impact on instructional effectiveness. Teaching has implications on teacher status and empowerment, if, and only if you receive recognition for your good work. Personally, you may feel empowered and invigorated in class, but once you leave the classroom, what then? When you are honored with a teaching excellence award, now that is permanently empowering, and it motivates you to be an even better teacher and to work harder. (T6) A teacher connected empowerment with experience and professional growth. In other words, acquiring the skills needed to perform effectively in the classroom. I have been involved in EMI so long that now I have quite a bit of experience, I have what it takes. I have learned much along the way. Experience empowers teachers as does progress in my academic career. I think that many tenured teachers are empowered in our system by default, especially the more experienced ones. (T7) Empowerment is also closely linked to the notions of autonomy, power, deci‐ sion-making, and the ability to exercise their professional judgment. For me, empowerment means having the power to decide and do what I feel is right, being free to do whatever I feel is right. Of course, this means that I have earned the trust and respect to be in the position to do what I want, without having to check for confirmation or to seek approval. (T8) And finally, EMI, in itself, is empowerment as it is linked to university prestige and a powerful educational innovation that is in great demand. EMI means being in the trend. At our university it means being a part of a small team of teachers. It also means taking part in this global phenomenon. Maybe 10 years from now it will not be a big deal, now, it’s still not mainstream. (T9) - 4.2 Fostering teacher empowerment As for how teacher empowerment can be enhanced, the teachers are unanimous that English language proficiency can enhance feelings of empowerment. This is hardly surprising as teachers’ proficiency is a prerequisite for teacher efficacy Understanding EMI Teacher Empowerment 379 and empowerment in the EMI classroom (Wang 2021). Teachers who are insecure in the language lack confidence in their teaching ability and fear losing face (Drljača Margić and Vodopija-Krstanović 2022). Similarly, the teachers in this study feel that the higher the proficiency level, the higher the feeling of empowerment. English language proficiency is elementary, students rightfully expect their teachers to be proficient. The better I am, the stronger I feel. (T8) English, of course, is the most important. The rest we know. Without adequate language skills, don’t even consider […] how can anyone ever consider taking part in EMI, if they don’t have advanced skills. This is luckily changing. […] My language proficiency is directly linked to my feeling confident and strong. (T6) Teachers emphasize that the importance attributed to the English language empowers them and affirms their professional identity as EMI teachers. Above all, English is a gateway to professional success in academia. Through English, teachers participate on the global market, collaborate, and create their own network. Furthermore, English supports teacher mobility in the sense that they teach in EMI programs abroad, while incoming international teachers teach in their classrooms. This exchange allows them to compare their skills and competencies with those of peers from other institutions. Through English I feel more empowered than through Croatian, the language is empowering. English is power. I cannot do anything without English in […] science, absolutely nothing, research, papers, collaboration, presentations at conferences, they’re all in English, and only in English. Local research is really marginal. Just by being able to teach through English, it helps me improve my English. Also, I can invite colleagues from partner universities to teach in my classes and I can go abroad. This helps me really see myself in a more critical light in relation to others. Such opportunities make me aware that I have the capacity to teach through English and that my English is just fine. (T2) In a similar manner, teachers’ positive attitudes and perceptions of their ability to accomplish and tackle difficult tasks, rather than perceive them as threats (Bandura 2002), can, in turn, motivate and empower them, and further increase their sense of teacher efficacy for EMI (Wang 2021). The ability to cope successfully with the challenges that arise is perceived as an opportunity to become more confident (cf. Amzat and Valdez 2017) and teachers who have a positive outlook on their ability to successfully complete a task state that it empowers them to better cater to student needs. 380 Irena Vodopija-Krstanović There are difficult situations in the classroom, more in EMI […], when I feel I am not coping well because I don’t understand something, or am struggling to explain the material and see the students have difficulty understanding, maybe because of how I explained something in English, maybe because the material is difficult in any language. However, I don’t brood over such setbacks and do not see them as failure or lose faith in my capabilities. This means I can then help the students, and meet their needs. (T10) …confidence, and dealing with the fear of making mistakes, and possibly not being able to do everything as well as I would like to. If I can feel confident and not worry that I have made a mistake, and can downplay less than ideal situations, this really helps me do a better job, and, in turn, it boosts my confidence, and I am a better teacher to my students. (T7) Given that the training of EMI teachers across European universities is far from systematic or comprehensive, especially in the domains of pedagogy and ICC (O’Dowd 2018), it seems fair to state that teacher empowerment could be facilitated through teacher development. In other words, professional develop‐ ment improves teachers’ expertise and empowers them with the “necessary and updated skills” (Yusuf 2017: 217). In EMI, teachers need to be able to modify teaching approaches in a classroom of international and home students, and teacher development would help them do so. I would feel more empowered if I had attended a training program. I learned everything by myself. Sometimes, I’m not sure whether my teaching is appropriate for international students. We probably tend to lecture here more, and sometimes I am not sure how to respond to students’ queries, sometimes they seem provocative or condescending, what were they implying? […] Maybe this is just normal behavior elsewhere. (T9) It was also stated that professional training and development improve teachers’ skills, and competencies, and support their belief that they are competent and capable. Consequently, professional development empowers teachers (cf. Amzat and Valdez 2017) and professional training is a cornerstone of EMI teachers’ success, and a prerequisite for quality assurance (Drljača Margić and Vodopija- Krstanović 2018; Macaro and Han 2019; O’Dowd 2018). The University should offer various training programs. This is important, not only because it improves our teaching, and we are better at what we do, but also because it improves my self-image and my belief in my abilities and competencies. (T1) Understanding EMI Teacher Empowerment 381 It also stands to reason that professionalization of the EMI teacher profession would have a positive effect on teachers’ perceiving themselves as empowered. By enabling them to become EMI specialists, they would take charge of their own growth and develop the knowledge, skills and power to change their practice (cf. Ismail and Çavuşoğlu 2017). “Teachers who are considered as having professionalism must have a strong knowledge base, be committed to students’ needs, have high ethical awareness, and have strong individual and collective identities” (Wu et al. 2017: 60). This could be reinforced through formal teacher development (Wu et al. 2017). EMI is now just seen as teaching in English. Everyone assumes that you only have to know English, and you are all set. Academia is all about quality assurance, standards, benchmarks […] but in EMI, not really. […] if there were a more professional approach to EMI, this could empower stakeholders, […] raise awareness that this is something serious, that you cannot teach in EMI if you have just completed a couple of English lessons in a language school. (T3) In a complementary vein, EMI certification and a formal international certificate would serve as proof of quality of EMI, regardless of the context (Macaro and Han 2019). Given the different policies and practices across EMI contexts (Macaro et al. 2021), EMI certification would be both an empowering process and outcome. An international certificate of knowledge of English or an international EMI certificate would prove that I am good enough to teach anywhere in the world, even at betterranked universities. Nothing could make me feel more empowered. (T5) In view of the fact that one of the main drivers of EMI is internationalization (Dearden 2015), it is hardly surprising that this is also considered its key benefit (Dearden and Macaro 2016), as well as a source of empowerment for EMI teachers. Positive identification with an international community sets EMI teachers apart and gives them a special status at home through the power and prestige associated with internationalization and English, and teaching an international student body in an international program. It opens the gateway to a rather elite global community of practice (cf. Wenger 1998). Working in an international program makes us a special group at our faculty. The international dimension is closely linked to English, and higher prestige and status. Not everyone has developed the capability to teach in EMI, only some of us. This makes us feel more empowered. (T5) 382 Irena Vodopija-Krstanović I just like the possibility of working with young people, but especially the privilege of teaching an international audience, which invigorates me to be the best I can. (T4) Given that EMI programs are funded through tuition fees, whereas Croatiantaught programs are subsidized, and tuition fees are waived on a merit basis, EMI creates two classes of home students. Some teachers are aware of this inequality and see EMI as catering to the privileged. For them, enabling access to EMI for students from disadvantaged backgrounds means working towards social equity and empowering teachers for change and social action. We offer the same program in Croatian and English. As you know, the first is free, if the students meet the requirements. The second, however, is not. We have offered several scholarships for EMI programs. This is so important for me as I feel that I am creating opportunities for young people who would otherwise not have one. (T9) Finally, participating in decision-making processes and teacher authority and autonomy are mentioned as factors which empower EMI teachers, and affect their overall satisfaction and performance. Within an empowering setting, teacher ideas are taken into consideration, and they can impact their context (Kreisber 1992). The most important factor is that I can impact decisions and any changes that take place in EMI, and that I am autonomous in my decisions, and nobody puts any pressure on me. This motivates me, and is an important condition for me to give my best in the classroom. (T8) 5 Concluding remarks and implications This paper has sought to provide insights into how EMI teachers conceptualize teacher empowerment and how it can be enhanced. Bearing in mind that empowerment is closely associated with teachers’ motivation, self-confidence, and their ability to confront challenges and address students’ needs, it is critical to broaden our understanding of EMI teacher empowerment. Continuing along this line, it also seems fair to claim that EMI teachers are the key to successful EMI programs and teacher empowerment can play a central role in the EMI classroom. The teachers in this study have indicated that empowerment is closely associ‐ ated with sufficient proficiency in English, which is an essential prerequisite for teacher efficacy. Empowerment is also linked with teaching expertise, teaching experience and professional growth. In the classroom, it depends on studentteacher dynamics. Understanding EMI Teacher Empowerment 383 As for how teacher empowerment is enhanced, this can be divided into two broad categories comprising internal and external facilitating factors of teacher empowerment. The internal factors include English language proficiency, the ability to cope with and overcome challenges in the EMI classroom, positive self-perception of their ability, and teacher autonomy. The external factors are associated with the power of English as the language of science, research, and academia, involvement in decision-making processes, teacher development for EMI, professionalization of EMI teachers, and teacher certification. In addition, belonging to an international, rather elite community of practice was considered a contributing factor. Interestingly, what has also been brought up by the teachers is the need for greater equity of access to EMI. This has been highlighted as an invigorating factor by teachers who are aware of the impact of neoliberal policies on EMI and are concerned about fairness of opportunities for all students and the social accountability of higher education. Overall, this study has shown how empowerment can be perceived in different ways and how it can be enhanced in EMI. In addition, it has corrobo‐ rated findings which indicate that more attention needs to be paid to teacher development in EMI (Drljača Margić and Vodopija-Krstanović 2018, 2020; O’ Dowd 2018). By addressing teachers’ needs through professional development and the improvement of their professional competencies, (Boyaci and Oz 2017), teachers will ultimately increase their empowerment and self-efficacy. Although EMI is highly contextualized, but at the same time is an international endeavor, it might also be worth considering developing an EMI teacher knowledge base and EMI teacher certification program in the European Higher Education Area (Macaro and Han 2018). Given that there is collaboration and standardization across Europe with respect to quality assurance and university accreditation (e.g., ESG 2015), EMI should also be explicitly incorporated in this process. 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Using an e-portfolio for teaching and teacher continuous learning: A process for professional development. In I. H. Amzat and N. P. Valdez (eds.), Teacher Empowerment Toward Professional Development and Practices: Perspectives Across Borders. Singapore: Springer, 295-307. 390 Irena Vodopija-Krstanović Contributors Carmen M. Amerstorfer: Carmen M. Amerstorfer is a Senior Scientist and teacher trainer at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. She has extensive experience of teaching students at various age and proficiency levels at educational institutions in Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, and China. Carmen’s research encompasses features of psychology of language learning and teaching as well as learnercentred teaching approaches, particularly problem-based learning and cooper‐ ative learning. Besides having published numerous book chapters and journal articles, she has co-edited Language Learning Strategies and Individual Learner Characteristics: Situating Strategy Use in Diverse Contexts (Bloomsbury, 2018) together with Rebecca L. Oxford and Activating and Engaging Learners and Teachers: Perspectives for English Language Education (Narr Francke Attempto, 2023) together with Max von Blanckenburg. Marta Degani: Marta Degani (Ph.D. 2006, habilitation 2012) was appointed Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Verona, Italy, in 2014 and currently also holds a position as Senior Scientist of English Linguistics at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Her current research focuses on the analysis of political discourse in the frameworks of cognitive semantics and critical discourse analysis, and the study of varieties of English and language contact in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand. Her recent books include Metaphor in Language and Culture Across World Englishes (2021, with Callies), Framing the Rhetoric of a Leader. An Analysis of Obama’s Election Campaign Speeches (2015, honorable mention ESSE Book Awards 2016), The Languages of Politics. La politique et ses langages, 2 Volumes (2016, with Frassi and Lorenzetti), and He Hiringa, He Pūmanawa. Studies on the Māori Language (2014, with Onysko and King). Werner Delanoy: Werner Delanoy is Associate Professor of English Language Teaching at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. His main areas of research are cultural learning in a globalized modernity, literature teaching and learning, language education, and contemporary British culture and literature. His main publica‐ tions include Fremdsprachlicher Literaturunterricht: Theorie und Praxis als Dialog (2002), Cultural Studies in the EFL Classroom (2006, with Laurenz Volkmann), Fu‐ ture Perspectives for English Language Teaching (2008, with Laurenz Volkmann) and Learning with Literature in the EFL Classroom (2015, with Maria Eisenmann and Frauke Matz). His most recent publications include “What is Culture? ”, a contribution to the Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Communication (2020), and “Dialogue, Cosmopolitanism and Language Education”, an article published in the volume Hans-Herbert Kögler’s Critical Hermeneutics (2022). Frédérick Dionne: Frédérick Dionne holds an MA in English (Linguistics) from the University of Klagenfurt and is currently a PhD student in Applied Linguistics as well as a project member in the international and interdisciplinary research project “Questioning Sequences in Coaching” (I - 4990 G). Within the project, she worked on the development of the typologies of questions and questioning sequences. Her doctoral thesis explores the responsiveness of coach and client in the various sequential positions of questioning sequences. She has also pub‐ lished on the development and merits of (interdisciplinary) coaching research. Nikola Dobrić: Dr Nikola Dobrić is a Senior Scientist (Privat Dozent) at the Department of English at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. He has published in the fields of language testing, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics. He is the Chief Editor of the philological journal Colloquium: New Philologies and is also heavily involved in assisting the European Commission with scientific funding decisions. Melanie Fleischhacker: Melanie Fleischhacker holds an MA in English (Linguistics) from the University of Klagenfurt and is currently a PhD student and project member of the international and interdisciplinary research project “Questioning Sequences in Coaching” (I - 4990 G). As part of the project team, she has been involved in developing a typology of questions and questioning sequences. In her PhD, she focusses on particular question types in coaching and their sequential organization. As an applied linguist, her research focus is on professional (helping) interactions, i.e., (business and writing) coaching, as well as identity construction and gender ideologies in the context of (female) football and EFL textbooks. Eva-Maria Graf: Eva-Maria Graf is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics with a special focus on English Linguistics at the University of Klagenfurt. She holds a PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Munich. She is the founder 392 Contributors of linguistic coaching (process) research, has published the first linguistic monograph on coaching and is currently leading the international and inter‐ disciplinary research project “Questioning Sequences in Coaching”, funded by FWF, DFG and SNF. Besides her interest in coaching, she is also researching helping interactions more generally from an applied linguistic perspective and investigates gendered ideologies across various socio-cultural contexts such as leadership or football. Eva-Maria Graf is also working as a coach in the academic context and as a coaching trainer. Matthias Klestil: Matthias Klestil is Postdoc Assistant in American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. He wrote his PhD on environmental thought in nineteenthcentury African American literature (University of Bayreuth, Germany) and was Bavarian Fellow at the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C., United States). Since winter 2018, Klestil teaches classes on American literature and culture at the University of Klagenfurt, where he is conducting a postdoctoral research project on “Versionality and Coincidence in Contemporary North American Fiction and Film”. His research interests include narrative theory, ecocriticism, the Anthropocene, and ethnic American literatures. Klestil has presented papers at national and international conferences; his recent publications include articles on Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (de Gruyter, 2022) and Ted Chiang (Routledge, 2022). Klestil’s monograph Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan (spring 2023). Clara Kuncic: Clara Kuncic studied to become a teacher of German and English as a foreign language (EFL) at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. She works fulltime at a higher technical college in Austria and regularly teaches university courses for pre-service EFL teachers. Clara loves promoting the use of graded readers in foreign language instruction and courses that employ a problem-based learning approach. Her teaching experience and her interest in teaching, research, and material development enable her to connect theory and practice in a manner that is both meaningful and comprehensible for her students at school and at university. Vesna Lazović: Vesna Lazović is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she has been full-time employed since 2018. She has been an External Lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Klagenfurt, Austria Contributors 393 since 2015. She received her MA degree in the field of translation studies in 2009 (MA thesis: “Translation of texts on food and drink packaging from Serbian into English: descriptive and prescriptive aspects”). In 2015 she defended her PhD thesis entitled “Cross-cultural analysis of online bank advertisements in English and Serbian”. Her main research interests include sociolinguistics, translation, contrastive linguistics, discourse analysis, semantics, pragmatics, intercultural communication and ELT methodology. Armin Lippitz: Armin Lippitz MA is a PhD student at the University of Klagenfurt, currently writing his dissertation on the interand transmedial exchange between comics and videogames. Since 2014 he is an Adjunct Lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies in Klagenfurt, aiming his attention towards North American Literatures and the media mentioned above. Marijana Mikić: Marijana Mikić recently completed her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Klagenfurt. Her dissertation, “Race, Space, and Emotion in Twenty-First-Century African American Literature,” explores how novels by African American writers as varied as Colson Whitehead, Brit Bennett, Percival Everett, and N.K. Jemisin interrogate individual emotional experience as closely bound up with the social production of both race and geography. With Alexa Weik von Mossner and Mario Grill, she is co-editor of Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology (Routledge, 2022). Her scholarly articles have appeared in Journal of Narrative Theory, Anglia, Orbis Litterarum, and aspeers. Most recently, she published a co-authored essay with Derek C. Maus in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison (edited by Kelly L. Reames & Linda Wagner-Martin; Bloomsbury, 2023). Anita Millonig: Anita Millonig is currently working on her PhD thesis on teaching English in multilingual classroom settings. She is a teacher for English and German and has been teaching German as a foreign language since 2007. Since 2018, she has been conducting courses in the teacher training program at the Department of English and American studies at the University of Klagenfurt. Anita’s special focus is on educational equality, social justice, and language education from a sociocultural and ecological perspective. Alexander Onysko: Alexander Onysko is Full Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Klagenfurt. His main research interests and publications are in the areas of 394 Contributors World Englishes, Language Contact, Bi/ Multilingualism, and Cognitive Linguis‐ tics. Some of his particular foci are on the application of conceptual metaphors in multilingual contexts and on Englishes in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is the editor of the series Bloomsbury Advances in World Englishes and co-editor of the journal AAA (Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies). Some of his publications include Language Contact and World Englishes (2016), Metaphor Variation in Englishes Around the World (2017, with Marcus Callies), Processes of language contact in English influence on German (2019), Reconceptualizing language contact phenomena as cognitive processes (2019), Research Developments in World Englishes (2021), and Englishes in a Globalized World: Exploring Contact Effects on Other Languages (2022, with Peter Siemund). Ursula Posratschnig: Mag. a Ursula Posratschnig, M. A. is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Klagenfurt, where she teaches advanced English language and academic writing at the Department of English. Besides her degree in English and American Studies focusing on American Cultural Studies and Didactics, she holds an M. A. in Global Citizenship Education and is passionate about Critical Animal Studies. Her interests lie in the fields of English language teaching methods and writing pedagogy, sustainability and social change through global citizenship, ideologies of othering including speciesism, intersections of human and animal rights abuses in the animal-industrial complex, and the effects of carnism on global ecosystems. Carina Rasse: Carina Rasse is holding a post-doctoral position at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. She completed her PhD in Linguistics in 2021. Her monograph Poetic Metaphors: Creativity and Interpretation ( John Benjamins) explores how poets use metaphors and how readers interpret and engage with this poetry. Over the last years, Carina has been involved in various international projects that study the production and processing of metaphors and idioms in various contexts (e.g., fiction, songs, health campaigns, textbooks, accounting discourse). She has also been teaching classes in Linguistics and in American Literature at the University of Klagenfurt. René Reinhold Schallegger: René Reinhold Schallegger was trained in English and American Studies, as well as French, with a focus on literary and cultural criticism at Klagenfurt University (Austria) and Anglia Ruskin University (UK). After a research stay at Birmingham City University (UK) for his post-doctoral thesis Choices and Consequences: Videogames, Virtual Ethics, and Cyber-Citizenship (upcoming with Contributors 395 McFarland), he is now Assoc.Prof. for British-, Canadian-, and Game Studies at Klagenfurt University and President of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung. Amongst his recent publications are “Virtual Voices in the Wilderness? - The Media Ecology of Videogames in Canada” (Boller, Krewani, and Kuester, eds.: Canadian Ecologies Beyond Environmentalism - Culture, Media, Art, Ethnicities, 2020), “Light My (Camp-)Fire: Affect and Incitement in Firewatch” ( Joyce and Navarro-Remesal, eds.: Culture at Play - How Video Games Influence and Replicate Our World, 2021), and “Reality Denied? - On Multicultiphobia, Just Government, and Textual Authority in Zac Thompson’s Relay (2019)” (Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung 10.1, 2022). Felix Schniz: Senior Scientist Dr. Felix Schniz B.A. M. A. is the co-founder and programme director of the master’s programme Game Studies and Engineering at the Uni‐ versity of Klagenfurt, Austria. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English and American Studies from the University of Mannheim, where he subsequently joined the master’s programme Cultural Transformations of the Modern Age: Literature and Media. After asking ‘What is a Videogame Experience? ’ in his dissertation, his contemporary research in game studies focuses on experiences made in and the genre theory of virtual worlds. Christopher Blake Shedd: A native of Mississippi, Christopher Blake Shedd is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English at the University of Klagenfurt, where he currently serves as Deputy Head of Department and Director of Studies. He is also cur‐ rently enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Klagenfurt and focuses on the historical development of English. He has taught second and foreign language learners of English at tertiary levels in the United States (University of Mississippi), Germany (Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg), Turkey (Koç University), and Austria. He has also led creative writing, poetry, and translation workshops in secondary and tertiary institutions in Austria. His research and teaching interests include historical linguistics, translation, sociolinguistics, and language teaching and acquisition. Günther Sigott: Günther Sigott is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics in the English Department at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. He started his career at the Department of Romance Philology at the University of Graz and as a freelance translator for specific purpose English, French and German in Austria and North Africa. He has taught English and French at secondary-level schools in Graz and Klagenfurt while at the same time working as a lecturer at the Department of 396 Contributors Romance Philology and at the International Language Centre at the University of Graz. In his teaching, he has covered a broad range of subjects ranging from practical language training to translation, semantics, lexicology, text linguistics, discourse analysis, research methodology, and language testing. He has also acted as director and consultant to large-scale national test development projects for English, German, and Classical Languages. His research interests are in all areas of Applied Linguistics and particularly in Language Testing and Evaluation. He is co-editor of the international monograph series Language Testing and Evaluation (Peter Lang Publishers) and has recently brought out volume 40 entitled Language Testing in Austria: Taking Stock in that series. Iris van der Horst: Iris van der Horst is currently enrolled in the Master of Education programme, with English and History, and since 2020 has been working as a student assistant in the English Department at the University of Klagenfurt, where she has also given guest lectures on Shakespeare. She spent a semester at King’s College London, and has co-authored an article with Werner Delanoy on “Transhumanism, Language Education and Young Adult Literature”, which was published in CLELE JOURNAL. She has published two novels in English, Charlotte (2016) and Looking at Marseille (2020). Irena Vodopija-Krstanović: Irena Vodopija-Krstanović is a Professor in the English Department at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, where she formerly served as the Vice-Dean for Academic Affairs. She was also a Visiting Professor at Klagenfurt University. Irena received a Ph.D. from Klagenfurt University, an M. A. from SIT Graduate Institute in Vermont, and an M. A. from the University in Zagreb. Irena has presented extensively at conferences and delivered keynotes. She has published more than thirty papers, co-edited two books, co-authored two books on English-medium instruction (EMI), and contributed to the TAEC EMI Handbook. She has also designed a teacher devel‐ opment program for university lecturers in EMI. Irena is involved in quality assurance in higher education, EFL teacher development, and is a member of the Croatian EFL Teacher Certification Board. Her research interests include EMI, CLIL, TEFL/ TESOL, teacher development, teaching English as an international language, and intercultural communication. Alexa Weik von Mossner: Alexa Weik von Mossner is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt. Her research explores American literature and film as well as contemporary environmental culture from a cognitive perspective. She Contributors 397 is the author of Cosmopolitan Minds: Literature, Emotion, and the Transnational Imagination (University of Texas Press, 2014) and Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Ohio State University Press, 2017), the editor of Moving Environments (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014), and the co-editor of The Anticipation of Catastrophe (Winter, 2014), Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology (Routledge, 2022), and Empirical Ecoc‐ riticism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). She recently published her first novel, Fragile (Elzwhere, 2023). 398 Contributors www.narr.de ISBN 978-3-8233-8604-9 In one of the contributions to this edited volume an interviewee argues that “English is power”. For researchers in the field of English Studies this raises the questions of where the power of English resides and which types and practices of power are implied in the uses of English. Linguists, scholars of literature and culture, and language educators address aspects of these questions in a wide range of contributions. The book shows that the power of English can oscillate between empowerment and subjection, on the one hand enabling humans to develop manifold capabilities and on the other constraining their scope of action and reflection. In this edited volume, a case is made for self-critical English Studies to be dialogic, empowering and power-critical in approach.