Text – Meaning – Context: Cracow Studies in English Language, Literature and Culture – serie

The volume offers an interdisciplinary discussion of the phenomenon of migration and mobility in the modern globalised world and their impact on multiple aspects of culture and communication. Contributors, who are literary scholars, linguists and investigators of culture, examine problems related to migration, cultural diversity and cultural globalisation.

This book was shortlisted for the ESSE Book AwardsThis volume analyses the endeavours of early Elizabethan playwrights to examine the narrative possibilities of drama. Paying attention to pre-Shakespearean comedies written in English between 1560 and 1590, the author explores how the interest in depicting subjective experience arose among English dramatists years before the theatre of Shakespeare and Jonson reached its zenith.

The modern age has further expanded on the multifaceted character of English, which is used not only in many places in the world, but also by a variety of users in numerous contexts. Technical innovations have led to the rise of new registers and offered scholars new tools to study language variation. Set in the context of the electronic medium of social networking, and additionally enriched with findings from the field of language attitude studies, this study explores features of English used in the Inner, Outer, and Expanding Circles, here represented by the UK, India, and Poland. The analysis of the English used by Facebook members demonstrates cultural differences as well as gender and age similarities in the area of e.g. politeness, emotionality, informality or code-switching.

Translating audio description scripts from foreign into source language seems to be a tempting alternative strategy of creating audio description scripts in those countries where audio description is still scarce. This book presents the results of a three-stage study. This study was conducted to test whether the translation of audio description scripts written by experienced British audio describers into Polish is a solution that is less time and money consuming. Besides it was analysed whether the scripts created through the application of the translation strategy preserve the quality that satisfies the target recipients. The obtained results prove that translation of audio description scripts is not only possible, but also beneficial when it comes to time consumption, costs and quality of audio description.

Travelling Texts: J.M. Coetzee and Other Writers is a collection of essays on mutual influences and inspirations between authors, with a special focus on J.M. Coetzee. Bringing together a group of international scholars, the book offers a wide range of perspectives on how canonical and less canonical texts travel between literatures and cultures. Chapter One is devoted to connections between Coetzee's writings and Polish literature and theatre. Chapter Two is concerned with Dostoevsky's presence in his fiction. The essays in Chapter Three identify and analyse connections and inspirations between Coetzee and other European writers, with a special focus on Central Europe as a distinct cultural entity. The collection's scope is extended by the essays in Chapter Four, which deal with several writers for whom Africa has been a source of inspiration.

Relevance Theory provides an original theoretical framework to capture the complex nature and intricacies of the processes underlying ostensive communication. The model has been in constant development for the last 30 years, and this study attempts to contribute to it by challenging free enrichment as an important explicature-generation procedure. The mechanisms underlying the recovery of explicitly and implicitly communicated meanings are explored in this book. They show that by approaching communication as a creative process, Relevance Theory offers a coherent explanation not only of communication in which what is conveyed is relatively straightforward and easy to identify, but also of cases in which what is communicated is partly precise and partly vague.

The book offers an interdisciplinary discussion of the cognitive-semiotic interface between language, literature, and the arts, with a special focus on creativity and imagination. It brings together international contributors suggesting a wide range of innovative perspectives on the correlation between verbal discourse and creative artefacts. The book reveals the specificity of such phenomena as parallax, transparency, corporeal imagination, and multimodality. Alongside interpreting artistic texts, the contributors search for cognitive and semiotic manifestations of creativity in political and everyday discourse.

This book is dedicated to the issue of animal metaphor together with its intricacies and internal complexity. Its main objective is to present a unified picture of the role animal terms have played in the shape of English and other natural languages. The author addresses such aspects of animal metaphor as the problem of animal names used as surnames, so-called verbal and adjectival zoosemy, or the use of names of animal body parts with reference to people. The cognitively-oriented analysis is carried out in terms of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which is capable of accounting for semantic change in a panchronic perspective. The results show that virtually any facet of humanity, which is beyond the norm, may be viewed, perceived, conceived of and expressed in animal terms.

In today’s world, the English language exerts an unprecedented influence internationally, and its echoes are present in almost all languages. These echoes, also known as Anglicisms, are no longer limited to English-sounding loanwords. The English impact includes a wide range of linguistic phenomena, all of which are discussed in this book, presenting a taxonomy accommodating all types of linguistic outcome of contact with English. While the outlook remains international, the focus is on Danish and Afrikaans, two Germanic languages spoken in societies with very different histories involving English. A number of chapters present diachronic corpus studies showing that the English influence on Danish in the 21st century resembles the impact felt by Afrikaans speakers already in the 20th century."The book is highly original and differs markedly from other works on Anglicisms. For instance, the author takes advantage of his knowledge of the field of translation studies to write a thought-provoking chapter on translation (including subtitling and dubbing) as a vector for English influence. The initial chapters give the state of the art in studies on Anglicisms on the world stage (not just for Danish), drawing on the work of many scholars, expressed in a multitude of languages. The argumentation of the book is based on hands-on research, much of which was carried out by the author himself. The style is an excellent compromise: a measured, authoritative language with a bright conversational lift. It will appeal to both students and a broader readership."John Humbley, Professor emeritus, Université Paris Diderot

Was it possible for an eighteenth-century woman to become a celebrity and remain respectable? Could women’s commercial success in literature be reconciled with contemporary ideals of prescribed feminine domesticity? The rugged trajectory marked by the critical reception of the works by Frances Burney (1752–1840), an English novelist, diarist and playwright, reveals the dilemmas she faced at different stages of her career from a debutante to an acclaimed literary figure. Burney’s long life is set against the background of changing conventions in culture consumption and appreciation, and the book highlights the successes and failures of the techniques which the author employed in her texts for projecting a favourable image of herself as a woman and writer.

The book discusses the issue of religiosity in the context of American Jewish literature, emphasizing the significance of Judaism as an indispensable element in the formation of American Jewish female identity. The empirical part of the book is devoted to a critical comprehensive analysis of selected fiction by contemporary American Jewish female writers, representatives of the third generation, whose works were published between 1980–2005. The literary analyses of the selected narratives reveal a strong connection between the identity of American Jewish women and Judaism, and the simultaneous need to modify it in the face of socio-political transformations occurring in the American society at the turn of the twenty-first century

Intercultural encounters accompanying the movement of individuals and groups receive a variety of expressions and call for a debate in an interdisciplinary context. The present volume brings together articles investigating aspects of culture, language, media and literature in the context of a world made more mobile than ever before. The authors cover a wide range of areas in humanities and social sciences, esp. literature, translation and interpreting, communication and health communication, media studies, cultural studies, and teaching methodology.

Text-Image-Music: Crossing the Borders brings together a diverse body of scholars in a genuinely interdisciplinary and wide-ranging volume. This deliberate bricolage finds its unifying force in the erudition of contributing authors and their shared appreciation for the work and investigations of Professor Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, to whom this collection is dedicated. Tackling topics spanning narrativity, various modes of literary expressions, intersemiotic translation and multimodal communication, the volume contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities.

The primary objective of this study is to propose a comparative analysis of the political TV interview with reference to two distinct approaches: the theory of discourse (dialogue) games (Carlson 1983), an extension of game-theoretical semantics (GTS) as proposed by Jaakko Hintikka, specifically his strategic paradigm (1973, 1979, 2000), and the strategic perspective adopted by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff (1991, 2010 for business games with roots in the mathematical theory of games). Text-forming strategies utilised by the selected British and Polish political figures have been presented and the strategic repertoire of politicians have been systematised following the five master strategies of: cooperation, co-opetition, conflict/competition, manipulation and persuasion.

Language can never be seen as separate from social phenomena. With the rise of the internet and the changes that have taken place as far as sites in which interaction occurs, new types of discourses surrounding sexual assault have emerged. As a result, victim-blaming as a discursive action has become more anonymous.This study investigates digital comments located on news reporting websites on the subject of rape and compares American and Polish comments. The linguistic analysis of the discourse on rape and the actors involved investigates representations of victims, offenders, and the act of rape itself and questions the cultural significance of victim-blaming.The [...] work is an excellent example of methodological triangulation. The author has decided to combine the potential of CDA and pragmatics to gain a better understanding of the ideologies revealed in the linguistic layer of the researched material and the process of their influence—through language—on the attitudes of discourse participants. The theoretical (conceptual) and methodological “circumstances” of the relevant research have been developed extremely broadly. One could say that a reader learning about research competencies has been provided with a complete and rich set of tools, both those chosen by the author of the work and alternative ones, to consider alternative research paths.– Professor Agnieszka Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak, Adam Mickiewicz University, PoznańThis work is a highly valuable academic study that develops both a critical analysis of discourse and enriches knowledge about attitudes and evaluations of rape and its perpetrators and victims. [...] On an academic level, the work provides a comprehensive and original solution to the research problem.– Professor Andrzej Łyda, University of Silesia in Katowice