Heidelberg Journal of English Studies

Showcasing English Studies in and from Heidelberg

Bruce Gaston, Natalie Stevenson, Cara Vorbeck, Oriana Yim, Vroni Zieglmeier — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Troy Bolton’s Linguistic Characterization in High School Musical

Tine Bez — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

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 — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

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.

Peeling Back the Layers

Marie Thielebörger — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Urban public spaces are increasingly shaped by informal visual practices beyond official signage, with stickers functioning as politically charged interventions in the urban linguistic landscape. This study examines political sticker clusters in Heidelberg, a university town characterised by a high concentration of politically engaged students, to explore how public space is contested through visual and linguistic means. Drawing on the concepts of emplacement and transgressive signs (Scollon and Scollon 2003), the paper analyses sticker clusters as layered, polyphonic visual texts (Reershemius 2019), with particular attention to multimodal meaning-making (Bezemer and Jewitt 2018). Building on Awcock’s (2021) understanding of stickers as tools of everyday resistance, the study situates sticker placement within broader contexts of youth-led political discourse. The data consists of photographs of sticker clusters collected in central Heidelberg during the summer of 2025, focusing on sticker-dense locations in public and university-adjacent spaces. Qualitative analysis shows that sticker clusters function as semiotic hotspots in which political ideologies are performed, contested, and renegotiated through practices of layering and covering. Rather than operating as isolated messages, stickers form dynamic, spatially anchored texts that contribute to grassroots, bottom-up public discourse in student-dense urban environments.