Roman Buttner – författare

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,6, University of Marburg (Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Blood, Lust, and (Un)death: Vampires in American and British Cultures, language: English, abstract: Terence Fisher's masterpiece was his 1958 movie version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. With the huge success of that film, Fisher and Hammer Films started a whole new era of horror movies. Other Dracula films were to follow. Vampirism has traditionally been associated with lust and sexuality, which becomes clear in various modern vampire movies. But this is rather an exception because the film history of blood suckers demonstrates that, when times were different, vampires were depicted differently, too. In Fisher's films, sexuality began to play a bigger role in the genre than ever before and became the key to success of each and every vampire film made by Hammer. Using two of the early Hammer movies, Dracula (1958) and its sequel Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966), this paper will not only present the necessary historical background that made it all possible but will also analyze these movies with regard to the role of sexuality in them.

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Marburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Contrastive Linguistics, language: English, abstract: In the last decades, modern English has evolved into one of the dominant world languages of science and technology, sports and pop culture. In that it also has a growing influence on other languages such as German. Recent linguistic research has not yet been able to come up with the actual percentage of anglicisms in modern German. Linguists like Zifonun and Kirkness do however estimate that 11-40 % of all neologisms that enter the German language are of English origin. The biggest word class among these are nouns because their morphosyntactic integration into the target language does not pose too great a problem for speakers of German. This is different with verbs: their morphological structure is more complicated than that of nouns due to their wider system of inflectional paradigms. In comparison to German, English syntax is much stricter which results in different syntactic treatments of verbs in both languages. Besides, nowadays the only productive class among these consists of the regular weak verbs. All new loans are incorporated into this class and must therefore rigorously follow its inflectional paradigms. In that, the integration of verbal anglicisms into German is different from the integration of nouns which provides a fruitful area of linguistic research. After all, they account for 10-20 % of all anglicisms, as linguist Stephanie Bohmann is said to have found out.The aim of this term paper is to take a look at variation in the formation of the past participle (“Partizip II”) of English verbs in German. For that purpose I will start with an introduction to previous research in that specific field, answering the general question how the past participle is formed in German and where problems may occur with verbal anglicisms. In a next step I will present the empirical study I conducted and the results collected from it in order to get a deeper insight into morphosyntactic variation in the process of word integration.

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Marburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Transatlantic Stereotyping, language: English, abstract: David French is one of Canada’s most renowned playwrights of the 20th century. With his play "Jitters", which he wrote in 1979, French turned away from his more serious plays to create his first comedy. The plot is set in the theatrical world of a small Toronto theater, the Leicester Street Play-house, and takes place shortly before, during, and after the performance of the play-within-the-play, "The Care and Treatment of Roses". French uses the characters in his work to illustrate the contradictory attitudes regarding the clash of Canadian and American culture, in this case from the point of view of actors, producers and henchmen of the stage. And even though the play revolves around the institution of theater, French’s depiction of its characters also aims at the Canadian people as such. In "Jitters" he gives an insight into the weak Canadian self esteem and the attempt of forming a Canadian identity in competition against the more dominant American culture.Thus, in this term paper, I would like to elaborate on Canadian–American relations in French’s play. In a first step, I will give an overview about the historical development of theater in Canada and to what extent it is intertwined with the question of national identity in that country. With this theoretical knowledge as a basis, I will further go on with an analysis of the people in "Jitters" itself. I will begin that part of the term paper by looking at the minor characters in the play and will then go on characterizing the two protagonists, namely Jessica Logan and Patrick Flanagan. These two are used by French as the strongest opposing forces when it comes to different attitudes regarding the relations between the two north American nations. My analyses will be made against the background of the images which are created of Canada and the United States and the relations between these two countries respectively. Professional theater in Canada is not older than about fifty years. The wish to establish this art form, however, reaches back to the early days of colonization by European settlers. Back then, in the 16th and early 17th centuries, the theater was dominated by the French lan-guage which was because north America had become the battlefield of French and English interests. Thus, the development of a national theater was closely connected to the political and military situation in the young country.