Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

The Modernist Party

This post was contributed by Dr Kate McLoughlin, Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature in the Department of English and Humanities.

The Modernist Party began as a teaching idea. In my previous job, at the University of Glasgow, I was looking for a way to introduce students to Modernist literature – a notoriously difficult, though richly rewarding, set of works by writers such as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. In the first class, we began with a general discussion of parties (show me the student who hasn’t been to one). After exploring how people might feel before, during and after attending a party, we moved on to discuss parties in some famous Modernist texts: Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’, investigating how these scenes work formally and thematically. The students had already each researched a modernist figure – a writer, artist, dancer, musician, philosopher – and I then asked them to role-play him or her at an imagined party taking place in the 1920s. (I played Ernest Hemingway and was asked why I’d written such a gloomy ending to A Farewell to Arms.) Still sitting round the seminar table, the students and I introduced ourselves in character and made small-talk. At the end, we discussed what we’d learned about our Modernist fellow-guests and how the role-playing had felt. ‘Awkward’, ‘fun’, ‘embarrassing’, ‘hard to keep up the pretence’ were among the responses: useful things to have learned about modernist experiences. I repeated the class the following year at Glasgow and this time we stood up and moved about as we mingled, which made the experience more realistic. When I came to Birkbeck, I used the format as the opening seminar of my course on English Literary Modernism. The fact that, like all Birkbeck seminars, it was taking place in the evening made for even greater verisimiltude. This time, I dimmed the lights and provided soft drinks. A student commented:

I personally found the mock party very productive. It was a great way of making someone understand how they might feel at a party. I loved it because it made me feel nervous, anxious and coward, but I also found it enjoyable. I guess these feelings are common to most people in modernist party, and making someone actually experience the feelings and experiences of modernist party gives a more clear idea of the modernist party as you are not simply reading or hearing something but experiencing it.

I’m delighted to have found a format that gives students experience of Modernism from the inside, as it were, and I’m enormously grateful to the Birkbeck and Glasgow classes for playing along so sportingly.

It’s always gratifying to an academic when teaching and research come together, and at the same time as experimenting with the Modernist party in the classroom, I have been assembling a volume of essays on the subject for publication. The Modernist Party is published this month by Edinburgh University Press. In 12 chapters internationally distinguished scholars explore the party both as a literary device and as a forum for developing modernist creative values, opening up new perspectives on materiality, the everyday and concepts of space, place and time. There are chapters on Conrad and domestic parties, T. S. Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ and performance anxiety, the party vector in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and Finnegans Wake, Katherine Mansfield’s party stories, Virginia Woolf ’s idea of a party, the textual parties of Proust, Ford Madox Ford and Aldous Huxley and the real-life parties of Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein, the black ‘after-party’ of the Harlem Renaissance and the party in extremis in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.

“Most obscene title of a peer-reviewed scientific article” – an amusing award for a serious academic paper

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This post was contributed by Professor Jean-Marc Dewaele, from Birkbeck’s Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication.

This post contains strong language.

As an applied linguist and a multilingual I have always been interested in the communication of emotion in a person’s multiple languages. It seems that telling jokes in a foreign language, declaring love or promising something in a foreign language does not quite have the same resonance as it typically has in a native language (see also my taster lecture – contains strong language!).

One particularly interesting area is how multilinguals swear. Indeed, swearwords in a foreign language don’t sound quite as bad as the ones in the native language, and students spending some time abroad are eager to pick up some of these words that their teachers did not want to teach them. However, these enthusiasts abroad quickly realize that the people around them do not necessarily approve of the liberal use of swearwords. What sounds like “funny” words to the foreign-language user can in fact be deeply upsetting words to the native language-users.

I remember how Livia, my trilingual daughter (English, Dutch, French as first languages), aged 7, playing with a Belgian bilingual boy (Dutch, French as first languages), who, when he heard she also had English as a first language, exclaimed that he knew English too, after which he uttered Fuck you!, which made my daughter jump and switch to English: But you can’t say this! The boy looked surprised at her emotional reaction. He had clearly no idea that this funny expression would upset his friend.

What matters when swearing is to know how to do it “appropriately”, in other words, know the context in which certain swearwords and expressions may be tolerated or appreciated. For foreign language-users it may take years, and even then they typically avoid them because the reactions they elicit may differ from native users using the same words in the same situation. I think that it is because swearing is an indication of “in-group” membership. However, if you have a foreign accent you clearly don’t belong to the “in-group”, and you’re expected not to use these words, and not make fun of the head of state or queen/king.

In 2010, I published a paper: ‘Christ fucking shit merde!’ Language preferences for swearing among maximally proficient multilinguals. Sociolinguistic Studies, 4 (3), 595-614. (doi : 10.1558/sols.v4i3.595). I investigated language preferences for swearing among multilinguals using an on-line questionnaire. They consisted of 386 adult multilinguals who had declared that they were maximally proficient in their first and second languages and used both languages constantly.

I discovered that despite similar levels of self-perceived proficiency and frequency of use in the first language and second language, the first language was used significantly more for swearing and first language swearwords were perceived to have a stronger emotional resonance. An analysis of additional interview data confirmed the findings of the quantitative analysis, also highlighting cultural issues in swearing.

The working title of the paper was Language preferences for swearing among maximally proficient multilinguals until I heard an Anglo-Canadian author, Nancy Huston, who has lived in Paris for many years, being interviewed on France Inter about her swearing behaviour. She explained that when she needs to express a strong emotion, like sudden anxiety, or when dropping a hammer on her foot, she swears in English. The journalist then asked her Vous dites quoi? ‘What do you say’? Nancy answers: Je dis Christ fucking shit merde! ‘I say Christ fucking shit merde!’ (“merde” meaning ‘shit’, is a high-frequency French swearword). She’s surprised at the presence of the French swearword and adds: Ah je peux ajouter merde! ‘Ah, I can add merde!’.

I thought this quote would be the perfect illustration of my paper, namely that while multilinguals generally prefer swearing in their first language, some second language swearwords may creep into their core emotional vocabulary as a result of years of affective socialization in the culture of the second language.

I had to argue with the guest editor and the general editor Sociolinguistic Studies to keep the swearwords uncensored in the title. I explained that it would make no sense to censor them, as the code-switching would become invisible, and that it was exactly the phenomenon I was interested in. They agreed in the end.

A few days ago, to my amused surprise, I won the award for “for most obscene title of a peer-reviewed scientific article”. Merde alors!

Günter Guillaume: East Germany’s most famous spy

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This post was contributed by Dr Eckard Michels, from the Department of European Cultures and Languages.

The Guillaume affair is one of the most well-known political scandals and Günter Guillaume is certainly the most famous spy in German history. His arrest as an East German Stasi agent in April 1974, after having worked for more than 18 months as a close aide to the first Social Democratic Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt, resulted in the resignation of the latter two weeks later. Guillaume and his wife Christel, who was also a Stasi agent, had moved from East Berlin to West Germany in 1956 with a Stasi brief to infiltrate the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Guillaume made a career as a party functionary in Frankfurt. With Social Democratic take-over in 1969 in Bonn, Guillaume joined the ranks of the Bundeskanzleramt as a desk officer, initially responsible for contact with the trade unions. In 1972, he received a further promotion to become one of Willy Brandt’s three personal assistants.

In 1981, after seven years in West German prisons, the couple returned to the GDR in exchange for West Germans who had been held in GDR custody. After 25 years of absence, the two former spies adapted with difficulty to life in the country for which they had spied.

This astonishing story has already inspired the arts in Germany and Britain, not least with Michael Frayn’s highly successful 2003 theatre play Democracy.

However, historians so far have turned a blind eye to this case, not least due to the lack of available primary sources. But more than 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, enough material from the Stasi files has come up to write this story from the East German perspective, in particular Guillaume’s recruitment by the Stasi and his passing of secret information from West Germany to his spy masters in East Berlin. Additionally, the German Freedom of Information Act of 2006 now empowers historians to request the release of secret files from (West) German government institutions, i.e. material which, due to its secret character, has not yet been handed over to the archives. Thus, I was the first historian to have requested and been granted access to the secret files of the Bundeskanzleramt, the German Cabinet Office, for which Guillaume had worked from 1970 to 1974. This enabled me to thoroughly investigate the West German side of the story, in particular how Guillaume was able to join the ranks of the Bundeskanzleramt even though there had already been doubts about his reliability in 1969/70, his work for Willy Brandt and his access or non-access to sensible information about the West German government.

Because this prominent case has generated so much material, archival sources, autobiographical accounts of the protagonists and very dense contemporary media coverage, it is perfectly suited to explore the personal dimension of Cold War espionage between the two Germanys.

In my forthcoming book, I have investigated patterns of recruitment for the Stasi and the original motivation of the Guillaume couple to work as spies for the Communist GDR. I have also assessed to what extent the environment in the West, changing personal circumstances and pure “Eigensinn” (Alf Luedkte) affected the intelligence performance of Günter and Christel Guillaume in the eyes of the East German spy masters. I question the alleged superiority of the Stasi and other Communist intelligence services in “human intelligence” over its Western adversaries, in particular the West German Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service). My biographical study, spanning from the early 1950s to the early 1990s, looks at how individuals experienced espionage and tried to make sense of their intelligence activities, be it as active Stasi spies, convicts in West German prisons, celebrated heroes in the GDR after their release or impoverished Stasi pensioners after German unification in 1990. Thus the book is at the same time an inter-German migration and mentality study at a micro level which reaches beyond the confines of mere intelligence history at “grass roots”.

Guillaume, der Spion: Eine deutsch-deutsche Karriere (Guillaume, the spy: A Career between the two Germanys), by Eckard Michels, will be published in February 2013 by the Christoph Links publishing house, Berlin. There will be a book launch on 8 March 2013 from 6pm to 8 pm in the Keynes Library at 43 Gordon Square, London.

The West Wing

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This post was contributed by Dr Janet McCabe, a lecturer in Media and Creative Industries in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies.

Credit: The Obama-Biden Transition Project

‘America’s possibilities are limitless … My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it so long as we seize it together.’ President Barack Obama used these words at his second-term inaugural address. His oratory resuscitated the language of the US Constitution and its ambition spoke of an unabashed liberal agenda, and reveals once more how Obama understands only too well how words and texts have the force to reform politics, even change government—something President Josiah ‘Jed’ Bartlett (Martin Sheen) from NBC’s award-winning political drama, The West Wing, also appreciated.

Back in 2006, however, when The West Wing ended its seven-year run, the political landscape looked rather different. The beltway series concluded with the inauguration of America’s first Hispanic president—the youthful, charismatic, but unseasoned coalition-building newcomer who talked impassionedly of change and hope, which, at the time, looked idealistic at best and awkwardly contrived at worse.

I started writing the TV Milestone book on the show two years later, at the very moment when the 2008 presidential campaign started to ignite genuine excitement—and suddenly The West Wing began to seem rather prophetic. The show prefigured with remarkable accuracy the real presidential campaign: the long and bitterly fought contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Obama, a Republican ticket mired in entrenched ideological schism, and a ‘pro-choice’ nominee with appeal beyond his conservative base (only to be held back by it). Somehow The West Wing looked pertinent, as having something vitally important to tell us about contemporary US politics, history and culture. Time in fact had served to skew our sense of this show as somehow significant, and it was this sense of relevancy and import that I set out to explore in the book.

Judging the achievement of any show is a precarious business and it was a question I certainly I struggled with as I wrote the monograph. The West Wing began in the closing days of the last Democrat to occupy the White House, a post-Monica Lewinsky era of political scandal and partisan vitriol. Aspiring to turn around the deep cynicism pervading American political life, the NBC beltway drama combined the representation of the quotidian with high-minded governance and debated weighty political questions alongside stories of its all-too-fallible characters. Its visual pace was kinetic, its dialogue smart and witty, and its weekly civics lesson delivered with the help of the latest television image-making technology. And then there was Aaron Sorkin. Bringing new levels of stylish wit and intelligence to primetime defined The West Wing as exceptional; and credit for that went, more often than not, to this very modern of television auteurs.

At its height The West Wing was the hottest show on American network television. Big cast, big ideas, big financial investment, big profits—the series proved a powerful asset to its broadcaster as well as the company that produced it, Warner Bros. Television. Studying the media history reveals that the multi-Emmy-award-winning political series mattered because it mattered to those who mattered. The West Wing may have ushered in new ways of representing politics in television drama, but it also contributed to NBC’s distinctive channel brand as well as delivered one of the most elite audiences of any primetime show, which made its commercial time an exceedingly attractive buy. Interviews I conducted with buyers and schedulers from Europe confirmed a similar demographic profile. So while The West Wing may not have scored high in the ratings, it remained a prestigious and important acquisition, attracting a select yet loyal audience among ABC1 adults living in metropolitan areas.

Just as President Bartlet, and later Representative Matthew Santos (Jimmy Smits), seduced viewers with oratory of uplift, urgency and unity, so did a young mixed-race senator from Illinois with promise to heal a divided, post-civil rights, post-9/11 America—a commitment he, as president, recently renewed. Of course, the Obama victories took decades to cultivate, beginning with the legacy of civil rights. But somehow The West Wing paved the way for how we have come to read the machinations of political power, as well as how we expect our politics to ‘look’ and sound. In and through oratory, politics, and aesthetics, the series kept alive the history and destiny of the American experience. Obama may tap into that side of the nation that sees itself as idealistic and inspirational, but as I argue in the book it is a side that for seven years The West Wing never stopped talking about.