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This edited book examines silence and silencing in and out of discourse, as viewed through a variety of contexts such as historical archives, day-to-day conversations, modern poetry, creative writing clubs, and visual novels, among others. The contributions engage with the historical shifts in how silence and silencing have been viewed, conceptualized and recorded throughout the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, then present a series of case studies from disciplines including linguistics, history, literature and culture, and geographical settings ranging from Argentina to the Philippines, Nigeria, Ireland, Morocco, Japan, South Africa, and Vietnam. Through these examples, the authors underline the thematic and methodological contact zones between different fields and traditions, providing a stimulating and truly interdisciplinary volume that will be of interest to scholars across the humanities.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Silences in History, Linguistics, and Literature: An Introduction (Mahshid Mayar and Marion Schulte).- Chapter 2. Towards an Ontology of Silence in Music (Johannes Voit).- Chapter 3. Linguistic Considerations on the Awkward Silence (Simon Betz).- Chapter 4. Dissonant Silence: Susan Sontag and the Aesthetics of Silence (Ulf Olsson).- Chapter 5. Talkative and Taciturn Nations: Ethnographic and Political Perspectives in European Discourses on Communicative Cultures (c. 1750-1850) (Theo Jung).- Chapter 6. Corpus-Linguistic and Cultural-Cognitive Perspectives on Silence in Black South African English (Arne Peters).- Chapter 7. Organic Archives and Generative Silence: A Case Study of The Nlele Institute's Photographic Archives (Erin Dickey and Carol Magee).- Chapter 8. Voices in a Silenced Archive: The Photographs of the Menage Scientific Expedition (Mark Rice).- Chapter 9. Silence as Masquerade: Punctuation, Prosody, and Performance in 'A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease' (Mahshid Mayar).- Chapter 10. The Hatred of Speech and the Poetics of Silence (Thomas Gould).- Chapter 11. Night and Silence: Five Breaths at the End of the World (Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh).- Chapter 12. No Quiet Place - Breaking the Silence, Speaking the Unspeakable, or: How Cultural Critique Thrives on a Paradox (Sabine Sielke).- Chapter 13. Frankenstein's Resounding Silence on Industrialisation: An Ecocritical Reading of the Novel's Production and Reception (Ellen Grünkemeier).- Chapter 14. "No noise of any kind" - Silence and Silencing in First World War Correspondence (Frauke Griese).- Chapter 15. The Body Without Organs: On Silencing the Self (Steven Bindeman).- Chapter 16. The Silences and Silencing of First Languages Among L2 Speakers of English in Ireland (Marion Schulte).- Chapter 17. Silencing the Winning Opposition: An Irish Pre-Election Interview (Bettina Migge)
About the author
Mahshid Mayar is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany.
Marion Schulte is Professor of English Linguistics at University of Rostock, Germany.
