The Grove - Working Papers on English Studies

Christopher Rollanson, 'Read Books, Repeat Quotations': The Literary Bob Dylan. Two Riders/The Bridge, 2021

Nadia López-Peláez Akalay — 2022-12-23

Bodies that Speak

Maria Eugenia Berio — 2022-12-23

The present article examines the treatment of spatial corporeality in Doris Lessing’s novella “The Eye of God in Paradise” (1957) set in Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. Even though Lessing’s works have been studied from different perspectives—as the abundant critical studies show—, spatial corporeality has not been analysed before. This paper argues that the characters’ bodies, insofar as physical spaces of flesh and blood that are lived and where power is exerted, represent the trauma encountered by countless anonymous people who suffered due to the horrors of the war and who have only been made visible by the author’s skilled pen. By highlighting the corporeal spatiality in its physical, psychological, and sociohistorical division, Lessing has brought to the fore the intense suffering of unknown people, to give them identity as well as visibility and transform them into a locus of contesting power relations.

The Use of Wait as a Discourse-Pragmatic Marker in Spoken British English

Nazaret Camacho Salas — 2022-12-23

Discourse-pragmatic markers—DPMs—have attracted much scholarly attention over the years since they play an important role in our daily lives. Most of them have been analysed by scholars. However, in this paper, I focus on one of these units, wait, a DPM which, with the exception of Tagliamonte (Wait, It’s a Discourse Marker) in the Canadian context, has been largely neglected. I follow a corpus-based approach, examining data from spoken British English extracted from the BNC2014. The study offers new light on the uses and functions of this DPM in the British English context and allows a comparison with the Canadian English data examined by Tagliamonte (Wait, It’s a Discourse Marker).

Students' Perception of Social Contextual Variables in Mitigating Email Requests

Victoria Codina-Espurz — 2022-12-23

Given the power imbalance between students and faculty members, many studies on email communication have focused on how email requests are performed in an academic setting. Research has illustrated that power-incongruent emails can lead to pragmatic failure and cause a negative effect on the email recipient. The present study explores how contextual variables, such as social distance, power and imposition are perceived by EFL students in three different situations in an academic context. Moreover, the study examines the degree of request mitigation performed by learners to adjust to these social contextual variables. Findings reveal that learners seem to be aware of social contextual variables, but they do not appear to mitigate email requests accordingly.

The Lucky Form of Truth

Leonor María Martínez Serrano — 2022-12-23

This article explores poet Mark Strand’s facet as an art critic and, more specifically, the way in which the pictorial universe of American painter Edward Hopper influenced his own poetry, both thematically and stylistically. Reading Hopper’s well-known oil on canvas House by the Railroad (1925) in a New York Times article entitled “Crossing the Tracks to Hopper’s World,” published on 17 October 1971, Strand dwells on “Hopper’s fascination with passage” (340). Years later, he would expand his critical exegesis of House by the Railroad and other canvasses by the American painter in a book-length essay titled Hopper (1994) in ways that are expressive of his own poetics. Both Strand and Hopper look at the world with an inquisitive gaze and capture moments in time with utter clarity to show that the self is a mystery and humans are transients yearning for a moment of revelation, a momentary stay against confusion.

Looking for William

Jennifer Ruiz-Morgan — 2022-12-23

Literary tourism has recently emerged as a lively field of research, especially in nineteenth-century studies. As a cultural phenomenon it has proved to be particularly popular in the British Isles, where its origins can be traced back to the eighteenth century. This essay analyses literary tourism in relation to one of England’s most renowned authors: Shakespeare. Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee is explored to explain how this well-orchestrated commemorative event paved the way for the earliest pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon. Secondly, the Shakespeare family homes, especially the Birthplace, are analysed as historical national icons that have elicited ideas of Englishness. Finally, there is a discussion on authenticity in relation to the Birthplace and The Globe. Using theoretical terminology coined by Lacan and Baudrillard, the essay seeks to demonstrate the inability to fully experience authenticity, as it is impossible to access a reality—Shakespeare’s past—that has ceased to exist.

In Whose Custody? – A Study of Culture in Crisis with Reference to the Novel and the Film

Astha Singh — 2022-12-23

In Custody is a novel by Anita Desai that studies the extinction of Urdu culture in post-partition India. The film adaptation of the novel has been done by Merchant Ivory Production in an attempt to not only convert the narrative from one art form to another, but also to use cinematic techniques to explore the socio-culture of India with the Urdu language being the central theme. This paper tries to explore the diminished Urdu culture and tries to analyze the question of its preservation in the modern world using technologies that have also been put forward in both art forms. The verses of Urdu poets and Faiz Ahmad Faiz used in the novel and in the film along with the progressive writers’ thought have also been dealt with. Hence, the theme of Urdu culture playing centrally, this paper studies various other aspects that have been presented in the film adaptation.

Guy Butler's Demea

Marta Villalba-Lázaro — 2022-12-23

While the relation between classical mythology and postcolonialism may appear as an inconsistency, many postcolonial writers identify postcolonial issues in the literary reception of the classics, and look back to classical mythology and their own precolonial myths to gain a better understanding of their present. In the intersection of myth criticism and postcolonialism, this article discusses Guy Butler’s Demea, a postcolonial drama written in the 1960s but, due to political reasons, not published or performed until 1990. Butler’s play blends the classical myth of Medea with South African precolonial mythology, to raise awareness of the apartheid political situation, along with gender and racial issues.

Scoring rules

Valentina Alves Menezes Andrade — 2022-12-23

A Lucid Gothic Dream

Valentina Alves Menezes Andrade — 2022-12-23

Cabeza de gardenia

Carmen Camacho — 2022-12-23