Volume 71, Issue 4

Aiming to contribute to the historiography of English Studies, this essay explores the research agenda and collective work of a particular network of academics that made a committed and systematic effort to implement working-class literature and culture as a new research field in (GDR) English Studies. Set up as a “Research Group on Working Class Literature” in 1965, its key actors were a group of academics based at the Humboldt University or Pädagogische Hochschule Potsdam who had come to the GDR from the UK or US as immigrants or remigrants. The driving force was Dr. Mary Ashraf, whose papers contained in the Bundesarchiv [Federal Archives] shed light on the Group’s work. On the basis of these archival papers and the Group’s publications, this essay studies the programmatic and conceptual nature as well as the praxeological dimension of their work, including their teaching legacy.

The diary section in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is often criticized. However, Helen’s diary is an essential element of the novel: recording and processing her traumatic first marriage in her diary is an important means of character development, making it possible for Helen to heal, and to experience what experts term posttraumatic growth. According to Herman as well as Tedeschi and Calhoun, the only way to recover from, and grow beyond, trauma is to narrate it. In the novel, Helen does this through recording and confronting her traumatic experiences in her diary.

The essay analyzes Sarban’s 1952 novel The Sound of His Horn , one of the first alternate histories to depict a victorious Third Reich. The depiction of the latter is a strange mixture. On the one hand, the novel is a product of its day by presenting a regressive, resolutely anti-modern Nazi Germany headed back into a barbarian past. On the other hand, it anticipates later depictions (both in the alternate history genre as well as in historiography proper) by highlighting the constitutive role of technology and the regime’s inner divisions. The latter results in narrowing the gap between the (British) observer and his (German) environment. I argue that this narrowing can be traced by analyzing both the chief villain Hackelnberg, a figure borrowed from German folklore that Jacob Grimm associated with the Germanic god Wotan, and the key motif of hunting. Second, the narrowing is structurally embedded in the novel by virtue of the fact that the counterfactual Nazi domain is confined to a nested narrative. It may be a mere projection, in which case Hackelnberg’s deadly hunts and English bloodsports are not that far apart.

This article discusses Morten Tyldum’s film The Imitation Game in terms of its media-specific representation of social closure at three spatio-temporal levels. They involve Alan Turing’s boarding school in the late 1920s, Bletchley Park, the home of the cryptanalysts during the Second World War, and a homophobic Britain of the early 1950s. The paper borrows from an expanded neo-Weberian theoretical frame and attempts to address power-based processes of social closure by means of an approach that relates the storyline to selected semiotic modes used by the film language. The analysis foregrounds some scenic juxtapositions and modal ties to illustrate how the two codebreakers, Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), cope with an exclusionary society, its homophobic legislation, sexist attitudes, and, in the case of young Alan, its practice of physical bullying.

Tamil writer Perumal Murugan announced his authorial death on Facebook in January 2015. The events that led to this moment and what followed highlight the contentious relationship between authorship and censorship. This paper positions itself within the field of literary authorship studies. While mid-twentieth-century French theory had engaged with notions of authorial death and author-as-victim, witnessing Murugan’s actions following the call for a social boycott of his novel, One Part Woman , in 2014, brought back to life theory that had long been buried. Explaining his experiences in light of Roland Barthes’s and Michel Foucault’s treatises on authorship, this paper reads Murugan’s literary suicide and writings as a resurrection that creatively challenges attempts to shun his critical fiction. His example highlights how a socio-political environment that is suspicious of plurality and democracy renders the relations among the author, the reader, the text, and the context as unstable.