bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Realistic vs romantic: the imagistic world of post-war English literature
Authors: Álvarez Calleja María Antonia
Published: April 2016

The short story ¡s the genre which has come closest to representing the most poetic aspects of post-Second World War English literature, not only for its linguistic and stylistic concentration, but also for its imagistic world, in which the realistic contrasts with the romantic. Nevertheless, there is a transference from the classic literary images to a modern alternative. On the other hand, since 1945 writers have been preoccupied with the quest for self—a search for identity, an effort on the part of the heroes and heroines to understand and define who or what they are. In fact, the term identity plays a central role in virtually every judgment or opinion of the post-war literary scene.
Poems from Green soldiers
Authors: Bensko John , Torres Ribelles Francisco Javier
Published: April 2016

Garcia Lorca and the one-legged schoolteacher = García Lorca y el maestro cojo ; We like the leaves = Nos gustan las hojas / translation by Francisco Javier Torres Ribelles
American studies and the new historicism
Authors: Chocano Díaz María Gema
Published: April 2016

This essay argues that one major reason American studies has proved resistant to the New Historicism is that its model of pouvoir-savoir, derived from Foucault, works more readily for cultures dominated by centralized power (e.g., Greenblatt's studies of Shakespeare and Renaissance court culture). In the United States, with a tradition of weak and decentralized state power, the relations described by Foucault are more difficult to conceptualize. The other major reason, the essay suggests, is that the "American self' model — a Hegelian notion of "collective consciousness" that dominated American studies from Perry Miller through Bercovitch's Puritans Origins of the American Self — had a certain positive ideological value within American intellectual culture. The essay treats as a representative instance the work of Myra Jehlen, whose American Incarnation was the last major achievement of the "American self approach, and who is today the leading spirit of the Rutgers "new Americanists."
Task types
Authors: Cuesta Cuesta María Rosario
Published: April 2016

This paper is part of a more complete study of a number of theoretical principles concerning the teaching of English grammar in EFL contexts. The purpose of this article is to analyse a number of classifications of task types. One of the striking aspects of task typologies is the rich variety of approaches to task classification that syllabus designers now offer. The available surveys of task types usually provide the reader with lists of activities; however, they do not give teachers any guidance in grading or sequencing different tasks or in organizing and integrating criteria for task design. But we need to deal with "task types, not tasks, or there will be no generalizability" (Long 12), even though typologies are likely to be fuzzy edged and in most cases a mere convenience.
Native English-speaking teachers versus non-native English-speaking teachers
Authors: García Merino Iván
Published: April 2016

There is a stereotype that takes for granted that a native speaker is by nature the best person to teach his/her foreign language. This assumption leaves little room for non-native teachers. A comparison of these two kinds of teachers is made following Medgyes' 3 dimensional framework: native/non-native, non-native/ non-native and native/native. The aim of this article is to analyze their differences in order to prove that non-native teachers have some advantages which should be taken into account.
Raising learning awareness in the EST classroom: practical application in a lesson
Authors: Kindelán Echevarría María Paz
Published: April 2016

The promotion of learning strategies in the second language classroom has been one of the most widely discussed issues both in research and in application to teaching practice. The incorporation of strategy training in the course syllabus of the language class requires a combination of instruction of the subject contents and the development of learning strategy awareness through tasks and activities completed by students. Particularly, when learning English within a scientific or technical course, this awareness-raising process has to be integrated in the teaching materials that are largely related to the specific ends for which the language is taught. This paper presents a unit of a required English course taught in a mining engineering degree, in which students are exposed to a number of strategies that they may become aware of with appropriate direction. Although the majority use learning strategies, as demonstrated in previous research within the same context, the lecturer should make them reflect upon the techniques or tactics employed in the process of learning a second language, thus helping them become more efficient and autonomous language learners.
Case assignment in double object constructions
Authors: Vázquez Iglesias Elisa
Published: April 2016

This paper analyzes how case assignment takes place in double object constructions in English. It has been claimed in the literature that case could be either structural or inherent. I will provide some evidence showing that this distinction is problematic under certain circumstances. In this sense, I will suggest three different possibilities to unify these two processes of case assignment. In the first place, I will consider unification through PP-movement, which seems to work well if we allow different subcategorizations of the same verb. In the second place, I will focus on unification through Inherent Case, pointing out that it cannot account for some of the data presented in this paper. Finally, I will discuss and give arguments for the unification through Structural case.
Arousing the receiver's involvement by flouting the communicative principles
Authors: Díez Arroyo Marisa
Published: April 2016

In this paper we examine the addresser's attempt at gaining the addressee's attention towards his message. The field chosen for the investigation is the language of advertising, and more particularly one of its effective, although not widely used, strategies: humour. The hypothesis we put forward is that humour arises as a consequence of flouting the communicative rules. In this way, readers may develop a feeling of solidarity with the advertiser for being daring or interesting, and above all for letting them' in the know'. Thus the use of humour is studied as a persuasive tactic.
Politeness: a relevant issue for relevance theory
Authors: Escandell Vidal Victoria
Published: April 2016

The aim of this paper is to offer some guidelines for an explanation of politeness in the framework of Relevance Theory. I will suggest that the notion of social adequacy is to be preferred to that of strategy; as a primitive for politeness theory, and try to show how such a notion can be integrated into a cognitive model. Some aspects concerning the status of politeness will be then considered under the light of Wilson & Sperber's (1993) distinctions: whether (or in which sense) it is an implicature, whether (or in which sense) it is communicated, whether (or in which sense) it is relevant. The predictions that emerge from adopting this point of view make it possible to provide a detailed and consistent account of politeness manoeuvres and effects.
Rhetorical questions, relevance and scales
Authors: Gutiérrez Rexach Javier
Published: April 2016

Rhetorical questions, and other varieties of pragmatically conditioned questions, present a challenge for a purely truth-conditional theory of the interpretation of interrogatives. In this paper, it is argued that relevance-theoretic principles account for the conditions of use of rhetorical questions. Concretely, it is proposed that a pragmatic principle, the "Bottom of Scale Principle", critically interacts with the Principle of Relevance and derives the dynamic meaning of the rhetorical use of a question. The Bottom of Scale Principle is also associated with the particular entailment and monotonicity properties of interrogatives, which explain the ability of rhetorical questions to license negative polarity items.
Phatic interpretations: standarisation and conventionalisation
Authors: Nicolle Steve , Clark Billy
Published: April 2016

This paper builds on work by Zegarac and Clark (Zegarac and Clark, forthcoming; Zegarac, in press) on phatic communication. Zegarac and Clark define phatic interpretations as interpretations which depend on the recognition of a communicative intention (as defined by Sperber and Wilson 1986 and exploited in their definition of ostensive communication). This definition does not link phatic interpretations directly to social functions but does reflect the fact that phatic interpretations have social effects. The social effects follow from the fact that any act of ostensive communication is, by definition, social. Zegarac discusses how phatic interpretations become standardised and conventionalised. Here we explore the processes of standardisation and conventionalisation in more detail. A first glance at the phenomena suggests an interesting paradox. When a particular linguistic form becomes so frequently linked with phatic interpretations that this usage becomes conventionalised, Zegarac and Clark's definition seems to predict that utterances containing that form will no longer give rise to phatic interpretations (because the interpretation will depend on the linguistically-encoded meaning rather than on the recognition of a communicative intention). We consider an alternative approach to that proposed by Zegarac, which exploits the relevance-theoretic notion of procedural encoding. We show how such an approach might lead to the modification of a prediction of Zegarac and Clark, i.e. the claim that purely phatic interpretations arise only when non-phatic interpretations are not consistent with the principle of relevance.
Interpersonal communication and context accessibility in the interpretation of ironic utterances. A case study: Rastell's version of La Celestina
Authors: Ruiz Moneva María Ángeles
Published: April 2016

It has been traditionally assumed that communication is a process of transmission of information between the addresser, who encodes a certain message, and the addressee, who would decode the message produced by the former. This process is assumed to be possible thanks to the existence of a code. However, certain theories, and mainly, relevance, have made it clear that neither the code nor the process described above are sufficient tools to account for this complex phenomenon. For one thing, were this so, it appears that speakers would always convey what they really want to say, and addressees would invariably manage to decode the "right" message. However, human communication appears to be a much more complex phenomenon, and such a proteic resource as irony illustrates this quite consistently. This also shows the necessity of further exploring its meaning and the way in which the whole process unfolds. Approaching communication in terms of intentions, and their inference may well enrich and offer a wider explanation. This paper will deal with the problems presented by the conveyance of ironic utterances in an English version of La Celestina, and will aim to suggest certain ways to cope with their interpretation, in terms of the relevance proposals of the relationship between speakers' intentions, in a context which they tend to choose, and which the result of their communicative interaction will tend to broaden and make it more shared.
Against blurring the explicit/implicit distinction
Authors: Vicente Cruz Begoña
Published: April 2016

In this article it will be argued that nothing is gained by further subdividing the categories of communicated content or by allowing the explicit and the implicit to overlap in content, and so the explicit / implicit distinction can remain exhaustive and classificatory as was originally claimed in relevance theory. First, Bach's notion of impliciture will be analysed and rejected as a useful category, and second, it will be argued that Carston's independence criterion gives us a distribution of the information communicated by utterances that meets the predictions of the criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance. To that effect, a number of counterexamples that have been levelled against the independence criterion are reanalysed and found to fit rather than violate it.
Postmodernist narrative: in search of an alternative
Authors: Crews Brian
Published: April 2016

The development of the novel form is an exploration of the possibilities for realistic representation which is increasingly informed by an understanding that distortion and fabrication are inevitable consequences of the mediating process of narrative. The search for alternatives to conventional modes of representation as a way of defamiliarizing this state of affairs draws attention to the fact that the ordered human constructs that compose knowledge are fictitious systems that inevitably invade reality. A number of contemporary authors, through a variety of strategies emphasize the inevitable distortion involved in representation. The world is always transposed, reality is always framed in terms of the conventions we know and becomes an unfamiliar absence continually deferred by the fictitious construct we call knowledge. Martin Amis, Angela Carter and Ian McEwan are just a few of the authors who question existing realisms and posit alternatives but in the knowledge that reality is always other than what we make it.
William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: the status of the popular in modernism
Authors: García Mainar Luis Miguel
Published: April 2016

This paper is an attempt to assess the attitude of a modernist work towards popular culture and the social changes that transformed the United States during the twenties. Its main contention is that modernism's emphasis on epistemology has tended to obscure the conservative stance of many of its creations, apparent in their reaction against the new reconsideration of class and gender brought about by industrialisation and urbanisation. Following a combination of textual and cultural analysis, the paper scrutinises the ways in which Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury negotiates the presence of those social changes.
Paradigmatic complementariness in variation studies
Authors: Hernández Campoy Juan Manuel
Published: April 2016

Despite the fact that linguistic change, as it is widely known, constitutes one of the great unsolved mysteries of linguistic science, and consequently a challenge to generations of linguists and philologists, we believe that the emergence of different trends in sociolinguistic research —regardless of their sophistication— and their subsequent disagreements are all evidence of the constantly increasing activity and vigour of variation studies. The importance of completing a combined approach to the phenomena of diffusion of language change from diverse perspectives, amongst which the dialectological, microsociolinguistic and geolinguistic ones must not be absent, is thus crucial. These three approaches are three different, though entirely complementary, treatments focusing on the same object of study: variation and language change phenomena. Sociolinguistics inevitably tends towards both a theoretical and methodological integration, despite the plurality existing nowadays. This integrationalist tendency has become patent in the attempts of sociolinguists to adapt themselves to those aspects and artefacts of human behaviour, such as social class, sex, age, race, ethnicity, social networks, social groups, attitudes, identity, politics, ideology, etc., as well as of human geography that affect linguistic variation and communication in general.
Opening the purple wardrobe: a psychoanalytic approach to the poetry of Richard Crashaw (1613-1649)
Authors: Phillips Bill
Published: April 2016

Richard Crashaw is often considered the odd man out in Metaphysical poetry. He is condemned for being the "most European", or "Baroque", and although he is not unusual in writing religious poetry, he is unique in his devotion to the Virgin Mary, and for his obsession with bodily fluids. This essay explores Crashaw's reasons for adoring the mother-figure and anathematizing the father, by means of a brief psychoanalytic appraisal of his life and work, and shows why so many critics nave felt uncomfortable with lines like: "To see one blended in one flood,/The mother's milk, the children's blood."
The reporting verbs and bias in the press
Authors: Floyd Moore Alan
Published: April 2016

This article describes one way in which news reports, apparently neutral, subtly show the personal preferences of journalists. It shows 1he way different people are reported using different reporting verbs, thus prejudicing readers' opinions in favour of or against them. It matters considerably whether the reporting verb is "professed" or "claimed", which have negative connotations, or "explained", "announced" or "pointed out", which have a more positive sound to them. Depending on the context, others, such as "asserted", "stated", "concluded", "argued", "promised and "maintained", are more neutral. In general, those reported favourably respond to a profile of Western, official, elite, establishment speakers.
Text world creation in advertising discourse
Authors: Hidalgo Downing Laura
Published: April 2016

This article explores the way in which text worlds are created in advertising discourse by analysing linguistic choices and features of context which are crucial in the determination of specific relations between sender(s) and target audience(s), in particular, deixis and frame knowledge. The argument is that a text world model is particularly adequate for the description of the way in which advertising discourse is processed in an active, dynamic, context-dependent way. In this process, addressees reconstruct the world projected in the discourse according to their own cultural and personal knowledge from the linguistic and visual clues provided in the advertisement.
The construction of novelty in computer science papers
Authors: Luzón Marco María José
Published: April 2016

Novelty is a concept of great importance in the writing of a research paper, given that the author has to persuade the audience of the news value of the reported research, which makes it worth publishing. In this paper I use a corpus of computer science papers to investigate how novelty is created in this discipline. I analyse how the author uses evaluation and lexical cohesion to integrate his/her research into the existing knowledge structure of the field. Evaluation in computer science papers is closely associated with the Problem-Solution pattern which structures most of the papers: authors claim that the technology they introduce is the best solution to a problem that they have previously identified. Lexical cohesion highlights the novelty of the research by establishing a semantic relation of contrast between the fragment of text reporting previous research in the field and that reporting the authors' own research.
Two types of change-of-state attributes in English
Authors: Rodríguez Arrizabalaga Beatriz
Published: April 2016

Contrary to the common belief that all attributes denoting a change of state belong to one and the same uniform class, we strongly defend in the present paper the existence of two distinct syntactic-semantic kinds of change of state attributes in the English language: on the one hand, those that complement the aspectual variants of the semantically vacuous copula be; and, on the other hand, those that combine with lexically autonomous verbs and are, therefore, optional for the grammaticality of the construction. Due to the markedly different behaviour they exhibit, we are going to distinguish both classes of attributes from a terminological point of view: we will call the members of the former group 'change of state attributes', strictly speaking, and those of the latter type, resultative attributes. To prove our hypothesis, we are going to base our study mainly on the nature of the verbal constituent that surfaces in the attributive structure and, as a consequence, on the syntactic and semantic relation it maintains with the attribute under discussion.
The representation of chivalry in The Knight's Tale
Authors: Sánchez Martí Jordi
Published: April 2016

The purpose of this paper is to determine to what extent the contemporaneous state of chivalry has influenced Chaucer's Knight in his literary endeavor. First I analyze the Knight's personality, which evinces his militant and nonconformist nature: as opposed to the majority of knights, Chaucer's Knight, in an attempt to uphold the ideal of chivalry, is engaged in religious campaigns, while he refrains from taking part in the Hundred Years War. To his eyes this is an immoral war among Christians which is mainly motivated by the lucrative desires of the so-called nobles.
A complete bibliography of interpreting and translation just one click away
Authors: Franco Aixelá Javier
Published: April 2016

The article is a brief presentation of the structure, aims and rationale of BITRA (Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation of Alicante). BITRA is an on-line database which already (November, 2001) comprises more than 8,000 documents and which aspires to cover all the literature on interpreting and translation taking advantage of information technology. This database is: (1) International: It accepts works from any country and written in any language, and although English is the lingua franca, there are several working languages (Spanish, Catalan, German, French and English are already used, and Dutch will follow shortly) so that as many users as possible can search in their mother tongues. (2) Annotated: Apart from the mere bibliographic information, there are metatextual fields aimed at offering an abstract, commenting on special traits of the text or reproducing the table of contents. (3) Interactive: There is a system for suggestions and contributions that allows users to propose changes in the existing data or the inclusion of new documents. (4) Flexible: Apart from its interactive possibilities, BITRA allows searches to be performed using any criterion or combination of criteria, from author, language or type of document to the subjects the documents deal with. (5) Open and free: In keeping with its academic nature, BITRA is open to everybody without any sort of subscription or payment.
What's in a title? A cognitive approach to the role played by translated text labels and (un)adapted semiotic elements
Authors: Iliescu Gheorghiu Catalina
Published: April 2016

This paper draws upon the importance of titles in intercultural communication starting from the results of an experiment in the field of psychology aimed at measuring the mnemonic value of titles as well as the expectations and evaluations they entail or the influential power they exert on receivers. Assuming that translation is a form of communication and adopting an eclectic approach based on the functionalist view in translation and the relevance theory in linguistics, I will try to analyse the role played by text labels in literary communication through an example provided by the title of a translated drama. I will also try to observe how the dichotomic tendency 'informativity versus/and/or motivation' is solved in this case of title translation. In addition, so as to complete the view of an intercultural communicative act of such a complex nature, some semiotic elements accompanying or highlighting the translated title will be discussed within a cognitive-communicative framework. Therefore, if both titles and semiotic elements function as ostensive stimuli in the literary/dramatic intercultural communication, then a separation between both types of stimuli is needed. Thus, titles will be dealt with as 'linguistic ostensive stimuli', whereas pictures, colours and fonts manifested by the front covers, which are part of the communicative situation since they are meant to introduce the communicative act (i.e. the dramatic text) to an audience, will be dealt with in terms of visual or typographic ostensive stimuli.
From the cognitive to the pragmatic: the scientist as communicator
Authors: Pérez-Llantada Auría Carmen
Published: April 2016

The main contention in this paper is that the process of communicating scientific knowledge could be compared to the role of the translator as communicator (Hatim & Masón, 1997). Like the translator, the task of the scientist is to encode —or metaphorically "translate"— the conceptualizations of science into a very restricted register with particular linguistic, pragmatic, and ideological conventions. The present analysis also shows how discourse is ultimately subject to certain social restrictions established by the institutional matrix. Like the translator, the scientist should also develop awareness of the complexities of the sociology of the language when communicating specialised knowledge.
Shakespeare's use of malapropisms and their translation into Spanish
Authors: Soto Vázquez Adolfo Luis
Published: April 2016

The purpose of mis study is to delve into the most representative Spanish versions of Romeo andJ uliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing and The Merry Wives of Windsor in order to analyse and evaluate the way malapropisms are rendered and whether the Spanish equivalents or the other solutions successfully or unsuccessfully convey their original function embedded in the English discourse. Since the main function of the malapropism is to generate hilarity in the audience or readers, in Spanish, as a romance language, it is very easy to find a great deal of equivalent malapropisms reflecting the comic effect of the original text, thus the lack of this literary device in the Spanish versions is unforgivable.
Anticipation in conference interpreting: a cognitive process
Authors: Vandepitte Sonia
Published: April 2016

In conference interpretation research, anticipation is usually seen as the oral production of a particular part of a message in special circumstances. In psychophysiological research, however, anticipation is a mental process. The article presents a revised definition of anticipation that takes account of both approaches. It does so in terms of deliberate enrichment, a conceptual tool from relevance theory. Anticipation in conference interpreting is found to yield a high number of strengthenings rather than deletions, additions or contextual implications. This is a cognitive aspect which is typical of interpreting and distinguishes it from other communication events.
A case study of collaboration among the ESP practitioner, the content teacher, and the students
Authors: Almagro Esteban Ana , Vallejo Martos Manuel Carlos
Published: April 2016

The literature in the field of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) conspicuously documents the relevance of the collaboration between the teacher in this field and the content teacher, as well as that between the former and the student. However, the positions on this score are of a general nature and, consequently, cannot easily be put into practice. This has led us to analyze the main aspects determining this collaboration, and the way in which it can be implemented. In order to do so, we will take as a reference point a post-graduate course on Foreign Trade and, by extension, on Management internationalization. We start by describing the ESP teacher's profile, and following upon this, we introduce the theoretical framework of the present study. In turn, we give way to the contextualization of the course under scrutiny, which will allow us to describe how this collaboration was undertaken building upon Dudley-Evans and St John's (1998) view. Finally, we highlight the conclusion at which our paper has enabled us to arrive, namely, that the collaboration between both teachers builds progressively and that it has to be established by delimiting their role in it, that the students' collaboration always involves some risks we should assume and, finally, that teachers with a philological background have a great deal to bring to the ESP field.
Re-visions of Volumnia's motherhood
Authors: Álvarez Faedo María José
Published: April 2016

The last decades have witnessed the appearance and consolidation of feminist Shakespearean criticism as a challenging -and therefore harshly attacked-critical project. This article explores and revises the interpretations feminist criticism has offered of the concept of motherhood concerning the character of Volumnia in Coriolanus, from two different points of view: the Psychoanalytic approach and the political perspective -integrating the British Cultural Materialist and the American New Historicist views. From this New Historicist perspective, a new approach to the question of Volumnia's motherhood is suggested, by adding, to classical interpretations, a new one, offering an analysis of Volumnia as a Renaissance 'new mother'.
Moral certitude and moral ambiguity in Bernard Bergonzi's The Roman Persuasion
Authors: Hale Frederick
Published: April 2016

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 received an immense amount of attention in the United Kingdom and elicited various responses from trade unionists, liberal intellectuals, members of the Roman Catholic and other churches, and numerous other segments of the population during that highly politicised decade. Largely overlooked in the extensive historiography of the repercussions of the war on British society are the ways in which British religious communities responded to the perceived crisis for both Christendom and European civilisation generally. In the most detailed study of this aspect, Bernard Bergonzi's fictional reconstruction of 1981, The Roman Persuasion, the dilemma of various members of an English Roman Catholic family are probed and analysed in terms of the conflicting mind-sets of English liberalism and authoritarian conservatism in the tradition of Hilaire Belloc.
On the nature of the verb in present day English (existential) there-constructions. Formal and communicative implications
Authors: Martínez Insúa Ana Elina
Published: April 2016

There is general agreement that be is the verb 'par excellence' in so-called English existential there-constructions (existential TCs). In fact, on many occasions, a distinction is made between existential TCs -be TCs- and presentational TCs (non-be TCs). It is true, however, that other verbs may also occur in TCs. These are mainly intransitive verbs that express the ideas of permanence, being, existence, movement, position, entrance into the scene of discourse, arrival or continuation of an event (seem, come, remain, follow, develop, etc.). From a corpus-driven perspective, the proportion of non-be TCs in Present Day English (PDE) is analysed, granting special attention to their communicative value. It is hypothesised that even though, strictly speaking, non-be TCs do not primarily express existence, they do share with be TCs their main pragmatic function -i.e. signal function- a trait genuinely linked to the use of there. It is also examined whether any significant difference is observed between the use of non-be TCs in speech and writing, and what is the rationale for this difference (if any).
The Philomathian Society and political debate in late Eighteenth Century England
Authors: Pérez Berenguel José Francisco
Published: April 2016

The present article deals with several vicissitudes of British intellectual life in the late Eighteenth Century. This time, of great political upheaval, saw the creation of many societies, pleading for important reforms such as the ones implemented in France after the Revolution. The paper reveals different aspects of the political and social life of such notable characters as Sheridan, Fox, Godwin, Burke, Priestley, Wollstonecraft or Alexander Jardine himself, whose relationship with them is used as the linking nexus of the whole paper. These political reforms needed to be accompanied by some social changes such as a new and more active role for women, and their right for independence, education and the vote.
Men don't have nothing like virginity : migration, refraction, and black masculine performance in Austin Clarke's The Question
Authors: Carmona Rodríguez Pedro M.
Published: April 2016

This paper examines Austin Clarke’s novel The Question (1999) paying attention to its main character’s representation of masculinity. On the one hand, the performance of masculinity that the protagonist brandishes unveils itself as a parody of the models that the white imaginary has created of its other as well as of those internalised by the black imaginary. On the other, the paradigms of migration from the British Caribbean to North America and the ideological refraction they imply situate the speaking subject in an interstitial location from which he visualises the split between the code of Caribbean masculinity and its Canadian counterpart. Within this transcultural scope, issues of social mobility, exoticism and reified sexuality are underlined to contribute a critique of the multicultural kaleidoscope.
The thematic tradition in black British literature and its poetic representation
Authors: Fernández Rodríguez Carolina
Published: April 2016

The aim of this paper is to offer a thematic study of Black British Literature. The analysis covers the way in which Black British writers have dealt with the issues of childhood, old age, history, return to the homeland, identity, language, and hybridity. Each of those questions is exemplified with a number of poems that show one or some of the perspectives from which they can be considered. The overall study thus constitutes a revision of an integral part of contemporary English Literature that works at destabilizing the idea that “pure” cultural identities exist and that homogeneous national literary traditions are possible.
Imag(in)ing the Nation through Maori eyes/I's
Authors: Fresno Calleja Paloma
Published: April 2016

This article focuses on the contribution of Maori writers to the reconstruction of New Zealand’s national profile, with special reference to Patricia Grace’s novel Baby No-Eyes. This process has been articulated around the need to destroy colonial images and preconceptions and has allowed them to gain visibility in a society which for a long time had remained blind to Maori cultural specificity. But whereas gaining visibility constitutes an essential part in their process of cultural recovery, the article also focuses on the simultaneous need to destroy the preeminence of visual material as the main constituent the country’s national identity and stresses the capacity of these writers to delineate their ethnicity through a double process of imag(in)ation more in agreement with contemporary needs, as Grace’s works particularly reveal.
Aetiological values in Achebe's stories for children
Authors: García Ramírez Paula
Published: April 2016

A fundamental aspect of Achebe’s work is shown in the narrations for children this writer developed during the sixties and seventies. These writings were Achebe’s response to the disastrous consequences of the Biafran War for his ethnic group which provoked a long silence on the part of the writer, unable to develop his commitment with his community through longer texts. During these years most of the production of Achebe was circumscribed to literary essays and stories for children, as an attempt to build a valuable literature for children throughout autochthonous reconstructions. With the exception of Chike and the River (published in 1966), the other tales are characterized by its moral fable-like tone and by being situated in a remote past, before the known time, in which the relationships between the physical and the spiritual worlds were very intense. Taking into account all these elements, I would like to pinpoint the aetiological value of Achebe’s tales, that is, the attempt to show the rural traditions that were used by the Ibo community to explain the cause and the origin of some natural phenomena, or even, of some features of human behaviour. I dare say that these tales constitute a clear example of a specifically African literature for children that, using autochthonous elements, does not deny the contact and influence of Western literature.
The military in Nigeria's postcolonial literature : an overview
Authors: Gbemisola Adeoti
Published: April 2016

The paper is a survey of Nigeria’s postcolonial literature with a view to highlighting how writers through diverse ideological persuasions and aesthetic modes have captured people’s experience under military rule (from January 15, 1966 to May 29, 1999). The paper observes that the military is not only a dominant political force in the country’s postcolonial governance but also a recurrent subject in its narrative fiction, poetry and drama. In the works of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, John Pepper Clark, Ola Rotimi, Femi Osofi san, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Odia Ofeimun, Niyi Osundare, Ben Okri etc, one is confronted with tropes of power abuse, economic mismanagement and poverty among other legacies of military regimes. Their art also capture the twist in public perception of soldiers. Whereas, the soldiers were celebrated initially as messiahs who rescued the polity from corrupt politicians, they became vampires in the 1980s and 1990s after plunging the nation into political turmoil and economic tribulation. In its conclusion, the paper contends that Nigerian literature in post-military dispensation will continue to be topical and relevant. Indeed, it has a crucial role to play in the task of nation-building and democratic development necessitated by years of military (mis) rule.
Merlinda Bobis's use of magic realism as reflected in "White Turtle" : moving across cultures, redefining the multicultural and dialogic self
Authors: Herrero Granado María Dolores
Published: April 2016

Merlinda Bobis was born in the Philippines but now lives in Australia, which turns her into a ‘translated’ woman, that is, a woman who has been carried across different cultures and who consequently cannot be defined by making exclusive reference to any of them. Her condition of in-betweenness provides her with a privileged perspective that allows her to talk from different angles, and thus bridge the gap, or else bring to the fore, the discontinuities that separate one world from another. The aim of this paper will be to show how “White Turtle”, the short story that gives the title to the collection of stories that Bobis published in 1999, makes use of magic realism and relies on Bakhtin’s well-known notions of heteroglossia, hybridization and polyphony to encapsulate the most pressing concerns of postcoloniality and, by extension, of the multicultural diasporic subject.
A new wor(l)d order : language in the fiction of the new Caribbean diaspora
Authors: Ledent Bénédicte
Published: April 2016

Language has always been a major issue for post-colonial writers, being at once an instrument used by the colonial power and one of the prime avenues of resistance to this oppression. For displaced West Indian writers in particular, English has been a significant tool for self-assertion, all the more ambiguous because it is their “mother tongue” while being the tongue of their ancestors’ masters as well. This paper analyses how the younger novelists of the Caribbean diaspora use and transform the English language in their search for a new diasporic, cross-cultural identity. Robert Antoni, Michelle Cliff, Fred D’Aguiar, David Dabydeen, M. Nourbese Philip and Caryl Phillips will be among the writers mentioned in this paper. While some of them resort to nonstandard linguistic forms and thereby deal head on with the tension between local languages and the need for international communication, others have had a more oblique approach to linguistic change, one that involves not so much lexis as tone and rhythm and often operates by rehabilitating silenced voices from the past. I will attempt to demonstrate how these writers have turned speech into a site of creolization expressive of what Caryl Phillips has called “A New World Order”.
From the monologic eye to healing polyphonies : dialogic re/vision in native American narratives
Authors: Martínez Falquina Silvia
Published: April 2016

As within the field of New Literatures in English or minority writing, two main models of fiction and critical discourse can be found in Native American texts. On the one hand, an essentialist or national model reproduces old images of the indian by favoring a separatist approach that reinforces dichotomies and hierarchies as it affirms differences. Both Alexie’s Indian Killer and Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes are shown to be examples of this trend. On the other hand, there is a more global, hybrid and relational model, which, while it can become strategically essentialist, relies fundamentally on dialectics. As an example of this trend, Erdrich’s Tales of Burning Love provides a holistic approach that favors the dialogue between texts and reality, allowing us to perceive truth as the sum of a series of points of view, and redefining subjectivity as polyphonic and reciprocal. It is the point of this paper to show that, besides a productive re/vision of the categories of gender and ethnicity that allows for the simultaneous deconstruction of conventions and the affirmation of differences, this second approach allows us to reinterpret Native American texts as the result of a series of open dialogues between ethnic and canonical, masculine and feminine, old and new.
Literary Moonlighting : the cultural spaces of Shashi Tharoor
Authors: Skinner John
Published: April 2016

Shashi Tharoor is remarkable for a sequence of three fictions which subvert a number of paradigms commonly linked with postcolonial writing or the New Literatures in English, even as they transcend the boundaries of the classic realist novel. His first work, The Great Indian Novel (1989), while owing a literary debt to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, may also be the most virtuoso reworking of an epic model -in this case, the Mahabharata- yet produced in English. His second novel, Show Business (1991), with its light-hearted satire of the Bollywood film industry, is also a more trenchant indictment of corruption in Indian public life. Riot (2001), finally, is a study of an East-West cultural clash against the backdrop of the communal disturbances following the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in 1992. On the basis of brief analysis of all three novels, an attempt is made to position the author in cultural and literary terms. Tharoor’s personal standpoint is, however, more explicit than most contemporary writers’. A social and political ideology is clearly articulated in his important essay collection, India: From Midnight to the Millenium (1997), and this work is therefore read in close conjunction with the novels.
To voice or not to voice the Tasmanian Aborigines : novels by Matthew Kneale and Richard Flanagan
Authors: Wallhead Salway Celia Margaret
Published: April 2016

The current debate in post-colonial studies continues to include discussions of whether it is licit or politically correct to represent, for the purposes of entertainment, or even edification, the situation of peoples who have suffered under colonisation. We ask if it is better to avoid the subject altogether and forget them, or give them a voice, even if it means recreating their humiliation and pain. A particularly extreme case is chosen for study here: that of the extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines. There has been a spate of books on the subject in the last year or two, both fiction and non-fiction, which have added to the debate. I look more closely at two prize-winning novels: Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish. Analysis of their approach, setting, narrative strategies and characterisation reveals that this post-colonial generation of writers is understandably much more sensitive than the generation which first began to question colonisation, of which Conrad is the most visible. Kneale and Flanagan attempt to give a voice to the hitherto silenced Aborigines, and create individual figures instead of stereotypes. They also portray marginalised Europeans who suffered alongside the natives, and show them, not only as fully human, but also noble and talented.
The context of translation : Richard Fanshawe and Spanish verse
Authors: Río Eduardo R. del
Published: April 2016

Compared to French and Italian, Spanish poetry was almost completely ignored by English translators during the seventeenth century. The limited amount of poetry that was translated, however, reveals important historical and social forces at work. Specifically, the deep resentment and fear that Protestant England held toward the “evil popish forces” of Catholic Spain played an essential role in guiding translators’ choices. This essay examines contemporary accounts of Anglo-Spanish relations in England, and argues that the fear of popery was a determining principle behind the choices of at least one translator of Spanish poetry, Sir Richard Fanshawe. Richard Fanshawe’s interest in Spanish literature, however, was also a personal one. His diplomatic assignments in that country made him acquire a taste for the language and culture of that land. Fanshawe’s close relationship with the Stuart monarchy -a monarchy that itself showed ambivalence toward Spain- is one more factor to consider when attempting to understand his translating choices.
A pragmatic account of listenership : implications for foreign/second language teaching
Authors: Garcés Conejos Pilar , Bou Franch Patricia
Published: April 2016

In our view, there is a general need to gain insights into what a listener does in linguistic interaction and to provide a comprehensive account of listenership from a pragmatic standpoint. This paper examines listener roles and processes in three aspects of communication: verbal understanding, verbal production and negotiation of meaning. Traditional views of communication are invariably speaker-centred and based on coding and decoding processes. This paper contains a critical review of these issues which are then related to foreign/second language teaching. Competent non-native speakers of a language should be able to both produce and interpret language correctly. We believe that social and cognitive pragmatic theories (Linguistic Politeness Theory and Relevance Theory) can be successfully applied to second language production and comprehension. Taking as our starting point Cauldwell’s (1998) caution to the effect that we need knowledge of what happens in real communication before thinking of methodologies to teach foreign languages, this paper reviews the three communicative processes of understanding, production and negotiation, and next addresses the main implications for the establishment of a theory-driven teaching methodology.
Reading Diego de San Pedro in Tudor England
Authors: Gil Sáenz Daniel
Published: April 2016

This article traces the changing cultural spaces within Tudor England in which San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor and Arnalte y Lucenda were transferred and read. The analysis of bibliographical data and paratextual materials sheds light on how and by whom these works were read throughout this period, from the court of Henry VIII to the wider audiences marketed by Claudius Hollyband’s Italian-English edition. The case of Diego de San Pedro serves to illustrate the interplay between transfer, rewriting and reading competence which conditioned the dissemination of texts in the English Renaissance.