Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Nicole Ludwig, Tsos, Nicole Ludwig

TSOS Interview Gallery

In September 2016, Nicole Ludwig led a group of her neighbors in Germany to assist newly-arrived Syrian and Afghani refugees. The volunteers collected clothing and toys, organized activities and field trips for the refugee children, and taught them German. Later, the volunteers offered homework support and led library reading groups. For the adult refugees, the volunteers provided cultural assimilation instruction and cooking classes. While there were occasional challenges to working together, the volunteers and refugees fostered a collaborative system and even hosted a Christmas party, during which one elderly Syrian man said, “This is one of the best memories I …

Successes And Challenges In Growing And Sustaining An Undergraduate Digital Scholarship Program, R.C. Miessler

All Musselman Library Staff Works

In July of 2017, Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library completed the second iteration of the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellowship, a library-led, student-focused program that introduces students to digital scholarship tools and methodology. Librarian R.C. Miessler discusses the successes and challenges of supporting a growing digital scholarship program, with a focus on its future sustainability and a vision of its expansion into a campus-wide initiative.

Ruthie Mae Cone

African American Funeral Programs

No abstract provided.

From Locus Amoenus To Locus Horribilis: Provincial And Urban Spaces Of Cultural (Re)Assertion And Hegemony In Yates And Sigel’S When The Mountains Tremble And Bustamante’S Ixcanul, Katrina Abad

Views from Below: The Underdog in Contemporary Latin American and Spanish Film

The trope of locus amoenus, or the idyllic representation of heaven on earth, and its counterpart locus horribilis, or the mundane incarnation of hell, was first critically defined by Ernst Robert Curtius in 1953 and identified in religiously influenced literature as early as Latin and medieval European works. Since then, the locus theory has appeared in numerous secular texts and films, such as Marcelo Ferrari’s Sub Terra (2004), as a means of distinguishing the once-pristine ‘purity’ of provincial spaces from the physically and metaphorically cramped mines and buildings produced by an urbanized modernity. This essay seeks to translate …

The Anti-Hero Perspective Of Sebastián Silva’S The Maid, Amber Bradley

Views from Below: The Underdog in Contemporary Latin American and Spanish Film

Many contemporary Latin American films portray a character or a protagonist that strives to bring in an audience to emphasize the “underdog” and their role in society. In Sebastián Silva’s Chilean film, The Maid (2009), Raquel is a maid and nanny, who achieves the exact opposite throughout the movie. This servant’s societal perspectives concerning distinct classes and gender roles are shown through her photographs and passive aggressive actions towards some of the family members and the other women, who are hired to help her lighten the housework of the home. Raquel’s attitude, mistreatment and tricks demonstrate her apparent desire to …

Cinematographic Resources As Meaningful Affordances In A Foreign Language Class, Denise Osborne

Views from Below: The Underdog in Contemporary Latin American and Spanish Film

Cinematographic resources as meaningful affordances in a foreign language class.” In this presentation, Osborne will discuss a proposal for use of films as works of art in foreign languages classes. She will show how cinematographic features (e.g., sound, color, lighting, camera angles, mise-en-scène) and their implication for film narrative − rarely emphasized in foreign language classrooms − can be a powerful tool to engage students in a dialogical and ecological construction of knowledge. Consideration of cinematographic features in scenes from the Brazilian Portuguese films Abril Despedaçado (Cohn & Salles, 2001) and Raízes e Asas (Cabral & Pimenta, 2011), and …

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 …

Scapegoating In The Films By Alejando Fernández Almendras, Ilka Kressner

Views from Below: The Underdog in Contemporary Latin American and Spanish Film

Chilean filmmaker Fernández Almendras has examined the processes of victimization of the “poor man” in several of his feature films, most prominently Matar a un hombre [To Kill a Man] (2014, Winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Price at Sundance Festival) and Aquí no ha pasado nada [Much Ado About Nothing] (2016). Both works exemplify processes of victimization through verbal performative acts: words in the form of humiliations, menaces and blackmail become the fatal weapons of scapegoating.

Biographical Sketches Of The Agora Writers, Editor Editor

Agora

No abstract provided.

Nature As A Theme In China, Gail Silveira

Agora

No abstract provided.

Flash And Smoke: The Importance Of Spectacle And Music In Theatre, Leigh Mackintosh

Agora

No abstract provided.

Oppression In Antigone And Africa, Rebecca Mcgowan

Agora

No abstract provided.

The Freemasonry Of Race: Booker T. Washington And W. E. B. Dubois On Education And Black Cultural Consciousness, Beverly Brown

Agora

No abstract provided.

Education Systems: Classical Vs. Jeffersonian, Jennifer Bolt

Agora

No abstract provided.

A History Of The Untouchables: The Buraku And The Dalit, Katelyn Coyle

Agora

No abstract provided.

Women In The Sciences, Bridgette Polite

Agora

No abstract provided.

Distorted Realities: Existentialism In The Works Of Salvador Dali, Grace Rochfort

Agora

No abstract provided.

Gender Relationships In Latin America: Mario Vargas Llosa’S Death In The Andes, Derrick Van Leer

Agora

No abstract provided.

The Political Influence Of Countries On Their Citizens, Jackie Fox

Agora

No abstract provided.

Communist Or Anti-Imperialist? The Personal Politics Of Gabriel García Marquez, Lydia Nilsen

Agora

No abstract provided.