Romance Studies

El presente artículo explora la cobertura visual del periódico ilustrado Correo del Domingo en sus primeros años de funcionamiento (1864-1866), particularmente con relación a las noticias de la Guerra de la Triple Alianza (1865-1870). Siendo el semanario una de las primeras publicaciones en la región en incursionar en tácticas de periodismo visual, la primera parte del ensayo analiza los límites difusos entre las litografías de carácter informativo y periodístico, y aquéllas de carácter puramente ficcional. La segunda parte del artículo estudia cómo el periódico utiliza este carácter maleable de la imagen litográfica para sortear los problemas del reportaje visual de una guerra que no se condecía con el discurso oficialista de corte heroico y patriótico que el periódico apoyaba.

This paper conveys the reflections of an instructor and a graduate student after participating in a graduate course on autoethnography, offered in a college of education at a large public research institution in the United States. In addition to the course focus on autoethnography as a qualitative research approach, the course used authentic practices, which are commonly used by academics, to socialize doctoral students from the social sciences to the demands of their future careers in the academy. Although the number of published autoethnography articles in academic journals has increased, few autoethnography courses are being offered, and even fewer are described in the research literature. The authors share their experiences and address their own assumptions, challenges and breakthroughs across practices, including: informal peer-reviews, drafts revisions, and the ongoing composition of a full-length autoethnographic manuscript to be (potentially) submitted for publication, and, thus, shared with a larger audience of readers. The authors call for more explicit and authentic preparation and socialization of social science doctoral students throughout graduate coursework—especially in light of the growing competition for tenure-stream faculty positions across the social sciences and the humanities.

A great Italian immigration novel has never been achieved, says Emilio Franzina. Yet, numerous “chapters” have been written and dispersed in an assorted “metatextual diaspora” composed of memoirs, letters, autobiographies, articles and short stories (“Partenze e Arrivi” 605). This paper will introduce one of these chapters: Camillo Cianfarra’s Diario di un emigrato, a first-person account of the travails of a young Italian immigrant in York’s Little Italy - or, as it was usually referred to at the time, “the colony”-, during the height of Italian mass emigration. How did Italians lived through their encounter with the New World and coped with estrangement and adjustment in an often hostile environment? We shall see that this story is imbued with an intrinsic anxiety as a result of the attempts to negotiate the protagonist/author’s sense of shame and honor. This anxiety begins in Italy with the mass emigration of the late nineteenth century and reaches its climax in America between the two centuries. The Diary is a microcosm through which we can identify a broader understanding of the Italian American experience.

Abstract: This chapter discusses an intercultural telecollaboration project led by the authors in the 2012/2013 school year. A group of ten Italian high-school students of English from Rome, and a group of ten American intermediate learners of Italian from the University of Arizona volunteered to be connected online asynchronously by means of a wiki to discuss a wide range of topics about their cultural backgrounds and lifestyles. The main purpose of our research was to enhance the participants' intercultural competence (Byram, 1997; Kramsch, 1998) via the creation of a Web-mediated, multilingual and multicultural communicative setting in which the students' second languages, English and Italian respectively, would be used as effective mediational tools. From this point of view, this project has shown that the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) by non-native speakers (NNSs) of English within a networked-based context is not a hindrance to communication and mutual understanding. On the contrary, it proves to be an appropriate affordance that L2-users develop through social cooperative practices in order to carry out pragmatic communicative goals. This study is based on integrating Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and Sociocultural Theory (SCT). Our goal is to show language practitioners how to create a web-mediated community of practice (CoP), the members of which seek to improve their intercultural competence while using their respective L2s as an affordance to carry out several communicative tasks online. Our CoP, for example, interacted through a website and a wiki that were purposely designed for the needs of the project. As regards the pedagogical implications of our project, the qualitative results indicate that Web 2.0 technology could play an important role in teacher education, as it promotes a valid alternative to face-to-face instruction. It reduces the gap between the teacher and the student, as the former becomes familiar and learns to interact with forms of communication that are second-nature in younger generations. This research confirms that integrating telecollaboration into the foreign language syllabus is a promising option. It helps the learner gain a new impression about the languaculture systems they are exposed to and, in the case of non-native speakers of English, it favours the emergence of ELF as an authentic communicative tool in multilingual and multicultural web-mediated settings.

“Integrating Computer-Mediated Communication into Foreign Language Education” by Long V. Nguyen is a very well written book offering ways to employ modern technology in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) pedagogy. The book investigates how both synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication may complement each other leading to collaborative learning within the classroom setting. Particularly, the investigation revolves around three important attributes of collaborative learning (Ingram & Hathorn, 2004): participation, interaction and synthesis of information. The book is organized in twelve chapters. Chapter One serves as an introduction stating the purpose of the research and the implications of the book. Chapter Two discusses the sociocultural background of the research, introducing the context where the investigation took place as well as information about the participants. Chapters Three, Four and Five provide a literature review covering various characteristics of sociocultural theory, collaborative learning and computer-mediated communication (CMC) in foreign language learning. Chapter Six considers the participants’ backgrounds and the methods of data collection and analysis, while Chapters Seven to Ten submit and discuss the results of the inquiry in view of the following research questions: “1) What is the nature and contribution of online synchronous discussion in comparison with  traditional face-to-face discussion in collaborative learning in the EFL classroom? 2) What is the nature and contributions of online asynchronous peer-review in comparison with traditional pen-and-paper peer-review in collaborative learning in the EFL classroom? 3) To what extent, and in what ways, do online exchange processes lead to improved English language achievement? 4) What are the students’ reflections on and perceptions of CMC collaboration in the EFL classroom?” (Nguyen, 2013, p. 4). Chapter Eleven offers a discussion of the main issues drawn from the research, while Chapter Twelve summarizes the book and offers some personal thoughts along with implications, limitations and suggestions for further study. The last pages of this volume, the Appendices, present statistics and samples of the participants face-to-face and chat discussions.

¿Quién despierta la conciencia social en España en los 70? ¿Cómo Lorca, Celaya, Machado o Alberti resucitan en una España que ve la libertad a la vuelta de la esquina pero aún no la disfruta?                                           

Cuando los conciertos se vuelven pacíficos combates y las armas son la poesía y la voz, reconocemos que vivimos un nuevo campo de batalla. Paco Ibañez dará el pistoletazo de salida para que poetas y cantautores se abracen con el fin de enseñarnos la manera de hermanar la poesía social con la canción protesta para generar un movimiento de compromiso ciudadano.

Analizaré tres poemas que consiguieron hacer vibrar a una España reprimida por la dictadura de Franco. Serrat con su Cantares de Machado, Paco Ibañez con A galopar de Alberti y Soledad Bravo con La poesía es un arma cargada de futuro de Gabriel Celaya. Representan las voces que demostraron como trasmitir una inolvidable enseñanza a esa sociedad española que deseaba clamar libertad.

Al exponer la repercusión de estos poemas, ahora cantados, abordaremos la lucha que llevaron a cabo los cantautores contra el poder hegemónico que censuraba la voz de esos escritores republicanos. Honrando al Me queda la palabra de Blas de Otero consiguieron que el grito en papel de los poetas fuera escuchado por una población que dejaba atrás una dictadura que moría para empezar a galopar hacia la libertad.

“El 18 de julio de 1936, frente al movimiento de los militares traidores, entro yo, poeta, y conmigo mi poesía (…) Entiendo que todo teatro, toda poesía, todo arte, ha de ser, hoy más que nunca, un arma de guerra”. Así manifiesta Miguel Hernández su posicionamiento ante el golpe de estado de 1936, anunciando que prepara bombas cargadas de versos. Treinta y seis años más tarde, Joan Manuel Serrat se presenta como voluntario para detonarlas: “cantar Miguel Hernández en 1972 en pleno régimen franquista era una herramienta política de lucha contra la dictadura. El poeta había muerto en las cárceles de Franco y su voz iba más allá de las imágenes poéticas, era una muestra palpable de que el régimen aún nos gobernaba”.

En los años 70, la canción protesta recupera a algunos de los poetas más comprometidos con los valores republicanos. En esta ponencia presentaré el papel que jugaron los cantautores a la hora de crear comunidades de resistencia contra la dictadura de Franco, comunidades dispuestas a despertar consignas de un pasado candente, ansiosas por dar voz a los poetas silenciados. Serrat y Hernández servirán para ilustrar el vínculo que se fraguó entre poesía y música de compromiso a través del análisis de Para la libertad.

This research joins the emerging field of postmemory studies in the context of the Spanish Civil War (SCW) . My contribution lies in exploring the ways in which oral stories, transmitted in this case by singer-songwriters, have shown features theorized as postmemory. This study aims to go beyond the predominance of visual media (paintings, documentaries, photographs, personal objects, etc.) through which we often study postmemory, by examining in detail the song “Justo”, sung by the Spanish singer-songwriter Rozalén in her album Cuando el río suena… (2017), and composed following a conversation with her grandmother, Ángeles. I will propose to call “voiced postmemories” those characteristics of postmemory found and expressed through songs.

En esta ponencia persigo comprender como la canción protesta ha interactuado con las luchas estudiantiles del largo 1968 en Chile y España, a través de las canciones: “¡Me gustan los estudiantes!” (1960) de Violeta Parra y “Què volen aquesta gent?”, escrita por Lluis Serrahima (1967), cantada por María del Mar Bonet (1968) y popularizada en castellano por Elisa Serna (1972). La elección de estos dos países se debe a que en ambos están teniendo lugar algunas de las protestas feministas más destacadas en este 50 aniversario del mayo de 1968. En la ponencia, abordaré como a través de la canción protesta, dos cantautoras, dos voces femeninas, denuncian la represión estudiantil, encarándola cada una desde las necesidades y las posibilidades del contexto en el que se encontraban. Este análisis permitirá advertir algunas de las similitudes y diferencias que caracterizó a la canción protesta de Chile y España entre los años 1960 y 1970, y visibilizará la presencia de la mujer en banda sonora del 68.

Dominant historical conceptions of space are shaped by both physical and ideological mechanisms. These include a gendered division of public and private spheres, race and class-based segregations of urban development, and the policing of non-conforming sexualities. A “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences represents the effort to challenge these conceptions.

The “Negotiating Spaces” conference proposes an examination of intersecting matters of gender, sexuality and race as they relate to the production and transformation of space. Of central concern is the “negotiation” of these problems by literary, artistic, and cinematic authors, both in terms of the subjects they
represent and their interventions in form and genre.

Keynotes
Prof. Domietta Torlasco (Northwestern) & Prof. Martin Repinecz (San Diego)