Die vorliegende Dissertation deduziert eine bisher unbeachtete ‚alternate‘ Praxis modernen Schreibens aus der Analyse dreier experimenteller Stadtromane, die weder bei zeitgenössischen Kommentatoren, noch im bisherigen Forschungsdiskurs zum 'amerikanischen Modernismus' Beachtung gefunden hat. Diese Praxis wird exemplarisch in Waldo Franks City Block (1922), Nathan Aschs The Office (1925) und Mary Bordens Flamingo or the American Tower (1927) herausgearbeitet. Die Arbeit argumentiert, dass diese diachrone Missachtung/Nichtbeachtung darin begründet liegt, dass die Romane von ihren AutorInnen unabhängig voneinander, doch nahezu zeitgleich als Prosatexte konzipiert wurden, die eine Gegenläufigkeit zu dem normativen Akzelerationsdiskurs erkennen lassen, welcher sich in verschiedensten Domänen amerikanischen Lebens und Handelns während der ersten Beschleunigungswelle (ca. 1880-1929) herausgebildet hatte. In diesen Romanen finden sich einzigartige, doch vergleichbare stilistische Mechanismen sowie thematische/ideologische Ausrichtungen, die eine generative Agenda (‚generative agenda‘) erkennen lassen: ‚Schnelle‘ textuelle Stile werden appropriiert und/oder mit ‚langsamen‘ Stilen kombiniert (‚aesthetic of in-betweenness‘), um Lesern für die negativen Folgen von Beschleunigung zu sensibilisieren; das Phänomen an sich wird in nuancierter, handlungsorientierter Form neu verhandelt und mögliche Bewältigungsstrategien entwickelt; stilistische, formale und inhaltliche Mechanismen werden angewendet, um eine entsprechende Aktivierung des Lesers herbeizuführen.

This dissertation uses a functional systemic approach to language to examine the construction of the respective first-person narrators of nine of the most popular, commercially successful and therefore influential African American slave narratives published between 1837 and 1862 (Roper, Grandy, Douglass, Brown, Bibb, Northup, Ball, Jacobs, Picquet). This corpus of more than 410,000 words was scanned for various linguistic features such as transitivity of verbs, nominalizations, and several syntactic features. The texts chosen differ as to their methods of production. Some of them were written by the first person narrators themselves, while others were either extensively edited, dictated to an amanuensis, or in some other way controlled. The dialectics of creation and representation through language results in the leading question in this study: how do the first-person slave narrators identify and create a personality for themselves through their texts? This dissertation thus focuses on the linguistic means by which the first-person slave narrator creates what is defined as a “discoursal self”, which helped the narrators to achieve one of their most important goals, namely, to be accepted as reliable. The dissertation consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 introduces a sociohistorical account of slavery, resistance against slavery, abolition, and the development of the slave narrative. The chapter shows that the African American slave narrative was not a completely new and original genre but an amalgamation of a variety of preexisting white and black literary forms. The second chapter is more theoretical and deals with discourse, power, and ideology in the slave narrative. Chapter 3 approaches the language of the slave narrative. The small corpus of scholarly texts that tackle language and style in this genre is reviewed. As an alternative to these approaches, critical discourse analysis (CDA) according to Norman Fairclough is suggested. It eliminates the a priori categorization of specific linguistic features as stylistically significant, because it is based on a functional view of language that perceives linguistic expression as choice on various levels. Every choice is considered meaningful and, according to its presence, absence, or clustering in a given co-text, potentially stylistic. Michael Halliday’s systemic functional grammar is introduced as the basis for the ensuing text analysis. Chapter 4 introduces the first quantitative observations about the density and distribution of the first-person singular pronoun in the narratives. This characteristic is then placed in relation to syntactic condensation in the forms of ellipsis, finiteness and nominalization, all of which are reviewed quantitatively. Finally, this chapter introduces the system of transitivity according to Halliday, Matthiessen, and others. It explains the distinction between the individual process types and provides a quantitative overview of the individual transitivity profiles within each narrative. Chapter 5 represents the main part of this dissertation. Each of the nine narratives is analyzed individually as to the presence of the I-pronoun in the text and the use and distribution of process types. In this way patterns of foregrounded or favored usages against absences of others emerge and contribute to the discoursal selves that the individual narrators present/construct of themselves. These preferred usages in general as well as in their local distributions are examined in detail. The quantitative observations supply the basis for further qualitative analyses derived from a large number of examples from the texts. Thus it is possible to show that each of the narratives is linguistically unique, which results in an individual construction of the respective I-narrator. The use of pronouns, process types and syntactic reconfigurations reveals how control over the activities as well as over the text is constructed, which can be directly related to issues of power. The Summary provides a synopsis of the previous quantitative and qualitative analyses and associates the quantitative results with characteristics of written and oral texts in general. Finally, it thus becomes possible to rank the nine narratives on a cline between predominantly oral and chiefly written characteristics.

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The focus of fighting tyranny and the justifications of the consecutive wars in fantasy literature for children and young adults play a noteworthy role in the intertwinement of literature and its educational potential. This genre is filled with numerous images of violence, in particular different scenarios of war and its justifications. In the books war constitutes the final battle between good and evil, and thus manifests the protagonists’ ultimate moral decisions between these two forces. The following books constitute the corpus: C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56), Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence (1965-77), Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000), J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007), Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle (2002-11), Amanda Hemingway’s Sangreal Trilogy (2005-07), and P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast’s House of Night novels (2007-2014). Although not all the books feature wars, all display justifications for war and the imperative to fight tyranny. Located within an intersection of diverse critical theories, my thesis engages literary texts in order to reflect on their capacity to negotiate, challenge, subvert, and perpetuate values and power structures. Motif analysis forms the centre of this analysis. I deploy a varied approach to literary analysis, relying upon literary and cultural theories (especially theories of ideology) to understand the realizations of the different motifs. Through issues of character construction, (political) authority, religion, and the construction of difference, the reader learns much about the culture and values of the respective world. Furthermore, this analysis invites the reader to find parallels between the fabricated world and the real world, and thus transfer what s/he has learned from the texts his/her own world. Engaging in such a reading ensures the drawing of direct connections between the reality constructed in the books on the one hand, and politics, the construction of difference, religion, and just war theory in the reader’s world on the other. The content analysis leads to broader cultural messages, which comprise assumptions about gender, power, ethnicity, religion, and morality. This methodology emphasizes the relevance as well as the complexity of the books and their educative potential, and facilitates the analysis of the books as tools for the defence and perpetuation of Western values and culture.