Speaking from experience: narrative schemas, deixis, and authenticity effects in Verena Stefan's feminist confession Shedding

Confessional writing, such as Swiss feminist Verena Stefan's autobiographical novel Shedding (1977) (German: Häutungen, 1977[1975]), is often praised as being an expression of a particular individual's authentic voice. This readerly concept of authentic voice has been under-examined in contemporary and postmodern narrative theories, which have tended to emphasize the abstractness, the disembodiedness of voice. In this article I draw from Monika Fludernik's concept of narrative schemas and from theories of deixis in literature within cognitive poetics in order to develop a model by which to explain the authenticity effects attributed to Stefan's book and to other works of testimonial and confessional literature. Through an analysis of stylistic features related to different aspects of deixis, I illustrate how deictic shifts may encourage readers to pay more attention to certain narrative parameters over others within the framework of familiar narrative schemas, thereby creating a greater sense of immersivity in the text and consequently the effect of a narrative that is being experienced even as it is being told.

FRAMING FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES: THE CASE OF GERMAN

co-authored with Claire Kramsch, Tes Howell and Chad Wellmon

The challenge posed to foreign language (FL) education by globalization and by the multilingual multicultural speech communities it has spawned is showcased by the current crisis in the teaching of German at American colleges and universities. It is not clear why American learners of German should be learning German: for business purposes, for general education, for humanistic enrichment, or for cross-cultural communication? The debate currently going on in Germany around the concept of education or Bildung is a lens through which to understand the debates going on in American German departments and the general crisis of FL education in this country. Rather than prepare students to communicate with members of idealized homogeneous monolingual speech communities, we should frame FL education as an education in reflexivity on the indexical, subjective and historical dimensions of discourse at all levels of the curriculum.

It's Just a Game, Right? Types of Play in Foreign Language CMC

This study focuses on the various playful uses of language that occurred during a semester-long study of two German language courses using one type of synchronous network-based medium, the MOO. Research and use of synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) have flourished in the study of second-language acquisition (SLA) since the late 1990s; however, the primary focus has been on the potential benefits of using CMC to increase the amount of communication (Beauvois, 1997; Kern, 1995; Warschauer, 1997), motivate students (Beauvois, 1997; Kern, 1995; Warschauer, 1997) and foster the exchange of ideas (Beauvois, 1997; Kern, 1995; von der Emde, Schneider, & Kotter, 2001; Warschauer, 1997). Only more recently has research within SLA begun to investigate the types of communication that occur online. (1) An analysis of the transcripts from a second-semester German course and an upper-level German communication course reveal that a large portion of the language use online cannot be described using standard referential definitions of communication, but rather is playful in nature. Using research from SLA and theories on social interaction, this article investigates the different types of play that occurred within the online discussions and the possible implications of the presence of play in online discourse.