Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Writing In The Language Of Reality: Interwar Experiments In Language, Robin Fuller

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This paper examines projects in universal communication from the interwar period, including Charles Kay Ogden’s Basic English, Otto Neurath’s Isotype, and László Moholy-Nagy’s typo-photo. The projects under discussion — experiments in language reform, graphic design and photography — were all born from a dissatisfaction with the imprecise, arbitrary and historically-contingent nature of established languages and semiotic systems. A non-arbitrary mode of communication was sought, one that represented reality directly without translation through a cultural code.

Patricide Or Mourning The Nation-State In Francis Leclerc’S Looking For Alexander, Sophie Boyer

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article examines two closely connected dimensions of Francis Leclerc’s 2004 film, Looking for Alexander: a psychoanalytical dimension and a political one. Freud’s theories on the murder of the primal violent father in his essay Totem and Taboo provide the framework for a psychoanalytical interpretation of the protagonist’s fate: Alexandre Tourneur, a veterinarian struck by amnesia, embarks on a quest for his lost identity. Facilitated by the totemic figure of the deer, the act of remembering gradually leads to a conscious awakening to the events of an abusive childhood and the crime of patricide he committed as a boy …

Cinomade And The Fight Against Hiv/Aids Pandemic In Burkina Faso, Vincent Bouchard

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article is questioning the validity of educational screenings in a West African context, based on the detail study of Cinomade’s activities to raise awareness of the HIV/Aids pandemic in Burkina Faso. While traditional educational films are characterised by a general discourse prepared for a heterogeneous cultural area and try to convince the participants by imposing an outsider’s opinion, in that case, Cinomade’s team creates a specific video for each projection based on interviews made the same day in the village, in order not to expose the spectator to the point of view of foreigners (governmental employees or …

A Revolt Of The Masses: Culture And Modernity In Early 20th Century Spain: From Bullfights To Football Games, Katrine Helene Andersen

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article discusses the consolidation of mass culture in early 20^th century Spain and analyses the discrepancy between the intellectual debate about Spanish culture and public behaviour. Bullfighting has throughout history been a much debated theme amongst intellectuals, and it has been banned by kings and the Church on several occasions. Nevertheless, there has always been an audience. In early 20^th century, football entered the scene of popular culture in Spain and gained very quickly in popularity. The article discusses the presence of the two and analyses the contribution of bullfighting and football to the process of modernisation …

Kunst Fürs Volk: Genre Painting As Mass Culture In Nineteenth-Century Germany, Colleen Becker

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

Kunst fürs Volk repositions genre painting in nineteenth-century Germany as a form of mass culture, rather than high art, to achieve new insight into the form and function of a rather tired pictorial format. Genre paintings were as commonplace at galleries and large-scale art exhibitions as they were in commercial art, and they were used to illustrate all manner of objects and ephemera. The reiteration of forms within genre paintings had become, in a sense, a ‘massification’ of artistic technique and expression, just as the images and figurative elements themselves were repeated endlessly within different media formats. To the extent …

Projecting Le Temps Des Loisirs: Cycling And Working-Class Identity In French Cinema Of The 1930s, Barry Nevin

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article interprets images of bicycles in two films – Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (Renoir, 1936) and Le Jour se lève (Marcel Carné, 1939) – whose directors each turned their cameras to the competing ideologies that fractured France over the course of the 1930s. Locating the practice of cycling within its contemporary economic, political and sociological contexts, this analysis proposes that Renoir and Carné’s respective portrayals of cycling chart evolutions in French national identity and express French society’s expectations of the future during the rise and precipitous fall of the Front populaire in the turbulent years preceding the outbreak …

Nikolai Shpanov And The Evolution Of The Soviet Spy Thriller, Duccio Colombo

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

It is a common opinion that Stalinist literature knew no explicitly popular genres, and that, consequently, its whole body can be regarded as popular culture. The case of Nikolai Shpanov is one of the most evident arguments against such an interpretation.

From the late Thirties to the early Fifties, Shpanov's works, centered around the fight with fiendish spies, had huge print runs and conspicuous success among the readers; yet, Soviet critics nearly ignored them. The publishing channels were not those of the officially endorsed "classics" of Socialist Realism, but rather what can be regarded as a Soviet equivalent of a …

When Popular Cultures Are Not So Popular: The Case Of Comics In France, Sylvain Aquatias

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

Studies about comics in France have often focused on the process of cultural legitimation. This process is made complex by the composition of the French readership of comics, which consists largely of children, and by the transmedia circulation and expansion of comics, including cartoons and videogames. These factors, and the role of peers’ prescription reduce the impact of cultural legitimacy. By contrast, when adults are concerned, a correlation between education and tastes in comic art can be clearly identified, as evidenced in the preference shown by adult readers with higher instruction level for graphic novels.

Comic art is characterised by …

Queer, Gender And Crime Fiction In French Studies: A Hazardous Scientific Endeavour, Andrea Hynynen

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article focuses on the multifaceted challenge faced by academics doing queer and gender studies of French crime fiction. It argues that the French literary arena still entertains a sharp divide between literature and commercialist mass fiction, which hinders the establishment of popular fiction studies. It further discusses the reasons for and the effect of queer theory’s late arrival to France, arguing that France’s strong republican ideal entails a fear of ghettoization that has undermined the development of gender and queer analysis, especially of literature. These phenomena, in combination with France’s centralized, traditionalist academic institutions and linguistic franco-centrism, contribute to …

The Way We Read Now: Middlebrow Fiction In Twenty-First Century Europe, Diana Holmes

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

The allocation of a novel to the category ‘middlebrow’ is partly a matter of marketing and shifting attitudes to literary value, but this article argues that it also designates certain stylistic and narrative qualities that are little esteemed by ‘serious’ critics, but appeal consistently to a wider reading public. The article focuses on one sub-category of contemporary middlebrow fiction, feminine crime, through a comparative analysis of novels by Fred Vargas (French) and Kate Atkinson (British). The argument addresses the relationship between popular and middlebrow within the genre of crime writing, and the ways in which a female perspective inflects generic …

Preface, Dominique Jeannerod, Federico Pagello, Michael Pierse

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This second issue of CALL Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language makes available a group of papers selected from the considerably larger body of work that was presented at The Cultures of Popular Culture conference, promoted by the Royal Irish Academy’s Committee for Modern Languages, Literary and Cultural Studies and held at Queen’s University Belfast on 13 and 14 December, 2013. The conference was the first one entirely devoted by the RIA to a subject that has become increasingly central in the field of Modern Languages as well in numerous other disciplines. If compared to the countless academic …

The Construction Of The Memory Of Italy In Argentina Through A Choice Of Translated Essays, Maria Belén Hernández-González

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

As a country of immigrants, Argentina assimilated several languages in its idiolect. The languages spoken by the majority of newcomers were amalgamated with Spanish. In this respect, the birth of Argentina as an independent nation is connected to migration and translation. In fact, in Argentina, exiled or immigrant Spanish and Italian writers earned their living primarily as translators for publishers and journals, and in many cases their work was of outstanding quality. As part of an ongoing research project entitled "Essay, cultural memory and translation in Sur (1931-1970)", this paper reveals a particular interpretation of Italian culture through the translations …

"Gained In Translation": Building The African Diaspora Through Linguistic Transposition In 20th Century Poetry, Cyril Vettorato

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This paper examines the relationship between language and diaspora by trying to look beyond the question of what befalls native tongues in the countries of arrival. The experience of forced migration undergone by African people brought to the Americas might have dispossessed them from their ancestral tongues, but it did not prevent them from aspiring to use language, be it the language of the former slave owner, to express their identity and shared historical experience. Using the example of American poet Langston Hughes and his Cuban peer Nicolás Guillén, this article will highlight the way poets from the African diaspora …

Histoire Croisée As An Approach To Migrant Writing, Gijsbert Pols

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

Although commonly understood as a monolithic entity, scholars have successfully approached the idea of cultural identity in terms of relationship, reference and binary opposition during the last two decades. This approach has consequences for the study of migrant literature. It seems the widely shared idea of ‘cultural transfer’, which implies a linear movement between mutually independent cultural spaces, is obsolete. This article instead proposes the concept of the histoire croisée, developed by Werner and Zimmermann, as a more fruitful model. Following Werner and Zimmermann’s suggestion that any migrant situation can be seen as culturally ‘crossed’, the article discusses two Dutch …

"Os Retornados" With Antunes: Luanda, Angola And Lisbon, Daniel De Zubia Fernández

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

António Lobo Antunes explores a forced encounter of a Portuguese diaspora with Africa for some settlers. He examines the nature of the bi-directional diaspora for “os retornados”, who, having returned to Portugal after independence of the colonies, found they were invisible in the eyes of Portugal, as portrayed in ‘O esplendor de Portugal’ and in ‘A história do hidroavião’. Luanda, Angola and Lisbon are depicted as spaces where each individual represents the reverse of the Portuguese colonial past. Antunes turns to historical facts as a source for a critical fiction. The prominence given to the experience of Africa and Portugal …

Paris Calling: Typical And Untypical Experiences Of Latin American And African Diasporas, Kian-Harald Karimi

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

A metropolis such as Paris may provide a common ground for the experiences of migrants coming from Africa and Latin American. The traditional capital of Latin American literatures is also considered to be the greatest agglomeration of African immigrants mostly coming from former French colonies. But a common ground does not necessarily mean that they have a great deal in common. Two novels, Café Nostalgia by the Cuban author Zoé Valdés and Black Bazar by the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou, not only define the topographic base of their exile. They also discuss the special reasons for their residence in a …

The Choral Intensification Of A Chronotope, Lluís Muntada Vendrell

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

According to an ancient constant, literature can be regarded as a struggle against oblivion, as an attempt to preserve individual and collective memory. On the grounds of the Pragmatics of Literature, we can consider that the processes of (re)construction of the literary memory of rootlessness, exile, persecution and imprisonment reveal two basic types of creative models: the objective description of reality and a plausible fictionality. This paper focuses on the first of these two creative models through the exploration and critical analysis of the book Allez! Allez!, which contains a set of texts by several authors compiled by Professor …

"Dad, Yo Soy Una Chica Americana": Migration, Identity And Language In Eduardo González Viaña's El Corrido De Dante, Fredrik Olsson

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

The focus of this article is the representation of language and identity in Hispanic immigrant literature. It provides a framework for the analysis of linguistic and cultural constructions of migrant identities in literary texts, on the basis of the exploration of the novel El Corrido de Dante, by Eduardo González Viaña. The most significant finding is that González Viaña applies linguistic homogenization in order to stress a common Hispanic identity without effacing cultural, national and ethnic differences, as these are stylistically marked by means of strategic (re)creations of different varieties of Spanish and instances of code-switching between Spanish and English …

"The Wild East" In Contemporary German Poetry: Gerald Zschorsch, Kurt Drawert, Brigitte Oleschinski, Sabine Egger

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article discusses images of a “European” or “Wild” East in German poetry after 1989, specifically the work of Gerald Zschorsch, Kurt Drawert and Brigitte Oleschinski. Do their texts confirm or challenge a dichotomy with a long tradition in German and Western European thought, by juxtaposing “Germany” or “Europe” and this “East”, or by aesthetically transcending such a dichotomy? How do their aesthetics open perspectives on inter- or transcultural movement beyond existing ideas of regional, national and European identities in an increasingly globalized world? Focusing on place, space and movement, the article addresses Centre-Periphery dynamics from a new angle. While …

Balancing Diversities: Multiculturalism And Cultural Identity In A Selected Number Of Works Of Modern Irish Fiction, Dore Fischer

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

Since the mid-1990s Ireland has rapidly changed into a multicultural society and the migrant population is increasingly becoming a well-established part of modern Ireland. This article is linked to one of the conference themes, 'literature as multicultural criticism', and is a contribution to the wider debates in the Irish media and academic circles on multiculturalism and cultural diversity in Ireland. From the beginning of the new millennium, these topics have started to have an impact on Irish literature. The article discusses a small number of Irish literary texts (by Hugo Hamilton, Dermot Bolger and Roddy Doyle, published between 2001 and …

Names Of The Territory, Meanings Of Exile: Language And Space In The Catalan Exile (1939), Iglesias Narcis

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

In 1939 a large number of Catalan and Spanish republicans left their country and sought shelter in France from the fascist army of the insurgent general Francisco Franco. The exile was a process which went through several stages: fleeing, crossing the border, settling in a new place, pondering their own and others’ identities, accepting their condition of rootlessness. From diverse written sources, such as personal diaries, reports, fiction texts, interviews, etc., I will focus on the analysis of the naming of the sites and the territory in two key moments: the moment of their flight and their arrival in the …

Spatial Translations And Embodied Bilingualism: Defining The Migrant's Experience From An Architectural Perspective, Caroline Rabourdin

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

As a bilingual writer and architect, my research is practice-based and multidisciplinary. In pulling together theories and practices about Space, Language and the Body, my aim is to develop a notion of Embodied Bilingualism. If the word ‘translate’ is to move something from one place to another, as architectural historian Robin Evans explains, then one needs to understand its pure and unconditional existence as a geometrical construct in the first place in order to fully appreciate the workings of linguistic translation. In this paper, language is considered as an embodied practice, which for the bilingual migrant leads to considerations about …

Linguistic Construction Of Migrant Identity In U.S. Crime Reports, Theresa A. Catalano

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This article explores the representation of Latino migrants in U.S. crime reports. Through multi-disciplinary linguistic analysis incorporating critical discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics, the author demonstrates how migrant identity is constructed linguistically in media discourse using various linguistic strategies to reveal an underlying xeno-racist discourse that serves the dominant group’s purpose of staying in power. The contribution of this paper lies in its systematic illustration of the covert nature in which this discourse is (re)produced in crime reports and the connections it can have to immigration policies and public attitudes. In addition, the aim of the paper is to serve …

"Give Me Your Name And I'Ll Tell You Whether You Speak With An Accent" The Effect Of Proper Names Ethnicity On Listener Expectations, Alexei Prikhodkine, David Correia Saavedra, Marcelo Dos Santos Mamed

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

The mastery of a national language tends to be regarded as a key element in foreigners’ integration in Switzerland and as a gateway to equal opportunity. In this article, the limitations of this claim are explored through a study measuring the effect of proper names’ ethnicity on speech perception. A hundred and fifty Swiss respondents had to rate six speakers who were presented as candidates for a job as a communication manager in a Swiss bank. These six speakers spent most of their lives in French-speaking Switzerland and spoke the Standard variety. Our findings indicate that a proper name with …

Changing From Within: Immigration And Japan, Brian Gaynor

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

Although Japan’s demographic decline is well known, the slow but steady increase in the country’s immigrant population has been less acknowledged. Despite this continuing influx of foreigners the Japanese state still has no coordinated immigration policy that clearly addresses such issues as residency, employment, education, and access to social services. Rather it is at the local level that towns and villages all across the country are having to develop ad hoc responses to the growing number of foreigners resident in their communities. Hitherto most research into immigrants’ lives has focused on what are known as ‘diversity points’, large urban areas …

Can Language Policy Make Multiculturalism Work?, Una Carthy

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

Researchers in the field of language policy have disagreed as to the effectiveness of language policy; some experts would claim that language simply cannot be managed. Drawing on international case studies, this paper will explore how effective language policy might work in multilingual societies. Interestingly, the dominance of English as a world language is quoted as an example of both language management success and failure. On the one hand, English is perceived as being a threat to indigenous languages which are portrayed as endangered species; on the other, the hegemony of English as a world language is perceived as a …

Chinese And Irish Students: An Investigation Of Their Intercultural Competence And Second Language Learning Motivation In The Process Of Integration, Allie Heying, Fionnuala Kennedy

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This paper presents the initial results of ongoing PhD research, which investigates the perceived intercultural competence and second language (L2) learning motivation of Chinese and Irish students in higher education in Ireland. Literature shows that the integration level can be determined by students’ intercultural contact frequency and L2 motivation. The main findings of this research show that i) integration between Irish and Chinese students is limited as their intercultural contact is restricted to academic environments; ii) intercultural contact does not necessarily imply an increase in perceived intercultural competence; iii) L2 learning promotes intercultural competence in the integration process and iv) …

Using Qualitative Methods For The Analysis Of Adult Immigrants’ L2 Needs: Findings From A Research Project In Greece Focusing On School-Parents Communication, George Androulakis, Efi Mastorodimou, Riki Van Boeschoten

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

In the Greek context of economic crisis and of emerging xenophobic ideas and discourse, this article presents some findings from a research project which had the ambition to give voice to immigrants in Greece about their own language and communication needs. The target group of the project were immigrant parents, whose children attend public schools in the area of Volos. Communication between schools and immigrant families is fragmentary or non-existent, causing frustration for parents and teachers. The ELMEGO project used focus groups in order to construct social meaning related to migrant discourse, and shed light on it from an interdisciplinary …

Little To Lose And Everything To Gain: L1 Maintenance And L2 Attainment In Long-Term Migrants, Conny Opitz

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This paper reports on a study of adult migrants' L1 and L2 proficiency after extensive residence abroad, focusing on the predictive power of maturational and usage-based accounts respectively. The former perspective assumes age-related constraints on adults' capacity to become proficient in an L2, while the latter argues for the importance of environmental factors. The study adds a novel dimension to this debate by considering both L1 and L2 development. German speakers in Ireland completed German- and English-language tasks and responded to questionnaires. The data provide evidence of a moderate amount of L1 attrition, a high degree of L2 attainment in …

The Status Of Russian German In Siberia. A Case Study Of Four Women Living In The Region Of Krasnoyarsk (Russia), Christiane Andersen

CALL: Irish Journal for Culture, Arts, Literature and Language

This paper introduces the difficult relation between language, ethnicity and individual identity of the German population living in Siberia today. In 2010, we interviewed four women born in the former German Volga Republic but now living in a village in Siberia. Their German language and identity were strongly stigmatized as a result of the Second World War. Today they primarily speak Russian in their everyday communication. Nevertheless, the women’s ethnic identity is still very strong, - they call themselves “daitsch” (Germans). In the linguistic analysis, which can be seen as pioneer work for German in Siberia, we identified a large …