WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 30 minutes (+ 10 minutes for discussion).
November 16, 2 p.m., room 109A, Collegium Novum – Talks by Prof. Paweł Stachura and Prof. Piotr Gąsiorowski
Paweł Stachura
Department of American Literature
Chemistry in American fiction in the 19th century: Towards a new materiality in literary criticism
Abstract:
The presentation follows a materialistic trend in literary criticism, with discussions focusing on the world of things, representation of setting, props, bodies, health, food etc. As such, descriptions of things and matter are usually discussed as means of representation of character or social background, but the present discussion will focus on historical evolution of literary materiality in itself. In an ongoing project about it, documentary evidence has been gathered from a variety of literary and non-literary texts published between 1820 and 1890, but the presentation will focus on the work of Edgar Fawcett, a transatlantic author active in the 1870s in America, a prolific poet and novelist almost totally forgotten today.
Piotr Gąsiorowski
Department of Older Germanic Languages
Sex, gender and morphology in Old English and Germanic occupational terms: a new look at an old enigma
Abstract:
It is tacitly considered axiomatic that, in languages that have grammatical gender, the vast majority of occupational terms are masculine by default. If gender is relevant, they can be made grammatically feminine by derivational means, e.g. by adding a femininising suffix. Similar devices may be employed in languages without grammatical gender, such as Modern English, to make a job title sex-specific (cf. usher : usherette). Still, the relationship between the Old English occupational suffixes -ere (m.) and -estre (f.) is unclear, and their segregation according to the sex of the referent is anything but consistent (e.g. bæcestre ‘baker’, though formally feminine, usually refers to men in the OE corpus). The presentation will attempt to explain this puzzling phenomenon by arguing that “the usual order of things” was in fact reversed in Germanic, where some occupational terms were primarily feminine before developing masculinised derivatives.