Heidelberg Journal of English Studies

Showcasing English Studies in and from Heidelberg

Bruce Gaston — 2025-12-19

Troy Bolton’s Linguistic Characterization in High School Musical

Tine Bez — 2025-12-19

This paper investigates the linguistic construction of Troy Bolton’s character in High School Musical through a pragmatics-informed analysis of direct characterization. Drawing on distinctions between self-presentation and other-presentation, the study examines how explicitly verbalized information contributes to the shaping of the male protagonist’s on-screen identity. A systematically compiled transcript of the film serves as the basis for identifying instances of direct characterization, including clearly implied cases situated at the boundary between direct and indirect forms. The analysis reveals a striking asymmetry: while Troy’s social environment—his teammates, peers, and father—consistently characterizes him almost exclusively through the lens of basketball, Troy’s own self-presentation conveys a more multifaceted self-image. This discrepancy exposes tensions between entrenched societal expectations and the protagonist’s desire to “break free” from the status quo. To account for the film’s depiction of Troy’s gradual character development, the study further incorporates selected indirect cues, including conversational structure, address forms, and paralinguistic features. These additional layers illustrate how the narrative ultimately negotiates and resolves the conflict between imposed stereotypes and Troy’s emerging complexity.

Continuous Hunger

Aaron Mayer — 2025-12-19

The Great Irish Famine (1845–1851) necessitated processes of collective identity reconstruction and re-narration. Scholars have traced literary transformations of the event up to the period of Modernism, leaving poetry and texts from later generations underexplored. This article examines how Seamus Heaney’s “At a Potato Digging” (1966) and Desmond Egan’s “Famine, a Sequence” (1997) reimagine a persisting cultural wound to redefine the Irish present. In an attempt to approach the ‘missing signifier’ to an inexpressible but palpable reality, Egan’s poem portrays the famine as an unending presence embedded in Ireland’s landscape, language, and collective psyche, using fragmented syntax and pared-down diction to mirror deprivation and the struggle for recovery from cultural trauma. Heaney’s poem, by contrast, explores competing causal narratives and intertwined dependencies by excavating the emblem of the potato, revealing a previously overlooked polysemy of divine, natural, agricultural, and colonial causes. Through poetic reimagining, both works militate against oblivion and advocate asserting the Famine as a foundational and continuing force in Irish self-understanding to enable processes of cultural healing.