In 1986, not long after the success of his surrealist masterpiece, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Wes Craven decided to eschew the slasher formula that had earned him a legion of fans, and instead adapted a little-known story of a child prodigy—with a robot friend—who reanimates the corpse of his murdered female next-door neighbor (and romantic interest) using a computer chip (CPU). The result is disastrous, as his half-cyborg creation then enacts revenge upon her enemies, including her abusive father. Today, the largely ignored Deadly Friend (1986) appears to be an anomaly in the oeuvre of a filmmaker known for hugely successful, low-budget horror-slasher films—including their reinvention (the Scream projects) or expansion (for example, The Hills Have Eyes [1977] being reimagined as Mind Ripper [Joe Gayton, 1995] and then remade under its original title by Alexandre Aja in 2006). Due in part to studio interference, Craven's final version of Deadly Friend was far from his original vision of a PG-rated “macabre love story with a twist,” with it instead featuring jarring nightmare scenes and gory violence, whose insertions clash with the vestiges of the film's (still intact) original child-like tone, causing it to depart farther from the character-driven elements of the novel Friend (1985) by Diana Henstell. Even with the film's troubles, however, it would be a mistake to disregard its representation of the individual's and society's relationship to technology within a horror context, especially in lieu of today's global reliance on information and communication technologies, as well as the growing criticisms of the darker side of digital culture and technology companies.

Deadly Friend retains the novel's Frankenstein-meets-early-cyberpunk-imaginings that are wholly of their time in the 1980s. Its interpretations of robotics, the cyborg, and what today we may call transhumanism (a philosophical movement interested in the melding of the human and machine for the purpose of physical and spiritual extension or evolution) are examples of that decade's vision of a future society engaged with technological innovation inspired by new, accessible computing power. This widespread interest resulted in pop culture fantasies of cyberspace and human advancement, bringing with it centuries-old concerns over science, spirituality, dualism, and disembodiment—struggles we are again rethinking with the necessary rise of a new form of telepresence in reaction to the deadly global pandemic of 2020.

Creating Communities in the Study of Middle Eastern Christianity

On 10 June 2020, a group of scholars navigated their way through the web conferencing system called BigBlueButton to reach the meeting of the seminar series on the ‘Anthropologie historique des Chrétiens en Islam’ (Historical Anthropology of Christians in Islam), or, as it was called before 2011, ‘Histoire des Chrétiens d’Orient’ (History of the Christians of the East). Over more than fifteen years, Bernard Heyberger had hosted this seminar in Paris, first from a room in the Sorbonne (2004–10); then from the Institut d’études de l’Islam et des sociétés du monde musulman (IISMM) in the beautiful sixth arrondissement (2011–18); and finally from Aubervilliers, the new campus site for parts of the University of Paris in the northeast of the city (2018–20). At these sessions, he or a guest scholar would present research-in-progress on a topic pertaining to Middle Eastern Christian history in the Islamic world from the early modern period (sixteenth century) to the present. But this time was different: the series was ending because Bernard Heyberger was retiring.

Recall that in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was raging. Unable to welcome colleagues around a common table in Paris, Heyberger organised the meeting online. By this stage, academics were becoming more accustomed to online lectures and discussions, although many admitted that such meetings left them numb from staring into computer screens and dissatisfied by the lack of real contact. Many yearned for face-to-face encounters and struggled with lockdowns, quarantines and fears of the corona virus. And yet, this final meeting of the ‘Anthropologie historique des Chrétiens en Islam’ was a joyful affair, and its online format enabled many more to attend than as if the seminar had happened in Paris, in person. I connected from Philadelphia. Others came from Oxford, Leiden and Marseille; from Athens, Beirut and beyond. As we recognised each other's names among the attendees on our screens and saw messages pop up in the ‘chat’ interface, expressing congratulations and gratitude, it struck me – as I am certain it struck others – that this seminar series had become more than the sum of its parts. It had become an intellectual arena, agora and laboratory, where a community of Middle Eastern Christian history aficionados was formed.

Wes Craven will probably be best known to even the least dedicated follower of horror cinema for his work on the blockbuster Scream series (beginning in 1996), or as the father of Freddy Krueger, who first appeared in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), spawning a series of sequels and a remake. His demonic creation, played by Robert Englund, was one of the most recognisable figures of the 1980s—so much so that the fan club devoted to the notorious dream-stalker had at its peak “more members than U2’s.” As this edited collection will ascertain, however, there is so much more than “just” these accepted canonical horror classics to this fascinating filmmaker's oeuvre. In fact, for four decades Craven retained his position as someone who made a number of prolific, wide-release, theatrical attractions—no small feat, and almost unique amongst his contemporaries who also became associated with (to borrow from the late Robin Wood) the “American Nightmare” of the 1970s (i.e., Larry Cohen, Don Coscarelli, Tobe Hooper, George Romero).

The director, born August 2, 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio and passing away on August 30, 2015, was, at the beginning of his filmmaking career, very much a marginalized option, even for hardened horror film fans. Writing about his work in Danse Macabre, no less than Stephen King would comment: “if you have seen one film by Wes Craven, for instance, it is safe enough, I think, to skip the others. The genre labors under enough critical disapproval and outright dislike; one need not make a bad situation worse by underwriting films of porno violence.” King was referring to Craven's first two feature films, The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), both of which were commercially successful but aesthetically and thematically transgressive: depicting grueling sexual violence but humanized, even horribly relatable, “monsters.” Lest we dismiss King's concerns outright, as late as 1992 the oft-revered fan writer Chas Balun was chastising the former shocker as “sordid … one of the most repugnant ‘horror’ films ever made,” an almost unthinkable critique when related to a debut of such humanity, intelligence, and provocation. Unsurprisingly, many of the writers who contributed to this volume choose to reference the words of the late Robin Wood—who gave Craven a leading role in his theory of the “American Nightmare.”

The literary genre of dialogues between Christians and Muslims is ancient, going back to the first centuries of Islam, and it has roots in Islamic as well as Eastern Christian culture. In the time of the Abbasids, the Christian Arabic writers working in the court milieu and aspiring to equality with the Muslim mutakallimūn (theologians) devoted themselves to this type of literature. It is difficult to determine to what extent these texts were linked to actual dialogues among Muslims and Christians. Nevertheless, there is evidence from this period on the practice of majlis, the sessions in which members of various religions were invited to explain their beliefs.

These sessions were no longer practised in the seventeenth century, in the Sunni surroundings of the Ottoman Empire, but we do have evidence of such meetings at the Mughal court in India and the Shiʿi Safavid court in Isfahan at that time. Christian apologetics and disputations from the first centuries of Islam were then known only in part. The Catholic disputational dialogues against Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were embedded in a more general practice of disputation in the Europe of this period.

Here we will focus especially on the production of two French missionaries, both of whom lived in Aleppo in the 1670s. In 1679, Michel Febvre (alias Justinien de Neuvy) published a Latin pamphlet entitled Praecipuae obiectiones quae vulgo solent fieri per modum interrogationis à Mahumeticae legis sectatoribus, Iudaeis, et Haereticis Orientalibus adversus Catholicos, earumque solutiones (The Main Objections Commonly Made in an Interrogative Form by the Followers of the Law of Mahomet, the Jews and the Eastern Heretics against Catholics, and Their Solutions), which appeared also in Arabic and Armenian translations. The same Capuchin, in two successive chapters of his Theatre de la Turquie (1682), included a ‘Method to Be Followed in order to Confute the Errors of the Turks, and the Abuses of Their Sect’ and ‘Another Method to Convince the Turks on Their Errors’.

0 Introduction

Most studies about English verb stress, however interesting from a theoretical point of view, seem to be based on limited sets of examples, leading their authors to assertions about the stress behaviour of English that are not actually vindicated through comprehensive data. Following Lionel Guierre's teachings, this study sets out to analyse as comprehensive a corpus as possible, based on dictionary data: though limited in some extent by the very nature of the source, it can still be seen as a first step towards a reliable description of the category. The chapter is structured as follows: first, we review the literature on English stress and distinguish two generalisations which were proposed in Chomsky and Halle's Sound Pattern of English (section 1). One generalisation refers to the weight of the final syllable of verbs while the other refers to the presence of a semantically opaque prefix. We then set out to evaluate the empirical validity of these two generalisations, as well as to propose a global overview of how English verbs are stressed, all morphological categories included. In section 2, we present how the data were collected, cleaned and classified. In the following section, we detail the stress distributions found in all the morphological categories found in the data (section 3). At the end of the presentation of our results, we measure the empirical validity of the two generalisations in the relevant morphological categories and show that they have similar efficiencies but different theoretical costs. Crucially, we find that the data support an analysis including semantically opaque morphological constituents among the possible determiners of stress.

1 English verbs: stress, syllable structure and morphology

1.1 The two generalisations

In Chomsky and Halle (1968, hereafter SPE), there are two parameters determining the position of primary stress in verbs that many morphologists would now analyse as monomorphemic. The first parameter is the segmental make-up of the final syllable. In their Main Stress Rule, a verb gets penultimate stress if the final syllable contains a ‘weak cluster’ (V̆C; for example astónish, édit, consíder, imágine, intérpret) and final stress otherwise (for example maintáin, eráse, appéar, collápse, exháust, tormént, usúrp). Since Kahn (1976), the terms ‘weak cluster’ or ‘strong cluster’ have been abandoned and replaced by the notion of syllable weight.

Introduction

The history of the ‘protection’ of Christian minorities in the Middle East cannot be reduced to a diplomatic issue. ‘Protection’ in an anthropological approach is a universal rhetoric, shared by almost everybody in Mediterranean societies, and the notion of dhimma, which is the basic principle underlying relations between Muslims on one hand and Christians and Jews on the other means contract, pact, protection and guarantee. But beyond this, in segmented societies with a weak state, patronage and clientelism appear in various shapes. Protection is an entangled issue, to which various players contribute on different scales: in this case, Eastern Christian individuals and congregations, local states and societies, Western opinion and Western States.

The history of protection first means one of circulations. From the sixteenth century onwards, a significant and increasing number of Eastern Christians, mainly members of the clergy, visited the ‘Christian Lands’ in order to claim support, collect alms and, sometimes, settle there. As a justification for their presence, they generally introduced themselves as victims of Islamic ‘tyranny’. On another level, Western consuls, merchants and missionaries settling in the Levant belonged to networks in which they benefitted from local ‘protections’. At the same time, they led complex systems of credit, advances on crops and tax-farming in which local Christians were involved. Occasionally, as early as at the beginning of the seventeenth century, local leaders such as Emir Fakhraddīn in Mount Lebanon could claim political and military support from Europe. Especially from the eighteenth century onwards, the so-called proteges of the European nations, benefitting from the berat which gave them exemption from Ottoman law, were an important element in this system.

Yet, ‘protection’ became an important diplomatic and ideological issue during the nineteenth century, when direct intervention by the European powers within the Ottoman Empire became heavier. At the same time, the ever-increasing anti-Christian tone of riots in the Ottoman cities and countries led to a mobilisation of international opinion through the press and to the first appearance of a humanitarian agenda for Mount Lebanon and Damascus after the massacres of 1860, followed by those in Anatolia (1894–96) and Crete (1897).

Released in 1995 by Paramount Pictures, Vampire in Brooklyn holds an unusual place in Craven's oeuvre, the vampire film resurgence of the 1990s, and in the filmography of its leading man, Eddie Murphy. On its release, just before Halloween, when horror films traditionally receive increased attention, the film barely managed to attract an audience—eventually recouping just $20 million dollars against a budget of $16 million—and earning many negative reviews. Murphy's career had been hamstrung by such previous, commercially unsuccessful projects as Beverly Hills Cop III (John Landis, 1994) and Harlem Nights (Eddie Murphy, 1989). Vampire in Brooklyn would not be the blockbuster that Murphy presumably hoped for, with The New York Times noting that his shift into the horror genre was an indicator of further decline: “Eddie Murphy as the living dead: that's not a bad description of his career, a situation Vampire in Brooklyn is not likely to change.”

However, Craven had also suffered from the vagaries of critical and commercial responses to his film work over the last decade, although, unlike Murphy, the social commentary that had punctuated his early work had not necessarily been diminished. In describing the subtext of The Last House on the Left (1972), Robin Wood summarised that not only was the commentary obvious, but it was also inescapable: “The film offers no easily identifiable parallels to Vietnam […] Instead, it analyzes the nature and conditions of violence and sees them as inherent in the American situation. Craven sees to it that the audience cannot escape the implications.” Indeed, a constant theme of Craven's work could be argued to be that the on-screen horrors are secondary to the social commentary underneath. For instance, the nuclear test is far more barbaric in and of itself than the mutants it creates in The Hills Have Eyes (1977), just as the conspiracy of silence in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) proves to be even more harmful, in the long-run, than the return of the film's iconic killer, Freddy Krueger, to slaughter a handful of teenagers. Craven's output in the late 1980s and early 1990s had continued this trend, with Shocker (1989) taking on the barbarity of capital punishment through the avatar of a killer who cannot be successfully executed, thus maintaining his profile and legend and leading to further trauma.

0 Introduction

Emerging Englishes, New Englishes or outer-circle Englishes such as Singapore English (SgE) may sound markedly different from native or inner-circle varieties. One of the main perceptive features that distinguishes SgE from inner-circle Englishes is claimed to be its staccato, machine-gun-like rhythm due to its distinctive rhythmic properties, namely syllable timing instead of stress timing. Stressed syllables may not be substantially longer nor pronounced with higher pitch; moreover, vowel reduction in unstressed syllables may not be systematic either (Levis 2005; Bao 1998). The absence of quantity raises an interesting question: while inner-circle Englishes all organise their stress algorithm partly around quantity sensitivity, at least for the non-derived part of the lexicon, how do SgE speakers assign lexical stress (accent) if their system lacks quantity?

This chapter looks at lexical stress patterns in standard SgE. The evidence comes from two types of complementary corpora: (i) recordings following the PAC protocol (informal and formal conversations, text reading), and (ii) findings from a nonce experiment testing SgE native speakers’ intuition about the stress of disyllables, which we carried out in 2016. Our nonce experiment follows the protocol of Turcsan and Herment (2015), inspired by Krämer (2009) and Bárkányi (2002). The experiment involves reading tasks with embedded nonce words displaying different phonological and morphological structures forced by the spelling. The exact duplication of the protocol allows us to compare SgE speakers with inner-circle speakers in their stress placement and to shed light to SgE speakers’ internalised system with respect to lexical prominence.

In section 1 we briefly discuss some necessary background elements for evaluating the results of the nonce-word test. In section 1.1, we present our object of study by locating the variety of SgE we have access to through our PAC recordings. Section 1.2 is concerned with lexical prominence: we compare findings in the literature with those from our PAC recordings. Section 2 gives the rationale for our nonce-word test by explaining our methodology. Section 3 describes the results from various points of view: first with respect to other statistical approaches based on the lexicon in 3.1, then by looking at speakers’ preferences in 3.2. The link to quantity sensitivity is established in 3.3, constraints on unstressed syllables are explained in 3.4 and finally, possible analogical patterns are discussed in 3.5. Section 4 contains our conclusions.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Wes Craven, 1994) (hereafter, New Nightmare) combines the familiarities of the previous entries in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series (hereafter, Elm Street—labelled as such to avoid any confusion) with a new element: home video. The recurring aspects of the series remain largely intact: iconic monster Freddy Krueger still attacks his victims in their dreams, existing in a liminal space between the dream world and reality. Other characters from earlier in the franchise also return, most notably the star of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Chuck Russell, 1987), Heather Langenkamp. Co-star of the initial film and Dream Warriors John Saxon likewise appears in New Nightmare, as do producer Robert Shaye, actor Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger), and Craven himself. But whereas Langenkamp eventually “combines” with her screen persona of Nancy, a young woman attacked by Freddy (Englund plays both his movie-monster alter-ago and himself) earlier in the series, and Saxon experiences the same confusion as her erstwhile cinematic father, Shaye and Craven only play themselves in New Nightmare—both proposing an uncertainty about the role of horror as critically derided “popcorn” entertainment and its wider need to encompass and critique societal concerns. Most affected by the presence of violent videos in the film is Heather's son Dylan (Miko Hughes), who views his mother's performance in the initial film on the family's television, a scene that is deemed to be (or possibly an astute criticism of) the belief that children cannot separate “real” from fiction. The famous “moral crusader” Mary Whitehouse, for instance, would question “how do we will the film-makers with a sense of their own responsibility for the health and welfare not only of the whole of our society, but especially, for pity's sake, the welfare of the children who are the future?”

The scenes of Dylan watching A Nightmare on Elm Street on video illustrate what James M. Moran calls the “video-in-the-text” (VIT): cinematic uses of “home video as a textual signifier.” As numerous scholars have shown, video has particular textual significance within the horror genre, as evidenced by the many horror films which have used the technology as a central narrative aspect (perhaps most famously the Ring franchise) and the format's relationship with controversy (i.e. “video nasties,” its accessibility to children and so forth).

The creation of ‘new speakers’ via education and language policy interventions has become an increasingly crucial objective in many contexts of minority language revitalisation. The phrase was initially coined in respect of L2 users of the Galician and Catalan languages, and has since been employed frequently in the sociolinguistics of other minoritised language groups. The concept of ‘new’ speakers refers to individuals who have acquired high levels of oracy in an additional language to that of their principal childhood socialisation, and make frequent use of it in the course of their daily lives. At the respective levels of national and provincial government, policymakers in Scotland and Nova Scotia make frequent reference to the role that such individuals may play in the future of the Gaelic language. In addition to Scotland's 57,600 Gaelic speakers, the 2011 Canadian census recorded 1,275 Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia, or just over 0.1 per cent of the total population of the province. Of that number, only 300 individuals reported Gaelic as their mother tongue. The Nova Scotia Gaelic community is thus substantially smaller than that of Scotland relative to the total population, having declined from an estimated population of over 80,000 in the early twentieth century. In both polities, policymakers have emphasised the importance of Gaelic language teaching as a mechanism for revitalising Gaelic. New speakers have thus emerged in both contexts as a significant element in the Gaelic language community.

Notably, Gaelic educational opportunities in Nova Scotia are limited by comparison with Scotland, where over 6,000 children are currently enrolled in Gaelic-medium immersion education. Immersion programmes have been available to Indigenous Mi’kmaw children and to Acadian children for some years, and in September 2021 North America's first Gaelic immersion school opened its doors to nine primary school pupils in Mabou, Cape Breton. For the most part, however, Gaelic language teaching in the province remains largely limited to a small number of schools teaching the language as a subject, evening classes, residential immersion courses and university classes.

Given this disparity, a major objective of the present research has been to assess the language learning and life experiences that inform Scottish and Nova Scotian new speakers’ decision to acquire and use Gaelic, and, relatedly, their cultural identifications with the language.