Gamers’ Games: Narratives of conflict, independence and engagement in video game culture

In this dissertation I look at various ways in which the relation between gamers and games has been discussed in video game culture in recent years. Gamers and games are currently being positioned by many scholars and industry experts as experiencing a series of major changes. From one perspective, gamers are said to be getting more and more access to the means of production of video games. Video games, in turn, are frequently analysed in terms of the effects they can have on their users. I argue that the discourses surrounding these phenomena have the effect of reinforcing the separation between gamers and games, considering both terms as separate and distinct entities. Throughout this dissertation I offer a series of readings of the relationship between the two, of how this relationship is currently being discussed by various actors and of how it could be narrated otherwise. I look at the narratives about the historical origins of both gamers and games, the conflicts between consumers and publishers, the production of independent games and the use of games for doing things. Drawing on deconstruction (Derrida 1976, 1980, 1985, 1988) and cultural and media studies scholarship, I interrogate the mechanisms behind many of the stories surrounding the contaminated and parasitical relations (Serres 1982) between gamers and games, whereby both categories are seen as emerging from the process of boxing consumers and products into discrete entities. I offer a reading of contemporary video game culture through a study that aims to encourage all of us who study and play (with) games to raise ethical questions for our own role in shaping the objects of research and for our involvement in the discourses we produce, as both gamers and scholars. What is ultimately at stake in this project is the possibility of outlining an alternative mode of thinking about the medium of the video game, one that blurs the distinction between studying, playing, making and living with video games through the invention of narratives about the unresolved relations (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) between gamers and games

Gender and style in the translation and reception of Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘Todesarten’ texts

This thesis compares style in the ‘Todesarten’ [literally: manners of death] texts by Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) with their English translations: the novel Malina (Malina; Philip Boehm), the novel draft Das Buch Franza (The Book of Franza; Peter Filkins) and the story collection Simultan (Three Paths to the Lake; Mary Fran Gilbert). The fact that Bachmann was a woman significantly influenced the descriptions by German-language critics in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s of the author herself, as well as their evaluations of her work. Bachmann’s extended metaphors, ambiguity, iconicity, transitivity structures and intertextuality suggest that her prose texts, and especially Malina, should be regarded as proto-feminist masterpieces whose contemplation of the post-war human condition and society’s treatment of women were far ahead of their contemporaries. Boehm’s and Filkins’ translation choices show parallels with criticism expressed in German-language reviews. The reduction of the networks of stylistic features in the translations results in a weakening of the links between content, style and politics which are crucial to Bachmann’s texts. These changes mean that the English-language reader experiences Bachmann’s texts in a fundamentally different way. The male translators largely silence what I term women’s language in Malina and Franza, and consequently conceal much of Bachmann’s proto-feminist message. It is clear that these changes are not necessitated by the constraints of translating Bachmann’s complex texts into English because Gilbert, the female translator of Simultan, manages to recreate the texts’ style

Partitive Determiners, Partitive Pronouns and Partitive Case

The fine-grained morpho-syntactic and semantic variation displayed by partitive elements across European languages is far from being well-described, let alone well-understood. This volume focuses on Partitive Determiners, Partitive Pronouns and Partitive Case in European languages, their emergence and spread in diachrony, their acquisition by L2 speakers, and their syntax and interpretation in a cross-theoretical typological perspective