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Explores silence in its philological dimensions: as a vehicle of meaning, a narrative device and a medium for expressing or concealing emotion.
This book explores how silence occurs across languages, literatures and cultures, fulfilling a wide range of communicative functions. It examines how silence can be collective or individual, intentional or unintentional, conveying meanings that extend beyond words and shaping interaction, perception and expression.
The volume investigates the multifaceted nature of silence from literary, semiotic and cultural perspectives, weaving together analyses that reveal its complexity across different media and contexts. The chapters address silences both within and beyond interaction, including interaction-like contexts, encompassing such diverse phenomena as animal silence, the silence of trauma and the iconic phase of silence.
Taken together, the contributions provide a comprehensive and multidimensional understanding of silence in auditory and visual forms of expression, and across varied linguistic and cultural contexts.
In this original and contemporary collection, silence shimmers both as an entry point and common denominator for the exploration of a host of fascinating communicative, cultural, and creative themes. The volume makes an important new contribution, examining the representations of silence as well as its manifestations as a form of social action across a host of literary, political, visual, and artistic genres.
Wolfgang Stadler is Professor Emeritus of Russian (applied) linguistics and subject-specific language education and a former Dean of the Faculty of Education at Innsbruck University, Austria.
Paul Mayr is a Research Associate in Romance linguistics at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.
Boris Norman: Foreword: Silence Through the Ages
Wolfgang Stadler and Paul Mayr: Preface: Silence Revisited
Part 1: Literary and Narrative Silences
Chapter 1. Ornella Kraeme: Silent Sicilian Signore: An Analysis of Silence as the Unspeakable
Chapter 2. Rachel Lehmann: (Not) Breaking the Silence: The Foreclosure of 'Rape' in Women’s Trauma Narratives
Chapter 3. Amy Singleton Adams and Patricija Corey: A Voice Like a Drum: Claiming Creative Silence in Donna Jo Napoli’s Bound
Chapter 4. Eric Kim: Speech Therapy: Animal Silence as 'Restorative Communication' in Anton Chekhov’s Toska
Chapter 5. Wolfgang Stadler: 'I Hope [Your Love] Will Break His Silence': Silences in Bethan Roberts’ My Policeman and its Russian Translation
Interlude: A Semiotic Perspective on Silence
Chapter 6. Michal Ornan-Ephratt: The Onomatopoeic Sounds of Silence
Part 2: Cultural Discourses and Representations of Silence
Chapter 7. Lucía Romero Gibu: Functions of Silences in Spanish Speakers’ Discourses on Migration-Related Challenges in Germany
Chapter 8. Melani Schröter: Visual Representations of Silence
Chapter 9. Tiyasha Sengupta: In Between Words and Panels: A Multimodal Investigation of Silence in Poober Akaash Laal
Reflections and Afterword
Rita Rieger: Instead of an Epilogue: One More Word on Silence and Silent Transformations through Reading
Paul Mayr and Wolfgang Stadler: Taking Stock – What was this Silence all About?