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As the oldest genre in New Zealand literature written in English, poetry always played a significant role in the country's literary debate and was generally considered to be an indicator of the country's cultural advancement. Throughout the 20th century, the question of home, of where it is and what it entails, became a crucial issue in discussing a distinct New Zealand sense of identity and in strengthening its independent cultural status. The establishment of a national sense of home was thus of primary concern, and poetry was regarded as the cultural marker of New Zealand's independence as a nation. In this politically motivated cultural debate, the writing of women was only considered on the margin, largely because their writing was considered too personal and too intimately tied together with daily life, especially domestic life, as to be able to contribute to a larger cultural statement. Such criticism built on gender role stereotypes, like for instance women's roles as mothers and housewives in the 1950s. The strong alignment of women with the home environment is not coincidental but a construct that was, and still is, predominantly shaped by white patriarchal ideology. However, it is in particular women's, both Pakeha and Maori, thorough investigation into the concept of home from within New Zealand's society that bears the potential for revealing a more profound relationship between actual social reality and the poetic imagination. The close reading of selected poems by Ursula Bethell, Mary Stanley, Lauris Edmond and J.C. Sturm in this thesis reveals the ways in which New Zealand women of different backgrounds subvert, transcend and deconstruct such paradigms through their poetic imagination. Bethell, Stanley, Edmond and Sturm position their concepts of home at the crossroads between the public and the private realm. Their poems explore the correspondence between personal and national concerns and assess daily life against the backdrop of New Zealand's social development. Such complex socio-cultural interdependence has not been paid sufficient attention to in literary criticism, largely because a suitable approach to capturing the complexity of this kind of interconnectedness was lacking. With Spaces of Overlap and Spaces of Mediation this thesis presents two critical models that seek to break the tight critical frames in the assessment of poetic concepts of home. Both notions are based on a contextualised approach to the poetic imagination in relation to social reality and seek to carve out the concept of home in its interconnected patterns. Eventually, this approach helps to comprehend the ways in which women's intimate negotiations of home translate into moments of cultural insight and transcend the boundaries of the individual poets' concerns. The focus on women's (re)negotiations of home counteracts the traditionally male perspective on New Zealand poetry and provides a more comprehensive picture of New Zealand's cultural fabric. In highlighting the works of Ursula Bethell, Mary Stanley, Lauris Edmond and J.C. Sturm, this thesis not only emphasises their individual achievements but makes clear that a traditional line of New Zealand women's poetry exists that has been neglected far too long in the estimation of New Zealand's literary history.
Die vorliegende Arbeit setzt sich die Übertragung und Anwendung des pragma-semantischen Ansatzes der germanistischen Phraseologie auf die englische Sprache zum Ziel, wobei die beiden Konzepte des semantischen Mehrwerts und der Multifunktionalität als dominante Charakteristika im Mittelpunkt stehen. Dazu wird die Verwendung von Phraseologismen in einer bestimmten Textsorte - der englischsprachigen Werbung - untersucht. Ihre besondere Bedeutungsstruktur und ihre kommunikativen Funktionen prädestinieren Phraseologismen als effektvolles sprachliches Gestaltungsmittel für die kreative Verwendung in Texten der Medienwelt. Werbung als wesentlicher Bestandteil nationaler Alltags- und Medienkultur und Phraseologismen als in ihrer Ausprägung spezifisch kulturelle Phänomene weisen viele Gemeinsamkeiten auf, die sich bei beiden in Form von semantischem Mehrwert und Multifunktionalität äußern.
Die Nobelpreisträgerin Toni Morrison, die ihren Romanen eine dezidiert auditive Qualität verleihen möchte, rekurriert in ihren Werken auf die Verwendung von Musik und Elementen des afroamerikanischen Vernakularen innerhalb verschiedener narrativer Ebenen. Meine Dissertation gliedert sich in folgende drei Haupt-teile: Zunächst wird die Darstellung einiger Charaktere als Musizierende oder Zuhörer thematisiert, die meist als Kommentar bezüglich der Handlung oder der Charaktere dient bzw. diese bisweilen auch unterminiert. Der Schwerpunkt des zweiten Teils liegt auf der Übertragung musikalischer Eigenschaften auf die Texte, die auf struktureller Ebene von musikalischen Mitteln wie Antiphonie, Rhythmus oder Improvisation Gebrauch machen und sich auch inhaltlich an Texte bekannter Spirituals oder Bluessongs anlehnen. Durch diese Kombination bindet Morrison ihre Romane enger an ihre afroamerikanischen Wurzeln. Im dritten Teil steht das Zusammenspiel zwischen Musik und vernakularen Traditionen des Geschichtenerzählens, des Zeugnisablegens und des Signifyings, also des im Rahmen des Afroamerikanischen typischen kreativen sprachlichen Umdeutens, im Vordergrund, welches Morrison zu einer modernen Hüterin afroamerikanischer Tradition macht.
This guide is meant to provide some initial bibliographical assistance to those who want to study the historical evolution of ecological thinking in Canada on the basis of poetry. A major theoretical assumption underlying this project is that literature gives privileged access to a nation's cultural memory. Even a cursory survey of Canadian literary history supplies ample evidence for the marked presence of ecological attitudes in Canada's mental history. The origin of these attitudes can be traced back to at least the 18th century. By way of generalising, one could argue that literature reflects, and provides subtle insights into, how both native Canadians and immigrant settlers have responded to their 'eco-sphere'. For many Canadian texts bear witness to a thematic preoccupation with the Canadian oikos-area (oikos signifying 'house' in a narrower sense but also 'habitat' in a wider), to which its inhabitants have established a meaningful relationship. No doubt, even a preliminary attempt to explore ecological attitudes in Canadian literature more systematically would be a multi-facetted and difficult task. One of the major practical problems that poses itself immediately is: Which texts could, and ought to be examined? For there are innumerous references to environmental attitudes and ideas in all literary genres -- also in a great many fictional texts, both traditional and contemporary. For the purpose of research and study it would be extremely helpful indeed, if there were comprehensive bibliographical aids that would enable us to approach, and familiarize ourselves with, all these texts more conveniently. But the challenge of collecting pertinent data of this general kind would have been far beyond my scope and resources. This is why the present guide limits its focus to poetry. The working hypotheses motivating this tentative compilation are: i. Poetry is a more ubiquitous literary genre than fiction and drama. According to available evidence, more writers seem to have tried out their skills on poetry than on fiction and drama. Therefore poetry is likely to mirror a greater variety of voices and sentiments. ii. Poems are still a relatively untapped source in the current discussion about the environment. However, a great many poetic texts lend themselves to supplying relevant arguments that could be used in various fields of action such as environmental ethics, evironmental education and, last but not least, conservation. iii. Apart from smaller pieces of the "nature writing" variety, poems dealing with nature and environmental issues are comparatively short, aiming as they do at a single focus and effect. This is why they can be opened up for critical inspection more easily than selected passages from, say, a novel, which would have to be related to the context of the whole work. iv. This guide attempts to direct the user's attention to poems that are accessible in anthologies. A strong argument for selecting poems from anthologies rather than from individual writers' collections is that the anthology editors are likely to have selected precisely those poems of whose appeal to their respective readerships they must have been thoroughly convinced. Thus the mere fact that a poem has been anthologized suggests that it can be considered an important element in the process of Canadian culture building. Therefore, the very poems that have been frequently anthologized could perhaps serve as special barometers of the Canadian ecological sensibility at a given historical moment.
