Modern Languages Faculty Research and Publications
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Item Open Access ACHILLES' BRUTISH HELLENISM: GREEK IDENTITY IN THE HEROIKOSMcCloskey, Benjamin; mccloskey; McCloskey, BenjaminPhilostratus’ Herōikos depicts two anonymous interlocutors who meet and talk. One of the two, known as the Vinedresser, spends much of their conversation informing the other, the Phoenician, about the true history of the heroes, most of which he claims to have learned from Protesilaos. Central to his account are three stories of acts of violence the revenant Achilles commits against humans. This article argues that these acts of violence may be understood as coherent and compatible manifestations of Achilles’ cultural identity, which is both violent in its defense of Greece and hostile toward Rome.Item Open Access Pasillos sin luz: Reading the Asylum in Nadie Me Verá Llorar by Cristina Rivera GarzaKanost, Laura; lakanost; Kanost, LauraMexican historian and literary writer Cristina Rivera Garza approaches the space of the asylum not as a monolithic mechanism of rigid control and silence, but as a continual negotiation of bodies and words. The characters in her 1999 novel Nadie me verá llorar improvise their own unique paths through the physical structure of La Castañeda asylum and the sociocultural space of mental illness. Through its narrative techniques, the novel positions its readers, too, in an indeterminate interpretive space. Readers’ paths through the fixed structure of the novel are as idiosyncratic as the characters’ trajectories through La Castañeda and Porfirian society. By representing and fostering such maneuvers—which Michel de Certeau has termed “tactics”—Nadie me verá llorar challenges the subject/object dynamic inherent in conventional concepts of madness. Rivera Garza’s novel manifests a relationship not of reading and writing subjects and voiceless objects, but of interdependent, mutable subjects. Viewed in the context of 1990s mental health care reform initiatives throughout Latin America, the “tactics” at work in Nadie me verá llorar reflect the reality of individuals currently living in psychiatric hospitals, as well as the potential for reform movements to resituate both concepts of mental illness and individuals who are identified as mentally ill.Item Open Access Viewing the Afro-Mexican Female Revolutionary: Francisco Rojas González's La negra AngustiasKanost, Laura; lakanost; Kanost, LauraFrancisco Rojas González's 1944 novel La negra Angustias is recognized as the only novel of the Mexican Revolution that features a black woman military officer. Critics have observed that, although this semi-biographical novel portrays Angustias as a gender nonconformist who seeks justice for women and the poor, the conclusion ushers her firmly back to her expected place in society as she falls in love and becomes a self-sacrificing wife and mother. I argue that this apparent reversal is present throughout the novel in a narrative gaze that objectifies Angustias, ogling her brown, curvy body. Furthermore, Angustias herself appropriates the power of the gaze and orchestrates striking visual performances at key points in her trajectory. Thus, the novel foregrounds multiple relationships of viewer and viewed, as Rojas oscillates between rewriting and reiterating nationalist discourses, celebrating and negating the agency of his protagonist.Item Open Access Spanish After Service-Learning: A Comparative StudyKanost, Laura; lakanost; Kanost, LauraTo begin to assess the impact of service-learning participation on subsequent use of Spanish, this study compares survey responses of students who completed conventional and servicelearning sections of the same intermediate university Spanish conversation course. Their responses suggest that the students who experienced service-learning generally describe themselves as more confident language users who continue their studies and use Spanish in their everyday lives at higher rates. In contrast, students who had completed the conventional sections tended to focus more on information learned and a greater percentage of them reported going on to study abroad.Item Open Access LEARNING TO EXPRESS GRATITUDE IN MANDARIN CHINESE THROUGH WEB-BASED INSTRUCTIONYang, Li; lyang1; Yang, LiThis study explored the effectiveness of a self-access website as a tool to teach expressions of gratitude to learners of Mandarin Chinese. The web-based instruction included explicit instruction on how to express gratitude appropriately in Mandarin and various consciousness-raising exercises/activities. Two groups of learners who differed in their proficiency in Chinese received instruction for five weeks. The findings indicated that the instruction positively affected the metapragmatic assessment and pragmatic awareness of the learners at two different proficiency levels. In their reflective e-journals, learners also reported the benefits the website provided for their pragmatics learning. Based on the findings, this study proposed implications for the teaching of pragmatics.Item Open Access The variable effect of form and lemma frequencies on phonetic variation: evidence from /s/ realization in two varieties of Colombian Spanish(2015-05-13) Brown, Earl K.; Gradoville, Michael S.; File-Muriel, Richard J.; ekbrownResearch has shown that frequency conditions the variable realization of sounds. However, the literature has not addressed whether the frequency of the individual word forms, or form frequency, has a larger conditioning effect than the combined frequencies of the members of the paradigm to which the forms belong, or lemma frequency. Monofactorial correlation tests and monofactorial and multifactorial linear regression analyses are performed on 2,734 tokens of Spanish /s/ in sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Cali and Barranquilla, Colombia. Two findings are highlighted: (1) frequency is only significant in the variety of Spanish that has low overall rates of /s/ reduction, Cali, and (2) form frequency is more influential than lemma frequency.Item Open Access Violence in mind and body: Jünger’s heart, Brecht’s brain, and Döblin’s hand(2014-05-12) Hillard, Derek; dhillardItem Open Access Ekphrasis and the feminine in Sannazaro’s Arcadia(2013-12-11) Cro, Melinda A.; macroItem Open Access Birdsongs: Celan and Kafka(2012-02-08) Hillard, Derek; dhillardItem Open Access History as a dual process: Nietzsche on exchange and power(2012-01-19) Hillard, Derek; dhillardItem Open Access Rilke and historical discourse or the 'Historie' of Malte Laurids Brigge(2012-01-19) Hillard, Derek; dhillardItem Open Access The rhetoric of originality: Paul Celan and the disentanglement of illness and creativity(2012-01-12) Hillard, Derek; dhillard
