Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Generative Artificial Intelligence, Co-Evolution, And Language Education, Steven L. Thorne

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

At this point in the history of applications of technology for language learning, there is nothing surprising about uses of video conferencing, social media, language tutorial websites and apps, online textbooks and grammars, translation tools, and video- and audio-based content (among others). As Internet theorist Clay Shirky has described it, “communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring” (Shirky, 2008, p. 105), and indeed, there has been considerable interest in more deeply examining humans’ now quotidian uses of digital technologies and modalities as they potentially transform language use and trajectories of development. Examples of incisive research …

From Body To World: Empathy And The Transformative Power Of Cinematic Imagination, Isabel Jaén Portillo

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

The transformative power of fiction has been acknowledged since antiquity (Jaén and Simon, 2012) and technologies such as cinematography have amplified it. This power resides in its capacity to move us, to change our emotional states. Moreover, the audiovisual and narrative strategies employed in film fictions allow us to experience emotions not only intensely but also safely. Our participatory responses are both elicited and modulated by the fictional “crafted” quality of the stories that we witness on the screen. What happens before our eyes does not pose a threat to us and does not need our intervention. Yet, …

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

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 …

Can Fiction Lead To Prosocial Behaviour? Exclusion, Violence, Empathy, And Literature In Early Modernity, Isabel Jaén-Portillo

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this short essay, I want to address the relationship between positivity and negativity in affect theories and literary analysis by focusing on the connection between empathy and literature in early modernity, a period when affect theories emerge robustly and are articulated in treatises such as De anima et vita (1538) by Juan Luis Vives (1492–1590) or Nueva Filosofía (1587) by Oliva de Sabuco (1562–1626?).1 We begin with the proposition that fictional narratives may move us to care for others and help them. Indeed, the idea that fiction can make us more empathetic and, thus, turn us into better human …

Exploring The Lexical Profile Of Advanced L2 Writers: Longitudinal Data From The Russian Overseas Flagship Program, William J. Comer

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study explores the lexical profile of essays written by 48 advanced learners of second language (L2) Russian who participated in the Russian Overseas Flagship, an intensive year-long study abroad program, designed to help students reach Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Level 3 proficiency in all skills. Using the lexical frequency profile (LFP) and P–Lex as measures of vocabulary sophistication, the study found that over the 9 months of the program, students significantly increased their usage of words from the lowest frequency bands. This adds to the findings of Hacking and Tschirner (2017) that knowledge of lexical items at the 3,000–5,000 …

Pig Gourd: The Meaning Of Tezuka’S Playing Around With Form, Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Taking an arguably minor character from Tezuka Osamu’s oeuvre, Natsume Fusanosuke argues how the Pig Gourd’s cameos even in the artist’s most serious works demonstrate a bifurcated sense of play and high-brow artistry in his manga. Natsume employs an early version of his ‘manga-expression theory’ (manga hyōgen-ron) manga-analysis approach, which he began to develop in this, his first manga-studies monograph and seminal study of the ‘god of manga’ Tezuka Osamu. This translation of a chapter essay from Where Is Tezuka Osamu? (Citation1992) demonstrates Natsume’s versatility in isolating thematic patterns or formal experimentations in an artist’s style, including …

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 …

“The Power Of Onomatopoeia In Manga” An Essay By Natsume Fusanosuke With Translators’ Introduction, Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Natsume Fusanosuke is one of the founding critics of manga that pioneered a style of formal analysis of manga in the 1990s. Natsume’s first important foray into his “theory of expression” (hyōgenron) was seen in the collaborate work, Manga no yomikata (How to read manga) in 1995. He later streamlined those ideas in a twelve-episode series Manga wa naze omoshiroi no ka: sono bunpō to hyōgen (Why is manga so interesting?: Its grammar and expression) for NHK television in 1996. The accompanying expanded book (1997) consists of well-ordered, individual essays on elements of manga such as …

Variation In Spanish/S: Overview And New Perspectives, Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

The natural tendency for language variation, intensified by Spanish’s territorial growth, has driven sibilant changes and mergers across the Spanish-speaking world. This article aims to present an overview of the most significant processes undergone by sibilant /s/ in various Spanish-speaking areas: devoicing, weakening, aspiration, elision, and voicing. Geographically based phonetic variations, sociolinguistic factors, and Spanish language contact situations are considered in this study. The sibilant merger and its chronological development in modern Spanish, along with geographic expansion, have resulted in multiple contemporary dialectal variations. This historical lack of stability in these sounds has marked modern regional variations. Tracing and framing …

Remembering Two Titans Of Manga: Shirato Sanpei And Saitō Takao, Natsume Fusanosuke, Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

What follows is a pair of recent tributes Natsume Fusanosuke wrote for Japanese newspapers, concerning the pioneering cartoonists Saitō Takao and Shirato Sanpei, who died, respectively, on September 24, 2021, and October 8, 2021. The two articles are here presented in English for the first time.

Translated by Jon Holt & Teppei Fukuda

Takahashi Rumiko And The Turning Point In The History Of Manga And Anime, Natsume Fusanosuke, Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Takahashi Rumiko’s entry onto the manga scene represented the turning point in the history of manga and anime. This turning point signifies the emergence of the genre of romantic comedy (rabukome = “love comedy”)—a romantic relationship-centered genre certainly common to shōjo (girls’) comics category at the time—now beginning to appear in shōnen (boys’) comics, too.

Translated by Jon Holt & Teppei Fukuda

Charlie Brown And Me, Natsume Fusanosuke, Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts turned 71 years old on October 2, and we celebrate the anniversary of this world-famous comic strip with a love letter from Japan. Natsume Fusanosuke originally wrote this essay[1] about his connection to Peanuts in 1999 for a supplement issue of Bungei Shunjū magazine: a special on one of the gods of comics, Tezuka Osamu, with whom Charles Schulz stands in great company. Natsume is a voracious reader and a global observer of both manga and world comics. Here, he describes the appeal of Peanuts for Japanese readers and how it compares to a similarly beloved Japanese …

Making It Just In Time: Author-Creator Matsumoto Taiyō, Natsume Fusanosuke, Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Translated by Jon Holt and Teppei Fukuda

The first time I can remember encountering Matsumoto Taiyō’s work was probably when he released his short story collection, Blue Spring (Aoi haru - Matsumoto Taiyō tanpenshū [stories published from 1990 to 1993; Shōgakukan, 1993]). All of the stories concern a bunch of young dudes -- full of desires, frustrations, and violent tendencies -- and no chance they can ever get past those things. I thought to myself at that time, “Ah, I bet this stuff means a lot to readers in their teens, but they don’t really do anything for me.” …

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, …

Time To Re-Evaluate Taniguchi Jiro's Pace In Manga, Natsume Fusanosuke, Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Natsume Fusanosuke is Emeritus Professor of the Graduate Program of Cultural Studies in Corporeal and Visual Representation, Gakushūin University. Despite his recent retirement from Gakushūin in March, he is still very active in manga criticism and scholarship. Originally a manga artist himself in the 1980s, by the 1990s he began doing more writing about manga, although he often still employs his cartooning skills to assist in his analysis and explanation of his subjects, much like his American contemporary Scott McCloud. It is not a stretch to compare the latter’s Understanding Comics to Natsume's work in the classic How to Read …

The Functions Of Panels (Koma) In Manga: An Essay By Natsume Fusanosuke, Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Natsume Fusanosuke presents in this essay the core ideas of his formal ‘theory of expression’ (manga hyōgen-ron) that focuses on three basic elements of manga: words, pictures, and frames. In the 1990s, Natsume emerged as a seminal scholar of Manga Studies, whose influential works include Manga no yomikata (coauthored, 1995) and Manga wa naze omoshiroi no ka: sono hyōgen to bunpō (1997), where the present essay is found. Here, Natsume describes the central aspects of panel constructions in manga: creating a sense of order for the reader by segmenting time; shaping the reader’s mental perceptions by panel compression (asshuku) and …

The Construction Of Panels (Koma) In Manga: By Natsume Fusanosuke From Why Is Manga So Interesting?: Its Grammar And Expression (Manga Wa Naze Omoshiroi No Ka: Sono Hyōgen To Bunpō, 1997), Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

“We are not alone!” (“Ui aa natto aroon!”) was the shared response of Natsume Fusanosuke and his colleague Takekuma Kentarō when, as if visited by extraterrestrials, they encountered a kindred spirit in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (first published in Japanese as Mangagaku in 1998; retranslated in 2020).1 Natsume and his fellow critics and scholars had published their own definitive study of how to understand comics in 1995: the now out-of-print co-authored How to Read Manga (Manga no yomikata, Takarajima), for which Natsume made a considerable contribution. Like McCloud, Natsume trailblazed a long-lasting path about how to understand …

Lenguaje Y Simbolismo En La Llamada, Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Book chapter in Mucho Más Que Cine: Historia, Literatura y Arte en el Cine en Español y en Portugués

Introduction:
Con un total de cinco nominaciones y galardonada con un premio Goya a la mejor canción original en el 2018, esta película española, dirigida por los Javis (Javier Ambrossi y Javier Calvo) nos abre las puertas a una experiencia fílmica cargada de simbolismos, melodías alegres y de música vivencial. Los directores nos presentan un entramado iconográfico y metafórico salpicado de ritmos pegadizos, populares e igualmente reveladores del mundo interior de las protagonistas. Atildados como el nuevo dúo almodovariano (Lunardelli, 2019) …

Aatj’S Role In Diversity And Inclusion: An Opportunity To Transform Into A Well-Integrated Organization, Suwako Watanabe

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

According to the survey results, 57% of the survey respondents said no to the question, “Is the Japanese language educator community in North America diverse one?” (Mori, Hasegawa, Park, and Suzuki, this volume). This result suggests that the American Association of Teachers of Japanese (AATJ) as a professional organization needs to improve diversity within the field. What is a more important question is whether or not our organization and its membership as a whole embrace the value of diversity and put it into practice in every aspect of their profession on a daily basis. The survey results make it clear …

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 …

Book Review Of, Japanese Kanji Power: A Workbook For Mastering Japanese Characters, Karen Curtin

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Book review of Japanese Kanji Power: A Workbook for Mastering Japanese Characters, by John Millen

Book Review Of, Beneath The Sleepless Tossing Of The Planets: Selected Poems Of Makoto Ōoka, Jon Holt

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Book review of Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets: Selected Poems ofcMakoto Ōoka.

“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.

The Characteristics Of Japanese Manga, Jon Holt, Teppei Fukuda

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the field of manga studies, Natsume Fusanosuke is widely known as an important critic and scholar. Not only does he maintain a brutally prolific publication record, but one must keep in mind he was of a new wave of manga commentators, critics, and scholars that made their impact on Japanese culture by bringing public acceptance to manga in the 1990s. Many scholars in comics studies are aware of Manga no yomikata (How to Read Manga [Takarajima, 1995]), a co-authored book that consists of a considerable contribution by Natsume, and of its importance in establishing certain types of approaches to …

Image And Storytelling New Approaches To Hispanic Cinema And Literature, Gina Herrmann, Isabel Jaén Portillo

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

This special issue of Periphērica, Image and Storytelling: New Approaches to Hispanic Cinema and Literature, features leading research by scholars of Hispanic cultures at the crossroads of literature, film, mind, and society. The collection showcases cutting-edge fields and themes including cognitive studies, affect studies, embodiment, and empathy, as well as new perspectives on adaptation, film typology, film teaching, gender, and genre. The research presented in this special issue underscores the excitement produced by crossing disciplinary boundaries in the study of verbal and visual narratives, moving beyond prevalent transnational approaches that do not sufficiently address key factors in the creation and …

Aproximación Léxica A Algunos Arabismos Del Castellano Del Siglo Xvi En El Caso Inquisitorial De Lucrecia De León (Lexical Approaches To Some 16th-Century Castilian Arabisms In The Inquisition Case Of Lucrecia De León), Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Based on Lucrecia de León’s oneiric records, this study focuses on a series of Arabisms in the Inquisition manuscripts of her persecution and imprisonment. The written documents of this young woman’s dreams, collected and conserved by scribes and inquisitors at the end of the sixteenth century, comprises 415 narrative fragments, dated between 1587 and 1590. The main goal of this article is to analyze three Arabisms, alcabala, ataifor, and búcaro, as examples of the Arabic influence on the Castillian vocabulary of the time. Besides the sociolinguistic analysis of these three words, we present this woman as representative of her gender …

In Search Of The Iraqi Other: Iraqi Fiction In Diaspora And The Discursive Reenactment Of Ethno-Religious Identities, Yasmeen S. Hanoosh

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In Iraqi fiction, the prerogative to narrate the experience of marginal identities, particularly ethno-religious ones, appeared only in the post-occupation era. Traditionally, secular Iraqi discourse struggled to openly address “sectarianism” due to the prevalent notion that sectarian identities are mutually exclusive and oppositional to national identity. It is distinctly in post-2003 Iraq—more precisely, since the sectarian violence of 2006–2007 began to cut across class, civil society, and urban identities—that works which consciously refuse to depict normative Iraqi identities with their mainstream formulations became noticeable. We witness this development first in the Western diaspora, where Iraqi novels exhibit a fascination with …

El Arte Sinestético En La Obra De Isabel Coixet, Eva NúÑEz-MéNdez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Entre las directoras españolas más internacionales se destaca Coixet. Sus largometrajes, spots publicitarios, documentales y cortos evidencian un arte cinematográfico que apuesta por destacar la esencia universal del individuo en un marco deconstructivo sin contextos nacionales ni parámetros temporales. Los títulos y textos de sus obras nos hacen reflexionar en el poder de la imagen como vehículo artístico de compromiso social y visual. Ver sus creaciones es una sinestesia: el discurso fílmico conmueve más allá del plano visual-auditivo, haciendo que la imagen despierte sentidos como el gusto, el tacto y el olfato. Esta ponencia se centrará en decodificar su trayectoria …

X-Rated And Excessively Long: Ji-Amari In Hayashi Amari's Tanka, Jon P. Holt

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

As a fixed 31-syllable form of short poetry, Japan's tanka is one of the world's oldest forms of still-practiced poetry, with examples perhaps dating back to the fifth century. In the modern periods of Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishō (1912-1926), poets radically reformed the genre, expanding diction beyond millennium-old classical limits, thereby allowing poets to write not only about cherry blossoms and tragic love but also about things like steam trains and baseball games; although today many tanka poets in practicing circles still employ classical Japanese, many modern masters innovated the genre by skillfully blending in colloquial language. Like their modern …