The concluding chapter discusses the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious politics within the global context of democratic backsliding and spontaneous mass mobilizations. We highlight the contributions of our theoretical framework and the implications of Hong Kong’s contentious pathways for hybrid regimes and beyond.

In his search for publishing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein wrote a letter to Ludwig von Ficker while trying to explain the deeper meaning of his work, which he considered to be an “Ethical one”. Whereas other philosophers would establish theories about ethical and religious matters, Wittgenstein emphasized his decision to keep silent about the sphere transcending the world of language and of science. In this chapter, I discuss the limits of language and of science, the significance of silence, the view sub specie aeternitatis, the dimension of wonder, the difference between what can be said and what can only be shown, and Wittgenstein’s mystical approach toward the ineffable.

This chapter discusses the collaboratively written Sir Thomas More in the context of Catholic outrage over the breakdown of the Elizabethan policy of outward conformity in the 1580s and 1590s and the various means by which the Elizabethan regime made windows into men’s hearts in the late sixteenth century, including espionage, oaths, and torture. The play’s insistent Senecan intertext, which revolves around questions of silence and treason, thus becomes legible in relation to late Elizabethan legislative developments that served to penalise silence in matters of religion. As this chapter argues, the play’s biographical treatment of the famous Catholic martyr, who never specifies the convictions for which he is executed, thus reflects the predicament of Elizabethan Catholic loyalists, such as Anthony Browne, first Viscount of Montague, who were concerned with maintaining an increasingly untenable sphere of silence as a middle ground between truth and dissimulation.

This chapter focuses on how the Finnish 1935 and 1950 sterilisation and castration acts were established, implemented and abolished. It also describes the formation of an infertility requirement in the 2002 law which still regulates legal gender recognition for trans people today. The chapter also recounts how some victims, mainly trans people and organisations, are continuously mobilising to eliminate the requirement and restructure the law. It compares the mobilisation and non-mobilisation of the groups and the persisting refusal of the Finnish state to acknowledge the violations, accept state responsibility for them, and provide related remedies for the victims. In terms of grievance formation, the chapter outlines a stalled process. Therefore, victims have generally refrained from mobilisation due to a missing common identity and sense of wrong to be remedied. The chapter signals a prevailing absence of a socio-cultural rights frame recognising harms of victims and public responsibility in Finland. In this sense, the lack of remedial culture is more evident and the structural impediments to grievance formation are higher in Finland than in its Nordic neighbours.

This chapter reflects on the psychological, physical consequences of sexual violence in and beyond Othello—in contemporary times. I argue that the white identity formation process, and allegiance to its ideals, inherently impedes racial equality; the process itself works to reiterate white superiority. This is evident as I apply the intraracial color-line mainly to readings of Iago, the play’s most visible and vocal white other. In conjunction with readings of Othello, I look back at the transatlantic slave trade and examine the trajectory of white violence that has led to Black silence and the de-victimization of Black boys and men, which is one of many reasons psychologists suggest Black males are not always heard, much like Othello, when it comes to their experiences with sexual and non-sexual violence. With historical examples in mind, I return to Shakespeare’s canon to reflect on how early modern texts amplify the “white voice.”

This chapter analyses several roles of silence in Greek novels before Heliodorus. On a macro-level, it suggests that the writing of the text was itself a breaking of silence, manifested in narrators’ openings in Achilles Tatius and Longus. Moving to characters, it reviews situations where the choice of silence is crucial to plot development – most far-reaching in Longus, where the couple’s origins must be concealed for four fifths of the narrative to allow them to grow up as simple herdsfolk. In Chariton too the choice between speech and silence repeatedly affects plot development. Silence is often allied with deception, twice with fear. In three novels a protagonist’s romantic involvement with a third party is crucially suppressed in communications between the couple. Next addressed are types of silence closely related to the novels’ central theme of eros, whether as a symptom, or the silent kissing Cleinias suggests to Cleitophon. Different is the silent awe a protagonist’s dazzling beauty triggers. Finally some topoi shared with other genres are examined: ‘everybody else was silent, but X began to speak’; and ‘for a long time X was silent, but eventually began to speak’. It is concluded that silence’s uses reveal it as an important element in constructing an engaging narrative, noting that of these writers only Longus has an ‘unmarked’ use of σιωπ- to mean little more than ‘he/she stopped speaking’.

The chapter highlights that the relationship between silence and output remains insignificant in SLA discourse. That is, little is known about how pre-verbal messages are processed in the mind. Pre-verbal messages are part of the conceptualisation stage of language processing, which precedes the formulation and articulation of speech production. The author argues that although SLA researchers have looked extensively into the quality of speech and are highly competent in identifying the complexity of both meaningful and meaningless verbal output, when it comes to silence, our sophisticated expertise is confronted by new challenges. The discussion identifies the presence of silence in second language acquisition by looking beyond the initial silent period to examine various scholarly attitudes towards the role of silence in SLA works and to point out the gap in SLA research on silence. After explaining the reason why the discourse on SLA does not share views on silence, the chapter argues that not all types of silence benefit L2 development and that some kinds of silence facilitate SLA while others may not.

This chapter highlights the reality that silence is a belittled construct. For many years, more scholars have suspected and denied silence than have embraced and understood it. The discussion recommends including silence in pedagogy to advance it. The discussion responds to some burning questions including why silence-inclusive pedagogy is needed and why it remains an underdeveloped area in the field, how silence has historically emerged as a theme and when silence research commenced, what makes silence such a debatable construct in language education, what has hindered collective scholarly efforts to consider silence in pedagogy, and finally, how the book is structured to present what it promises. The chapter also explains the title of the book, Silence in English Language Pedagogy. This title captures both imagination and reality – imagination because silence has yet to be a well-established component in pedagogy, at least until now; reality because the appeal for utilising the presence of silence in classroom teaching has been ongoing in the field for the past five decades.

This chapter argues that in much poetry in English of the First World War, form is most effectively exploited in the interplay between visual and auditory images that are mimetic of the immediate sensory experience of battle and the linguistic devices which channel mimesis into argument and organise the impossibly chaotic. It looks at the soundscapes and silences of poems, the detached and the visceral.

War and language have a symbiotic relationship. On the one hand, wars are carried on and remembered through a proliferation of linguistic discourse. On the other, language is often a site of violent action and the battlefield of fierce struggles for power. This chapter explores the symbiosis between war and language at two different levels. First, it delves into the language of war as explored by modern and contemporary writers and thinkers. Second, it analyzes the language on war by suggesting the most common family resemblances of war writing (e.g., the preponderance of the adynaton, the absurd, the sublime, metaliterature and self-referentiality, the embedding of reflections on war, the presence of an authorial ethical stand, the importance of the senses, factuality), as well as by studying three of its main parameters. At the end, the chapter argues that the writing on war openly addresses epistemological, ontological, and ethical issues that most, if not all, literary writing has to face sooner or later, and it concludes that since it self-consciously brings out essential aspects of any literary artifact, war writing constitutes an apotheosis of literature itself.

Here Dante, not yet dead, is in Paradise. His participation premortem in the knowledge and love of Heaven, and so in its community, is experienced as the “mystical,” which, earthbound, points to the reality that transcends the earth. And if Paradiso is by way of its narrative the articulation of Dante’s mystical theology it is so in a style that seems to owe much to that of St. Bonaventure, a distinctive feature of which is that he brings together all the steps on the way to a mystical union from the lowest “purgative” disciplines of the senses and through the reform of intellect, memory, and will, into the final vision of God. This theological epistemology allows Dante to conceive of Paradise as holding together the two dimensions of Heaven as at once an eternal journey of learning, an ultimate paideia, and a vision finally achieved.

Bodily images – smiles (especially those of Beatrice), music, and silences – are key elements of the language of this celestial pedagogy that are also those of Heaven’s essential nature. Smiles: It was in Purgatory that Beatrice reprimanded Dante for his grim seriousness (see Chapter 5). In Paradiso 33 Dante learns why: It is that smiles originate in the Trinity itself: They are what make God to be a trinity. And silence: Now Satan’s silence is seen as the opposite of Heaven’s and the two “apophaticisms,” of Heaven and Hell, embrace the whole of language, and all poetry, that finds its place between those two silences. And for Peter Damien Heaven’s silence is that of music, reflecting Boethius’s belief that each of the cosmic spheres emit a note, the conjunction of which is a celestial silence. And the last of word of all, Dante says, the word that moves his will, is the Word made flesh. For what moves his will is what that moves the sun and the other stars, the Word made human.

There is a profound ambiguity surrounding all elements of CIL, particularly as regards the psychological element of opinio juris. This is further accentuated by the prevailing, in international law, elements of absence, silence or non-action and their often-monolithic interpretation as non-objection or, even, acquiescence. But is this true, according to the rules of informal logic? What is the value of non-doing? Non-acting or abstaining? Non-believing towards the formation of a certain opinio juris? The mainstream interpretation of CIL overlooks the quantifications and varieties of meaning in non-appearances, such as the conceivable neutrality of absence. This has led to persuasive-teleological argumentation, in the sense that the person or agency elaborating on either absence or silence aims at a certain end and is thus characterised by a certain ‘argumentative orientation’ towards a preferred conclusion. In this spirit, the ICJ has developed several techniques of superficial, persuasive argumentation, teleologically governed by the non liquet principle, the containment of international crises and the effective resolution of international disputes. This repositions the whole enquiry to the proper place of informal logic in international legal reasoning. The author suggests that an open-system approach could shed light on these inconsistencies and political manoeuvres.

Chapter 6, ‘Absence of the Other’, points to moments in Schumann where the music is marked by the absence of another’s voice, be it through the Romantic evocation of distant voices in pieces such as the Novelletten’s ‘Stimme aus der Ferne’, or, more troublingly, the loss of voice in songs like ‘Des Sennen Abschied’ and ‘Die Sennin’ – a non-presence often explicitly denoting death, as is the case at the close of Frauenliebe or in the Kerner setting ‘Aus das Trinkglas eines verstorbenen Freundes’. As is found increasingly in Schumann’s later work, the music may pointedly not trace a successful ‘coming to lyricism’: the emergence of an expected lyrical voice is missing. This tendency is epitomised in the genre of melodrama, where music accompanies a declaimed speech that refuses to attain the subjective presence of lyricism, and in pieces such as Manfred.