The language of European food labelling regulations

Professor Angela Smith recently attended the 4th FoodKom Seminar at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.  Her paper, 'Tiny Print and Traffic Light Chaos', looked at how European food labelling regulations are applied in the British context to front of packaging.  Angela showed how the non-mandatory nature of the system has led to potentially confusing food labelling, exploring the semiotic properties of the packaging.  She concluded that the lack of standardisation and the non-mandatory nature of the system is often unhelpful and even confusing (particularly to those of declining eye sight), but that it could nevertheless be of use to the knowing consumer and so is of limited help.

Monstrous masculinities

Dr Alison Younger has contributed a chapter to an Edinburgh University Press publication edited by Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt. The volume, entitled The Victorian Male Body examines some of the main expressions and practices of Victorian masculinity and its embodied physicality. Alison's chapter - which explores dandyism and the gothic body - is called 'Monstrous Masculinities from the Macaroni to the Masher: Reading the Gothic 'Gentleman''.

Codex 2017

The latest edition of Codex has been published. Are you interested in riots in South Shields or Turkish Gothic literature? If so, visit Codex for top work from our class of 2017 undergraduates at the School of Culture.

Language learners in fiction and popular culture

Dr Susan Mandala will be giving a talk in the Language Research Seminars series on Tuesday 14th November at 5pm in Reg Vardy 113. She will explore how forms of mass media and popular culture have long been of interest to analysts for what they potentially tell us about ourselves and frequent attention has been paid to representations of gender, race, class, ethnicity and power. An equally potent but lesser explored representation is that of language learners. How are English language learners portrayed in our popular dramas, sitcoms and soap operas and what makes these portraits significant? Ranging widely over programmes such as The Archers and The Big Bang Theory, this paper explores the representation of English language learners in these texts and investigates how they are ‘storied’ in some of our most popular dramas. Dr Mandala argues that these representations frequently construct language learners as ‘other’ and asks what challenges this may pose for practice, teaching training, and wider issues of cultural understanding.

Two new chapters from Geoff Nash

'Britain,' chapter 33 in Waïl Hassan, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions, outlines the work of Arab British writers in the context of the volume’s examination of worldwide fiction in many languages by writers of Arab ethnicity.

'A fundamental aesthetic: Said Nursi’s re-writing of the Qur’an into the idiom of modernity' appears in Bridging the Divide: Essays on Language and Literature, and Islamic Studies – A Commemorative volume to mark the 60th birthday of Professor Abdur Raheem Kidwai (New Delhi: Viva books).  The piece discusses the Kurdish-Turkish Muslim revivalist Bediuzzaman Said Nursi’s project of re-writing Islam into a modern idiom.