I came across another interesting example the other day for my occasional series on nonsense poetry -- a pair of poems in German and Latin from Christian Morgenstern's delightful Galgenlieder. (For German learners in particular I recommend -- if one is not already familiar with it -- another poem of his, "Der Werwolf", which plays with the German case system. This poem has inspired some very creative translation attempts which I am inable to find a the moment, but which I will link to if I have a chance.)
Nonsense poetry seems to have a particular affinity with multilingual wordplay. Because it is always just on the edge of comprehensibility, it tends to draw attention to the language itself and the process of reading and understanding. Like a foreign language, nonsense must also be deciphered, but it always retains an element of "otherness" which resists our efforts to translate and thus assimilate it.
Das Mondschaf
Das Mondschaf steht auf weiter Flur.
Es harrt und harrt der großen Schur.
Das Mondschaf.
Das Mondschaf rupft sich einen Halm
Und geht dann heim auf seine Alm.
Das Mondschaf.
Das Mondschaf spricht zu sich im Traum:
»Ich bin des Weltalls dunkler Raum.«
Das Mondschaf.
Das Mondschaf liegt am Morgen tot.
Sein Leib ist weiß, die Sonn' ist rot.
Das Mondschaf.
Lunovis
Lunovis in planitie stat
Cultrumque magn' expectitat
Lunovis.
Lunovis herba rapta it
In montes, unde cucurrit.
Lunovis.
Lunovis habet somnium:
Se culmen rer' ess' omnium.
Lunovis.
Lunovis mane mortuumst.
Sol ruber atque ips' albumst.
Lunovis.
And as a bonus, a link to a recent essay on the Taxonomy of Sound Poetry at Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics.
Mittwoch, 27. Juli 2011
Sonntag, 3. Juli 2011
Stolpersteine für Deutschlernenden
As I've been working with my German students I've noticed a number of topics which many of them seem to struggle with and which none of the textbooks or practice grammars that I have really seem to cover adequately. Generally these tend to be semantic-pragmatic challenges; syntax and morphology can be drilled quite effectively, but producing meaning is much less mechanical.
1) How to talk about likes and dislikes
There are multiple ways to express this in German, but they don't really map neatly onto the English "I like", namely:
- x gefällt mir
- gern haben (with things) / gern + verb (with activities)
- mögen
I don't use these three expressions interchangeably, but couldn't always say precisely why. (And of course, not being a native speaker, I can't necessarily claim that my intuition is representative of how most speakers of German use the language.
I've found that my students -- even ones who have already had a fair amount of exposure to the language -- often seem to feel vaguely unsatisfied with options 1 and 2 and want to use mögen instead. I don't know whether this is because they're still translating on some level when they speak German and want something that matches better with the English.
However, the problem is -- mögen is much more limited in its usage than either of the other options, and it can't typically be used as a substitute. Even though it's technically a modal verb, I rarely use it this way when it has the meaning "like". Far more frequent are the subjunctive (möchten, "would like", which has started to gain the status of an independent verb i.e., see here) and the epistemic usages of the verb (es mag sein, er mag das getan haben).
So -- what should one use when? gefallen expresses a judgement about something, whereas gern is more of a preference. Thus gefallen also tends to be more specific, referring to a particular thing, person, or place, rather than a broad generalization about an entire class of thing. (One reference suggests that gefallen can't be applied to food, which may be related to this.) On the other hand, gern can be either general or specific (both ich schaue gern Filme and ich habe diesen Film gern are possible), and it can be combined with a variety of verbs to describe activities.
mögen is used above all in negative and interrogative sentences; rarely in positive statements and often without a complementary verb. It's often used when talking about food/drink:
Ich mag moderne Musik.
Ich habe diesen Mann nie gemocht.
Magst du lieber Bier oder Wein?
Jetzt mag ich keine Musik hören.
2) Particles (doch, noch, eben, gar)
I learned these pretty much intuitively and I've been finding it difficult to explain them to students when they ask what they mean and how to use them. The problem here again may be that they're looking for a one-to-one translation and there simply isn't one. Often the best I've been able to do is say that they indicate a contrast or emphasis, but there has to be a way to show them how these particles work so that they not only make sense, but my students are able to use them themselves.
The most straightforward way to approach this is probably to simply list a number of basic uses for each of them, followed by examples. This is what most grammars I've seen do -- e.g. the entry for eben lists the following: resignation (Man hätte ihm eben das Geld nicht geben sollen); agreement (Eben das wollte ich auch sagen); negative stress (Es ist nicht eben klug).
But I'm not really sure that this is the most useful method for students who don't already have a good sense of how the particles are used anyway. These words are also highly dependent on context because one of their primary functions is as discourse markers -- to situate a response in relation to what has been already said, to introduce a topic, and so forth. So teaching the particles within the context of dialogues might make more sense.
1) How to talk about likes and dislikes
There are multiple ways to express this in German, but they don't really map neatly onto the English "I like", namely:
- x gefällt mir
- gern haben (with things) / gern + verb (with activities)
- mögen
I don't use these three expressions interchangeably, but couldn't always say precisely why. (And of course, not being a native speaker, I can't necessarily claim that my intuition is representative of how most speakers of German use the language.
I've found that my students -- even ones who have already had a fair amount of exposure to the language -- often seem to feel vaguely unsatisfied with options 1 and 2 and want to use mögen instead. I don't know whether this is because they're still translating on some level when they speak German and want something that matches better with the English.
However, the problem is -- mögen is much more limited in its usage than either of the other options, and it can't typically be used as a substitute. Even though it's technically a modal verb, I rarely use it this way when it has the meaning "like". Far more frequent are the subjunctive (möchten, "would like", which has started to gain the status of an independent verb i.e., see here) and the epistemic usages of the verb (es mag sein, er mag das getan haben).
So -- what should one use when? gefallen expresses a judgement about something, whereas gern is more of a preference. Thus gefallen also tends to be more specific, referring to a particular thing, person, or place, rather than a broad generalization about an entire class of thing. (One reference suggests that gefallen can't be applied to food, which may be related to this.) On the other hand, gern can be either general or specific (both ich schaue gern Filme and ich habe diesen Film gern are possible), and it can be combined with a variety of verbs to describe activities.
mögen is used above all in negative and interrogative sentences; rarely in positive statements and often without a complementary verb. It's often used when talking about food/drink:
Ich mag moderne Musik.
Ich habe diesen Mann nie gemocht.
Magst du lieber Bier oder Wein?
Jetzt mag ich keine Musik hören.
2) Particles (doch, noch, eben, gar)
I learned these pretty much intuitively and I've been finding it difficult to explain them to students when they ask what they mean and how to use them. The problem here again may be that they're looking for a one-to-one translation and there simply isn't one. Often the best I've been able to do is say that they indicate a contrast or emphasis, but there has to be a way to show them how these particles work so that they not only make sense, but my students are able to use them themselves.
The most straightforward way to approach this is probably to simply list a number of basic uses for each of them, followed by examples. This is what most grammars I've seen do -- e.g. the entry for eben lists the following: resignation (Man hätte ihm eben das Geld nicht geben sollen); agreement (Eben das wollte ich auch sagen); negative stress (Es ist nicht eben klug).
But I'm not really sure that this is the most useful method for students who don't already have a good sense of how the particles are used anyway. These words are also highly dependent on context because one of their primary functions is as discourse markers -- to situate a response in relation to what has been already said, to introduce a topic, and so forth. So teaching the particles within the context of dialogues might make more sense.
Samstag, 28. Mai 2011
Threats and threads
Relativ oft bin ich über zwei Wörter in deutschen Foren gestolpert, wo ich nicht so richtig weiss, was ich darüber denken soll. Es handelt sich wieder um Anglizismen. Was hier allerdings merkwürdig ist, sie sind keine Begriffe, die auf deutsch einfach anders gebraucht werden als in (amerikanischen) Englisch. Das verstehe ich, auch wenn es mich gelegentlich verwirrt. Hier wird ganz deutlich existierende englische Ausdrücke gemeint, aber sie werden häufig falsch geschrieben, bzw. mit anderen englischen Wörtern verwechselt: "Threat" (für "Thread") und "Making off" (für "making of"). Neuerdings habe ich auch "Best off" gesehen. Ich habe mich lange gefragt, was dahinter steckt. Warum werden insbesondere diese Worte verkannt?
Die Verwechslung von "Thread" und "Threat" lässt sich dadurch erklären, dass sie wegen der Auslautverhärtung im Deutschen nicht lautlich unterschiedlich wären. Was ich allerdings nicht verstehe, ist warum die Rechtschreibungsfehler hier vorkommen soll, da es um einen Ausdruck handelt, die die meisten wohl aus dem Internetbereich kennen -- also um ein Wort, dem man ohnehin hauptsächlich in schriftlicher Form begegnet. Die phonetische Regeln sollten also eine untergeordnete Rolle spielen (würde ich zumindest denken), aber das ist offensichtlich nicht der Fall.
"Making off" und "best off" sind etwas komplizierter, obwohl der Fehler ähnlich aussieht. Im Englischen sorgt das zweite F in "off" dafür, dass es stimmlos anstatt stimmhaft ausgesprochen wird, und bestimmt natürlich auch die Qualität des Vokals. Aber warum das von Deutschen möglicherweise lautlich anders interpretiert wäre, ist mir nicht ganz klar. Hier würde ich vermuten, dass das Problem eher in englischen Kollokationen zu finden ist. Die Partikel "off" taucht relativ häufig in englischen Phrasenverben (phrasal verbs) vor, "of" jedoch nur selten, da es sehr eng mit dem Genitiv verbunden ist.
Bei "Threat" muss ich bloß schmunzeln, vor allem da es manchmal zutrifft, aber "Making off" verwirrt mich, da ich mir dabei einen heimlichen Sich Davonmachen vorstelle und keinen künstlerischen Schaffensprozeß. Es stört mich auch, weil ich ein Objekt erwarte -- "making of" hat sich als eigenständiger Begriff eingebürgert, aber man muss "make off with something". "Best off" macht mich etwas weniger stutzig, obwohl der Ausdruck auch in diesem Fall sich semantisch und syntaktisch ziemlich anders verhält. "Best off" ist eine Steigerungsform für "[be] well off" und wird oft durch ein Gerundium ergänzt ("you'd be best off not eating that second piece of cake").
Übrigens, weil ich gerade bei der deutschen Aussprache von englischen Wörtern bin: mich stört es immer wieder, wenn in den deutschen Nachrichten von NASA berichtet wird -- intervokalisches "S" wird nach den üblichen deutschen Rechtschreibungsregeln stimmhaft ausgesprochen, wobei ich unweigerlich an Nasen denke und nicht an Raumfahrtforschung. Ich weiss nicht, warum diese Abkürzung mich besonders stört, die meisten anderen werden ja auch auf landesüblicher Weise ausgesprochen, aber sie klingen normalerweise nicht wie deutsche Wörter. Oder sie sind Acronyms (sie werden buchstabiert, nicht als Wort ausgesprochen).
Die Verwechslung von "Thread" und "Threat" lässt sich dadurch erklären, dass sie wegen der Auslautverhärtung im Deutschen nicht lautlich unterschiedlich wären. Was ich allerdings nicht verstehe, ist warum die Rechtschreibungsfehler hier vorkommen soll, da es um einen Ausdruck handelt, die die meisten wohl aus dem Internetbereich kennen -- also um ein Wort, dem man ohnehin hauptsächlich in schriftlicher Form begegnet. Die phonetische Regeln sollten also eine untergeordnete Rolle spielen (würde ich zumindest denken), aber das ist offensichtlich nicht der Fall.
"Making off" und "best off" sind etwas komplizierter, obwohl der Fehler ähnlich aussieht. Im Englischen sorgt das zweite F in "off" dafür, dass es stimmlos anstatt stimmhaft ausgesprochen wird, und bestimmt natürlich auch die Qualität des Vokals. Aber warum das von Deutschen möglicherweise lautlich anders interpretiert wäre, ist mir nicht ganz klar. Hier würde ich vermuten, dass das Problem eher in englischen Kollokationen zu finden ist. Die Partikel "off" taucht relativ häufig in englischen Phrasenverben (phrasal verbs) vor, "of" jedoch nur selten, da es sehr eng mit dem Genitiv verbunden ist.
Bei "Threat" muss ich bloß schmunzeln, vor allem da es manchmal zutrifft, aber "Making off" verwirrt mich, da ich mir dabei einen heimlichen Sich Davonmachen vorstelle und keinen künstlerischen Schaffensprozeß. Es stört mich auch, weil ich ein Objekt erwarte -- "making of" hat sich als eigenständiger Begriff eingebürgert, aber man muss "make off with something". "Best off" macht mich etwas weniger stutzig, obwohl der Ausdruck auch in diesem Fall sich semantisch und syntaktisch ziemlich anders verhält. "Best off" ist eine Steigerungsform für "[be] well off" und wird oft durch ein Gerundium ergänzt ("you'd be best off not eating that second piece of cake").
Übrigens, weil ich gerade bei der deutschen Aussprache von englischen Wörtern bin: mich stört es immer wieder, wenn in den deutschen Nachrichten von NASA berichtet wird -- intervokalisches "S" wird nach den üblichen deutschen Rechtschreibungsregeln stimmhaft ausgesprochen, wobei ich unweigerlich an Nasen denke und nicht an Raumfahrtforschung. Ich weiss nicht, warum diese Abkürzung mich besonders stört, die meisten anderen werden ja auch auf landesüblicher Weise ausgesprochen, aber sie klingen normalerweise nicht wie deutsche Wörter. Oder sie sind Acronyms (sie werden buchstabiert, nicht als Wort ausgesprochen).
Dienstag, 10. Mai 2011
Bilingual theater
I'm already starting to get excited about a production of Gogol's Revizor which will be performed this summer bilingually in Russian and English at the local Shakespeare festival. This kind of thing absolutely fascinates me, for reasons which should be obvious to my readers here.
And it seems to be something which is not terribly uncommon; at least, I can think of a number of other similar projects where a play is performed in multiple languages for an audience who is not necessarily expected to understand both languages. One is a production of Wedekind's Frühlings Erwachen which a friend of mine in Germany participated in (and which opened approximately a week to late for me to see it, to my great regret). Deaf and hearing actors collaborated on the production, which was performed partly in sign language and partly in German. There's also a theater company in France called Demodocos, which regularly puts on performances in ancient Greek and French.
What is it about theater in particular that is receptive to such an undertaking in a way that novels, say, are not?
What particularly intrigues me is not the multilingualism per se, but the way it's being used in all of these examples. Switching languages is a common phenomenon in multilingual communities, but that's not the way it's being used here. The use of one language rather than another isn't embedded in a communicative speech situation, it's not a pragmatic choice made based on social considerations, but instead, externally and arbitrarily imposed, more or less. It may be significant here that the plays being performed are classics -- that is, the audience can be assumed to have some general familiarity with the story beforehand. They're not new plays, not plays written specifically with the intention of being performed in multiple languages.
There's something else that interests me, though: Specifically, the effect of partial non-comprehension on the part of the audience.
Obviously, one of the purposes of such projects is the cross-cultural collaboration, both for actors and audience. The French theater company is a little different because it's not bringing together two different groups of people, but the mediating function is similar: integrating classical Greek into a modern performance and trying to give the contemporary audience a glimpse of this world of the past.
Opera, of course, is another example of theater which is frequently performed in a language that the audience may not know, so the parallels may help us understand what's going on here. Certainly the presence of the actors on stage, their gestures, costumes, emotions, help the audience to follow the plot even if they don't understand all the words. But opera -- like so many foreign films -- is often performed with subtitles; there is thus a delay in comprehension, but ultimately we are provided with the meaning.
Here, however, there's a certain amount of resistance. A translation is not provided. One minute the words are easy to understand, the next we have to guess at what is happening. Undoubtably there are Brechtian motives at work here, preventing the audience from identifying too easily with what is happening on stage.
Considered another way, there's a certain appropriateness to having the actors speaking different languages. Theater is typically multi-voiced: it reveals the widely different ideologies which clash when we interact with each other. Both tragedy and comedy are arguably about the failure to communicate, albeit with different consequences. About the roles we play, about how easily we deceive ourselves and each other.
And it seems to be something which is not terribly uncommon; at least, I can think of a number of other similar projects where a play is performed in multiple languages for an audience who is not necessarily expected to understand both languages. One is a production of Wedekind's Frühlings Erwachen which a friend of mine in Germany participated in (and which opened approximately a week to late for me to see it, to my great regret). Deaf and hearing actors collaborated on the production, which was performed partly in sign language and partly in German. There's also a theater company in France called Demodocos, which regularly puts on performances in ancient Greek and French.
What is it about theater in particular that is receptive to such an undertaking in a way that novels, say, are not?
What particularly intrigues me is not the multilingualism per se, but the way it's being used in all of these examples. Switching languages is a common phenomenon in multilingual communities, but that's not the way it's being used here. The use of one language rather than another isn't embedded in a communicative speech situation, it's not a pragmatic choice made based on social considerations, but instead, externally and arbitrarily imposed, more or less. It may be significant here that the plays being performed are classics -- that is, the audience can be assumed to have some general familiarity with the story beforehand. They're not new plays, not plays written specifically with the intention of being performed in multiple languages.
There's something else that interests me, though: Specifically, the effect of partial non-comprehension on the part of the audience.
Obviously, one of the purposes of such projects is the cross-cultural collaboration, both for actors and audience. The French theater company is a little different because it's not bringing together two different groups of people, but the mediating function is similar: integrating classical Greek into a modern performance and trying to give the contemporary audience a glimpse of this world of the past.
Opera, of course, is another example of theater which is frequently performed in a language that the audience may not know, so the parallels may help us understand what's going on here. Certainly the presence of the actors on stage, their gestures, costumes, emotions, help the audience to follow the plot even if they don't understand all the words. But opera -- like so many foreign films -- is often performed with subtitles; there is thus a delay in comprehension, but ultimately we are provided with the meaning.
Here, however, there's a certain amount of resistance. A translation is not provided. One minute the words are easy to understand, the next we have to guess at what is happening. Undoubtably there are Brechtian motives at work here, preventing the audience from identifying too easily with what is happening on stage.
Considered another way, there's a certain appropriateness to having the actors speaking different languages. Theater is typically multi-voiced: it reveals the widely different ideologies which clash when we interact with each other. Both tragedy and comedy are arguably about the failure to communicate, albeit with different consequences. About the roles we play, about how easily we deceive ourselves and each other.
Donnerstag, 5. Mai 2011
Zoon rhetorikon
Seit Wochen schriebe ich nichts zu Ende. Und doch wimmert mein Kopf gerade so mit Gedanken. Zu viele Gedanken, vielleicht, dass ich nicht mehr weiss, wo ich anfangen soll. Da Schreiben eine gewisse Ordnung benötigt. Auch die Gedanken an Freunden, die ich seit Monaten nicht geschrieben habe, obwohl ich sie nie vergesse. Es ist einfach alles zu viel.
Ich merke immer mehr in letzter Zeit, wie viel im Leben nicht kognitiv ist. Ich meine nicht, dass die Dinge unbeschreiblich ist – man kann vieles beschrieben, aber das Wort ersetzt das Ding nicht. Das Präsentsein. Das Sinnengespür.
Und ich bin doch ein Mensch des Wortes. Ich brauche die Sprache - die Versprachlichung von Erlebnissen – um fest zu halten. Damit ich überhaupt einen Anhaltspunkt habe an etwas, was dauert. Und um handeln zu können.
Manchmal habe ich eine wahnsinnige Angst vor dem Tod. Nicht weil ich es mir vorstellen kann, was das wirklich heisst, ich denke, das kann niemand. Der Verlust des Ichs besorgt mich. Oder sagen wir es genauer: Angst, dass ich sterben werde, bevor ich alles sagen kann, was in mir liegt. Was ich zu sagen habe. Nur ich. Nicht weil ich denke, dass ich neues, welterschütterndes zu sagen habe, sondern weil es eine Art Überleben ist. Und weil ich vielleicht allzuviel Literaturwissenschaftler bin, der die Welt schließlich als ein Stück Papier versteht, das zu beschriften ist. Und zu lesen. Ach, dieser Wunsch, gelesen zu werden. Und wenn ich daran glaube, dass jeder von uns eine Aufgabe im Leben hat, bedeutet das: eine Erzählung, die erzählt werden, die verwirklicht werden muss. Als ob Menschen Romane wären. Als ob man dabei in der Welt selbst Ordnung und Bedeutung stiften könnte, und nicht nur mit Worten.
Ich merke immer mehr in letzter Zeit, wie viel im Leben nicht kognitiv ist. Ich meine nicht, dass die Dinge unbeschreiblich ist – man kann vieles beschrieben, aber das Wort ersetzt das Ding nicht. Das Präsentsein. Das Sinnengespür.
Und ich bin doch ein Mensch des Wortes. Ich brauche die Sprache - die Versprachlichung von Erlebnissen – um fest zu halten. Damit ich überhaupt einen Anhaltspunkt habe an etwas, was dauert. Und um handeln zu können.
Manchmal habe ich eine wahnsinnige Angst vor dem Tod. Nicht weil ich es mir vorstellen kann, was das wirklich heisst, ich denke, das kann niemand. Der Verlust des Ichs besorgt mich. Oder sagen wir es genauer: Angst, dass ich sterben werde, bevor ich alles sagen kann, was in mir liegt. Was ich zu sagen habe. Nur ich. Nicht weil ich denke, dass ich neues, welterschütterndes zu sagen habe, sondern weil es eine Art Überleben ist. Und weil ich vielleicht allzuviel Literaturwissenschaftler bin, der die Welt schließlich als ein Stück Papier versteht, das zu beschriften ist. Und zu lesen. Ach, dieser Wunsch, gelesen zu werden. Und wenn ich daran glaube, dass jeder von uns eine Aufgabe im Leben hat, bedeutet das: eine Erzählung, die erzählt werden, die verwirklicht werden muss. Als ob Menschen Romane wären. Als ob man dabei in der Welt selbst Ordnung und Bedeutung stiften könnte, und nicht nur mit Worten.
Dienstag, 1. März 2011
Constructing gender with pronouns
Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness is another interesting example of a science fiction novel that confronts the reader with "difference" and asks him to shift his perspective during the course of the narrative, "seeing" the world finally through other eyes (I use 'he' deliberately here for the generic pronoun, as the novel arguably assumes a masculine point-of-view even while it interrogates notions of gender.)
The inhabitants of Gethen - Winter - are androgynous; they only have distinct sexual characteristics for a few days a month, during "kemmer", when any individual may become either male or female. What interests me here is not their sex, but how this is transmitted to the reader using language, namely, through gendered pronouns.
Le Guin generally uses the masculine pronoun to refer to these people, although she mixes it up sometimes by combining mascuine pronouns with feminine kinship terms or titles, or on rare occasions by switching pronouns (for example, to indicate that an individual has become female during kemmer). One of her short stories, "Winter's King," which is set in the same world, was rewritten to use female pronouns throughout combined with masculine titles.
Le Guin has sometimes been faulted for her decision to use the masculine as a generic pronoun, rather than using an artificial genderless pronoun (either one of her own or extant options such as "s/he" or "sie"), and she herself has taken various positions on the topic, suggesting that she might have made a different decision were she to write the novel now. (See her essays "Is Gender Necessary?", "Is Gender Necessary: Redux" and her afterward to the novel written in 1994). However, I think the use of the masculine pronoun works, and it creates a very different effect than if she had used an invented pronoun which would have emphasized the Gethenians' strangeness. Because the point is not that they are "alien", but rather the extent to which gendered categories are rooted within our thinking and our perception of the world, that we have trouble getting beyond these categories even when they are not useful.
The world is described primarily from the perspective of an outsider, Genly Ai, who is visiting Winter as a sort of diplomat and who constantly projects his notions of gender upon a people for whom this category is scarcely relevant. Genly acts as a mediator for the reader, his use of pronouns is a reminder of his - and our - inability to comprehend the Gethenians for what they are. Until the end, when he comes to see this "unsexed" state as being natural, and ourselves as trapped within a divided, unnatural state. What the book finally offers is a gradual transformation, a way to get a glimpse of a world in which we are not primarily male or female but simply human.
Although this movement seems in some ways to be the opposite of what I was looking at in my previous post, I think the hermeneutic process is ultimately quite similar. In both cases the familiar is made strange -- in Riddley Walker through a deformation of familiar language, in The Left Hand of Darkness through an interpretive dead-end, that is, through a failed attempt to apply familiar categories which results in the need to discard these categories.
And just for the sake of it, I append a bibliography of articles dealing with language and the linguistic construction of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness. I started collecting this list for a term paper (which I ended up not writing) in a linguistics class, so it's limited to topics that seemed relevant to the project at the time -- i.e., I was concerned with language/gender, not sexuality per se, even if these are arguably never completely separate.
Barrow, Craig and Diana. “The Left Hand of Darkness: Feminism for Men.” Mosaic 20.1 (1987).
Cornell, Christine. “The Interpretive Journey in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.” Extrapolation 42.4 (2001).
Fayad, M. “Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin's Critique of Representation in The Left Hand of Darkness.” Mosaic 30.3 (1997): 59-73.
Myers, V. “Conversational Technique in Ursula Le Guin: A Speech-act Analysis.” Science-Fiction Studies 10 (1983): 306-16.
Pennington, John. “Exorcising Gender: Resisting Readers in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.” Extrapolation 41.4 (2000).
Also interesting is the study Pronoun Envy: Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender by Anna Livia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), in particular the chapter "Epicene Neologisms in English" which contains an extensive discussion of The Left Hand of Darkness along with a number of other science fiction novels.
The inhabitants of Gethen - Winter - are androgynous; they only have distinct sexual characteristics for a few days a month, during "kemmer", when any individual may become either male or female. What interests me here is not their sex, but how this is transmitted to the reader using language, namely, through gendered pronouns.
Le Guin generally uses the masculine pronoun to refer to these people, although she mixes it up sometimes by combining mascuine pronouns with feminine kinship terms or titles, or on rare occasions by switching pronouns (for example, to indicate that an individual has become female during kemmer). One of her short stories, "Winter's King," which is set in the same world, was rewritten to use female pronouns throughout combined with masculine titles.
Le Guin has sometimes been faulted for her decision to use the masculine as a generic pronoun, rather than using an artificial genderless pronoun (either one of her own or extant options such as "s/he" or "sie"), and she herself has taken various positions on the topic, suggesting that she might have made a different decision were she to write the novel now. (See her essays "Is Gender Necessary?", "Is Gender Necessary: Redux" and her afterward to the novel written in 1994). However, I think the use of the masculine pronoun works, and it creates a very different effect than if she had used an invented pronoun which would have emphasized the Gethenians' strangeness. Because the point is not that they are "alien", but rather the extent to which gendered categories are rooted within our thinking and our perception of the world, that we have trouble getting beyond these categories even when they are not useful.
The world is described primarily from the perspective of an outsider, Genly Ai, who is visiting Winter as a sort of diplomat and who constantly projects his notions of gender upon a people for whom this category is scarcely relevant. Genly acts as a mediator for the reader, his use of pronouns is a reminder of his - and our - inability to comprehend the Gethenians for what they are. Until the end, when he comes to see this "unsexed" state as being natural, and ourselves as trapped within a divided, unnatural state. What the book finally offers is a gradual transformation, a way to get a glimpse of a world in which we are not primarily male or female but simply human.
Although this movement seems in some ways to be the opposite of what I was looking at in my previous post, I think the hermeneutic process is ultimately quite similar. In both cases the familiar is made strange -- in Riddley Walker through a deformation of familiar language, in The Left Hand of Darkness through an interpretive dead-end, that is, through a failed attempt to apply familiar categories which results in the need to discard these categories.
And just for the sake of it, I append a bibliography of articles dealing with language and the linguistic construction of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness. I started collecting this list for a term paper (which I ended up not writing) in a linguistics class, so it's limited to topics that seemed relevant to the project at the time -- i.e., I was concerned with language/gender, not sexuality per se, even if these are arguably never completely separate.
Barrow, Craig and Diana. “The Left Hand of Darkness: Feminism for Men.” Mosaic 20.1 (1987).
Cornell, Christine. “The Interpretive Journey in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.” Extrapolation 42.4 (2001).
Fayad, M. “Aliens, Androgynes, and Anthropology: Le Guin's Critique of Representation in The Left Hand of Darkness.” Mosaic 30.3 (1997): 59-73.
Myers, V. “Conversational Technique in Ursula Le Guin: A Speech-act Analysis.” Science-Fiction Studies 10 (1983): 306-16.
Pennington, John. “Exorcising Gender: Resisting Readers in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.” Extrapolation 41.4 (2000).
Also interesting is the study Pronoun Envy: Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender by Anna Livia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), in particular the chapter "Epicene Neologisms in English" which contains an extensive discussion of The Left Hand of Darkness along with a number of other science fiction novels.
Montag, 14. Februar 2011
Some thoughts on databases & library cataloging
For some time I've been involved with the Internet Book List, which is basically an online book database which keeps track of various types of cataloging information (synopsis, contents, translations, etc). What has always particularly interested me is the potential offered by such a database for finding information which is not -- or has not been until recently -- easy to find anywhere else, at least not in any kind of systematic form.
In 2007 we implemented what we've been calling WEM (Work - Expression - Manifestation), a system based on a fairly new idea in library cataloging called Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). This allows us to distinguish between different versions -- called Expressions -- of a book and to track relationships between works (i.e., adaptations of a well-known story, inclusion of a shorter work in an anthology). At the time there were scarcely any other sites trying to make use of this concept, and none which attempted (as we do) to inform the user how various expressions of a book actually differed from one another.
This is huge. Unfortunately, for my needs, the database is still too limited. At the moment we only include fiction which is available in English, and that excludes the greater part of my library. What I want -- as a scholar and someone who reads extensively in multiple languages -- is the ability to go to the page for a work and be able to see not only the original title and publication date, but whether it has been translated, and into what languages and by whom. I want to be able to find out whether a particular ISBN refers to an English translation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex or a version in the original Greek, and whether or not it includes a commentary and in what language. I want to be able to find out -- from the work page -- whether there's critical literature on a particular book.
At present, IBList can't do any of this, and I don't see it happening in the near future, because the website has essentially been stalled for the last 2 years due to lack of time and resources. I've put far to much work into the project to simply give up on it, as several of the other administrators have already done.
But I'm frustrated. The site is not going anywhere, and I don't see any way to change that. There are a number of reasons for it. Inadequate communication among those in charge. Fairly rigid control of the data entry process, which restricts the number of people willing or able to contribute. Competition from other sites based on a similar concept.
In September I finally gave in and started cataloging my books at LibraryThing. I had mixed feelings about doing so, as I've been watching the site since it started with a mixture of admiration and envy. Because in many ways it's what I wanted IBList to be. What it could have become had things been otherwise. Had I known more, had I been better at making the project work.
LibraryThing has a "bottom-up" approach, while IBList has always been top-down. LibraryThing focuses on the manifestation level -- individual copies of books owned by its users, and I think that's one reason why it's been so successful. Copies of the same work are then grouped together ("combined") into a single entry. Some users may enter bad data, but the general principle is that enough people are entering good information that it all pools together into a very large quantity of (mostly accurate) collective data.
IBList, on the other hand, starts at the top (the work level). Our focus has always been on quality rather than quantity, and perhaps that's part of the problem. There's a certain amount of elitism inherent in our approach. Not everybody knows or cares enough to comprehend all the intricacies of WEM. But there are enough other sites out there which consist simply of lists of titles, with little additional information about any except the most recent and popular books. I don't want to turn the site into that, even if it means that our listings are less complete.
At LibraryThing I can at least keep track of my entire library. And it has enough users to support a recommendations system which is quite good, something that is a long way from happening at IBList. But I find the site chaotic in some ways, the methods for organizing data are limited by the site's user- and library-centered approach. There isn't always a direct way to combine data and often the final result is messy even after you've done so. It doesn't satisfy my desire for order and simplicity.
Just recently LibraryThing has also started creating a system for work tracking much like IBList. This is logical, and I think those involved with the site have seen the need for quite some time. I should be excited -- finally, a site that has all the features I've been wanting! But...it's not "my" site. Not the project which I put so much time and energy into.
It hurts. I read the discussions and I want to say "yes, but we did this first, we already sorted through these problems, this is how we solved them." I want to say -- "look, see what we did?" so that someone might appreciate our efforts. But nobody's heard of us. Nobody's pointing to us as an example. It doesn't bother me that LibraryThing is doing this. What hurts is that IBList did this before and went unnoticed. It didn't inspire anyone. The site had -- has -- so much potential that we never managed to make a reality.
In 2007 we implemented what we've been calling WEM (Work - Expression - Manifestation), a system based on a fairly new idea in library cataloging called Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). This allows us to distinguish between different versions -- called Expressions -- of a book and to track relationships between works (i.e., adaptations of a well-known story, inclusion of a shorter work in an anthology). At the time there were scarcely any other sites trying to make use of this concept, and none which attempted (as we do) to inform the user how various expressions of a book actually differed from one another.
This is huge. Unfortunately, for my needs, the database is still too limited. At the moment we only include fiction which is available in English, and that excludes the greater part of my library. What I want -- as a scholar and someone who reads extensively in multiple languages -- is the ability to go to the page for a work and be able to see not only the original title and publication date, but whether it has been translated, and into what languages and by whom. I want to be able to find out whether a particular ISBN refers to an English translation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex or a version in the original Greek, and whether or not it includes a commentary and in what language. I want to be able to find out -- from the work page -- whether there's critical literature on a particular book.
At present, IBList can't do any of this, and I don't see it happening in the near future, because the website has essentially been stalled for the last 2 years due to lack of time and resources. I've put far to much work into the project to simply give up on it, as several of the other administrators have already done.
But I'm frustrated. The site is not going anywhere, and I don't see any way to change that. There are a number of reasons for it. Inadequate communication among those in charge. Fairly rigid control of the data entry process, which restricts the number of people willing or able to contribute. Competition from other sites based on a similar concept.
In September I finally gave in and started cataloging my books at LibraryThing. I had mixed feelings about doing so, as I've been watching the site since it started with a mixture of admiration and envy. Because in many ways it's what I wanted IBList to be. What it could have become had things been otherwise. Had I known more, had I been better at making the project work.
LibraryThing has a "bottom-up" approach, while IBList has always been top-down. LibraryThing focuses on the manifestation level -- individual copies of books owned by its users, and I think that's one reason why it's been so successful. Copies of the same work are then grouped together ("combined") into a single entry. Some users may enter bad data, but the general principle is that enough people are entering good information that it all pools together into a very large quantity of (mostly accurate) collective data.
IBList, on the other hand, starts at the top (the work level). Our focus has always been on quality rather than quantity, and perhaps that's part of the problem. There's a certain amount of elitism inherent in our approach. Not everybody knows or cares enough to comprehend all the intricacies of WEM. But there are enough other sites out there which consist simply of lists of titles, with little additional information about any except the most recent and popular books. I don't want to turn the site into that, even if it means that our listings are less complete.
At LibraryThing I can at least keep track of my entire library. And it has enough users to support a recommendations system which is quite good, something that is a long way from happening at IBList. But I find the site chaotic in some ways, the methods for organizing data are limited by the site's user- and library-centered approach. There isn't always a direct way to combine data and often the final result is messy even after you've done so. It doesn't satisfy my desire for order and simplicity.
Just recently LibraryThing has also started creating a system for work tracking much like IBList. This is logical, and I think those involved with the site have seen the need for quite some time. I should be excited -- finally, a site that has all the features I've been wanting! But...it's not "my" site. Not the project which I put so much time and energy into.
It hurts. I read the discussions and I want to say "yes, but we did this first, we already sorted through these problems, this is how we solved them." I want to say -- "look, see what we did?" so that someone might appreciate our efforts. But nobody's heard of us. Nobody's pointing to us as an example. It doesn't bother me that LibraryThing is doing this. What hurts is that IBList did this before and went unnoticed. It didn't inspire anyone. The site had -- has -- so much potential that we never managed to make a reality.
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