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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Russian Civic Criticism And The Idyllic Dream In Ivan Goncharov’S “Oblomov”, Cassio De Oliveira
Russian Civic Criticism And The Idyllic Dream In Ivan Goncharov’S “Oblomov”, Cassio De Oliveira
World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations
Nikolai Dobroliubov’s and Dmitrii Pisarev’s reviews of Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov have gone into history as exemplars of Russian civic criticism. Their main argument centers on the eponymous protagonist’s seeming inability to exit his lethargic condition, which they interpret as a symptom of the Russian status quo at the time of the Great Reforms. In the present article, I argue that the case of Oblomov demonstrates the limits of the civics’ mimetic criticism. The dominant chronotope of the novel, namely the idyll, indicates that Oblomov is not in essence a novel about the hero’s inability to change (which would presuppose …
Mark Twain On The Soviet Silver Screen: Stalinist Laughter And Anti-Racism In Tom Soier, Cassio De Oliveira
Mark Twain On The Soviet Silver Screen: Stalinist Laughter And Anti-Racism In Tom Soier, Cassio De Oliveira
World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations
This article is an analysis of the Soviet film Tom Soier, an adaptation of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn released in 1936, at the height of the Stalinist period. In the article, the author places the film in the context of the Soviet support of the Black struggle against racial segregation in America by showing how Tom Soier creatively combines the plots of Twain’s novels in order to propagate an antiracist message. Furthermore, by casting African American actors in the roles of Black enslaved characters, the film also engages with what Steven Lee has called the ethnic …
Writing Outside The Soviet Canon: Aleksandr Kozachinskii's "The Green Wagon" As Roman A Clef And Odesa Memoir, Cassio F. De Oliveira
Writing Outside The Soviet Canon: Aleksandr Kozachinskii's "The Green Wagon" As Roman A Clef And Odesa Memoir, Cassio F. De Oliveira
World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations
This essay analyzes Aleksandr Kozachinskii’s 1938 Russian-language novella “The Green Wagon” as a roman à clef and exemplar of the Odesa Myth that has been unjustly neglected in literary scholarship. Reasons for the neglect of “The Green Wagon” include the historical context of its publication, between the Great Purges of 1936–1938 and the outbreak of World War II; Kozachinskii’s untimely death; and the conventional interpretation of the novella that reduces it to a fictionalized account of Kozachinskii’s friendship with Evgenii Petrov in Odesa during the early Soviet period. Against such a reductionist reading, and on the basis of recent archival-based …
Hybrids 2.0: Forward To A New Normal In Post-Pandemic Language Teaching, William J. Comer
Hybrids 2.0: Forward To A New Normal In Post-Pandemic Language Teaching, William J. Comer
World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations
This article reflects on possible ways of incorporating the practices and tools of pandemic-induced remote teaching into the post-pandemic face-to-face teaching of Russian. We posit that a large number of the tools and practices that face-to-face teachers adopted during the pandemic will continue to be useful and effective for accomplishing fundamental pedagogical imperatives such as curating learners’ access to input and providing opportunities for learners to interact with that input. Nevertheless, we also assert the benefits of synchronous face-to-face language instruction for building community and interaction. We explore ways of intentionally blending practices into new hybrid models of language instruction, …
Investigating The Needs Of Foreign Language Learners Of Tuvan, Rossina Soyan
Investigating The Needs Of Foreign Language Learners Of Tuvan, Rossina Soyan
World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations
Where do you start the course design for a minority language? One starting point is identifying and surveying a community of possible learners. This paper explores the needs of learners of Tuvan, a language spoken primarily in the Republic of Tuva, Southern Siberia, Russia. The study was conducted in two steps: an online questionnaire (March 2019) and semi-structured interviews (April 2019). The results showed a limited interest in Tuvan as a foreign language (13 responses) on the one hand, but a long-standing one on the other, more than two decades in some cases. The identified learner needs fell into three …
“Le Soleil De France”: Warm Translations Of Guy De Maupassant In Works By Isaak Babel’ And Ivan Bunin, Cassio De Oliveira
“Le Soleil De France”: Warm Translations Of Guy De Maupassant In Works By Isaak Babel’ And Ivan Bunin, Cassio De Oliveira
World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations
In the wake of Lev Tolstoi’s appraisals of his work, Guy de Maupassant was embraced by Russian twentieth-century authors who admired his mastery of the short story. The Soviet writer Isaak Babel’ and the émigré writer Ivan Bunin reference stories and other texts by Maupassant in their stories ‘Guy de Maupassant’ and ‘Bernard’. To these authors, Maupassant constitutes a means of expressing their own outlook on the craft of literature. Mediated by the act of translation from French into Russian, Maupassant’s writing enables the Russian authors to articulate distinct identities regarding their national literature: as Soviet and émigré.
Reading L2 Russian: The Challenges Of The Russian-English Dictionary, William J. Comer
Reading L2 Russian: The Challenges Of The Russian-English Dictionary, William J. Comer
World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations
This descriptive study examines when and how students use Russian-English dictionaries while reading informational texts in Russian and what success they have with word lookup. The study uses introspective verbal protocols (i.e., think-alouds) to follow how readers construct meaning from two texts while reading them for a limited time first without a dictionary and then with access to a paper bilingual dictionary. Quantitative and qualitative data about readers’ language and dictionary skills are presented based on the readers’ think-aloud protocols for the dictionary portion of the reading sessions. The data reveal patterns of dictionary usage and problems in finding words …