Accepted papers

The following papers have already been accepted for publication in International Journal of English Studies:

 

Plath's Spanish poems and tropes: Turning landscape into mindscape

Maria Luisa Pascual Garrido (Universidad de Córdoba)

ABSTRACT

Although critical attention has focused on Ariel, Sylvia Plath’s earlier poems are also worth examining since they reveal significant details concerning the writer’s evolution towards that final achievement. After getting married in June 1956, Plath and Hughes travelled to Spain and settled in Benidorm for their honeymoon. It is the poems derived from that period and Plath’s response to the alien setting that are analyzed in this paper. The corpus of “Spanish poems” and its most salient motifs will be identified and examined to assess the emotional and artistic response of Plath’s encounter with Spain in her work. A rhetorical analysis of these poems will be carried out but biographical data from Plath’s journals, correspondence and prose will also be considered. Finally, two later poems will be examined to demonstrate that Spain left its imprint in Plath’s mind, supplying suggestive imagery which turned the Spanish landscape into a violent mindscape.

KEYWORDS: Sylvia Plath, Spain, culture shock, poetic development, imagery, landscape and mindscape 

doi: 10.6018/ijes/2018/1/312671

 

“Great to see ur staff are doing their job properly”: Customer (dis)affiliation on corporate Facebook pages 

Patricia Palomino-Manjón (Universitat de València)

ABSTRACT

The emergence of new technologies has changed the way people communicate. Social media have allowed businesses to connect with customers and to market their products more efficiently. However, these platforms also allow customers to share information and opinions with the company and fellow customers, diverting from previous online service encounters which only allowed the interaction between the service provider and the customer. This new digital space of communication is in need of research. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to analyze how customer (dis)affiliation is discursively realized on Facebook. To do so, a corpus of comments published by customers on the Facebook page of a British grocery chain was compiled. The data were analyzed drawing on Appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005). The findings show that customers used a varied range of Appraisal resources to evaluate the company and express (dis)affiliation with it and fellow customers.

KEYWORDS: Service encounters, social media, Facebook, (dis)affiliation, Appraisal Theory, evaluation  

doi: 10.6018/ijes/2018/2/314401

 

Love, attachment, and effacement: Romantic dimensions in Sylvia Plath’s children poems 

Justyna Wierzchowska (University of Warsaw)

ABSTRACT

This article examines thirteen children poems written by Sylvia Plath in the years 1960-63, in relation to the poetics of romantic love. Drawing on motherhood studies (Winnicott 1956, 1965, 1967, Klein 1975, Rich 1976, O’Reilly 2010), the maternal shift in psychoanalysis (Kristeva 1982, Bueskens 3-6), and attachment theory (Tomkins 1962, Bowlby 1950, 1969, 1988), the article reads love as a continuous human disposition, informed by one’s attachment history, but realized at different stages of one’s life (Hazan & Shaver 1987). I specifically refer to Daniel Stern’s and Anthony Giddens’s largely overlapping concepts of maternal and romantic love to argue that Plath’s children poems are thoroughly infused with a poetics of romantic love. In the final section, I focus on the gradual shift of Plath’s speaking voice from the poetics of delight and secure attachment into one of separation and withdrawal, as a growing sense of anxiety cannot be reconciled with the poetics of romantic love.

KEYWORDS: Sylvia Plath, children poems, love, romantic love, maternal love, attachment, motherhood 

doi: 10.6018/ijes/2018/2/316831