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De contemplatieve natuurvisie van Thomas Merton
No full textIn this article I unfold the contemplative vision on nature and the impulse for an ecological ethics of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. After a short summary of the role of nature in his biography, I explore the sources of his contemplative vision, and then investigate the meaning that nature had for his contemplative life. Silence and solitude in nature makes the heart pure and receptive to perceive the oneness of all creation with the abiding Creator. This deep experience leads to an ethics of preservation of the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic communit
The nobility at play in all its myriad facets
No full textReview of Gloria Allaire and Julie Human, eds, Courtly pastimes, Routledge Medieval Casebooks (London/New York: Routledge, 2023, 243 pp., ill., index)
De vorstinnen van Vlaanderen: leading ladies in de middeleeuwen. Interview met podcastmakers en UGent-wetenschappers Els De Paermentier en Lisa Demets van het Henri Pirenne-instituut voor middeleeuwse geschiedenis
No full textFilm, fotografie, feit en fictie in het Pollino-gebergte (Zuid-Italië)
No full textFilm, photography, fact and fiction in the Pollino Mountains (Southern Italy) The film “Il Buco” (The Hole, 2022) by Michelangelo Frammartino is about a speleological expedition in the Pollino mountains (northern Calabria, Italy) in 1961. It won the Special Jury Award at the 2022 Venice Film Festival and received excellent reviews in the Dutch press (Volkskrant, Trouw, NRC, VPRO Cinema). In the film, an old shepherd at the end of his life observes a group of speleologists exploring an exceptionally deep cave. The shepherd dies just as the speleologists discover the end of the cave. To situate the death scene, Frammartino reconstructed a typical shepherd’s dwelling used in the days when the transhumance summer camps in the Pollino mountains were still used as shepherds’ summer dwellings. Frammartino based the reconstruction on black-and-white pictures from the archive of Giuseppe De Matteis, a speleologist from Turin, who took part in the expedition. De Matteis took several photographs of such shepherd´s dwellings during the period of the cave exploration, especially at the site of Mandra Vecchia, which is now part of the field study area of the Pollino Archaeological Landscape Project (PALP), led by the authors since 2020. These shepherds’ huts were made of wooden poles and planks and reinforced at ground level with limestone blocks. Other pastoral facilities, such as animal pens and sheds for cheesemaking, were located nearby. Archaeological research on the remains of these summer camps, combined with interviews, is beginning to reveal everyday life in Pollino summer camps. In this paper we bring together fact and fiction based on Frammartino’s documentary from 2021, Giuseppe De Matteis´ photo archive from the 1960s and our own fieldwork in the area
Collaborative reading and foreign language learning with literature
No full textTeletandem is a virtual exchange context designed by Telles and Vassallo (2006), in which two learners of different foreign languages meet in video conferencing platforms so that one helps the other in their learning process. These meetings are divided in two parts, each of them focused on the use of one of the languages, so that both have the opportunity to practice their target language. Since 2019, a thematic teletandem has been carried out so that participants do tasks related to the discussion of literary texts, which was named Literatandem. In this practice report, an interaction will be presented, in which two partners discussed a Literatandem activity to demonstrate how sharing interpretations of a literary text can expand the understanding of a text in a foreign language. As a result, it was noted that the tasks incited participants to exchange prior knowledge and negotiate meaning, which expanded the way they perceived language and allowed them to have new interpretations of the texts
Living on a Picture: Approaching Images and Life Stories in Social Media
No full textIf images were once conceived either as subordination or oppositions of words, the advent of the Internet has started new relationship dynamics between them. Within this digital scenario, vision and textuality intensely intertwine in the form of captions, posts, hyperlinks or other kind of social media content, daily handled by users. In this context, autobiographical narratives will take on a major role, shaping the way in which the subject conceives, forges and registers his or her identity in relation to the reader/viewer. This article aims to address the question, more present than ever, of how certain autobiographical narratives are disseminated through social networks, and how image and narrative dialogue within this framework. By addressing specific cases found on platforms such as Instagram, we will try to elucidate how these publications point to an ambivalent relationship with visual tropes or narratives associated with certain life experiences, either questioning it or contributing to the creation of a collective narrative. A complex interplay of image and narrative that will affect not only how we share life, but also how we understand it and construct it together with others in a changing world
We Were There: Individual, Social, and Cultural Memory in Punk Memoirs by Women
No full textThis article analyzes how three of the different types of memory proposed by Aleida Assmann (individual, social, and cultural) are intertwined in the memoirs written by female punk musicians. In these works, there is a strong emphasis on the fact that the narrative persona belongs to a social group, thereby inscribing herself in the culture of the times. The individual memories of the authors, and the shared experiences of the generation to which they belong, thus become a part of the creation of the cultural memory of punk. This article seeks to provide new knowledge of the participation of women in punk via the study of the representation of memory in three memoirs: Alice Bag’s Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage. A Chicana Punk Story (2011), Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys (2014), and Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless: My Life as a Pretender (2016). These memoirs demonstrate that the authors contribute to writing the history of punk by inscribing themselves into it. Aware that the presence of women has not previously been sufficiently acknowledged, they do so by interweaving their individual memories with social ones, in order to attest to the birth of punk as culture
A Feminist Autoethnography of a Family Archive: Affects, Narratives and Practices During Two World Crises: World War II and Covid-19
No full textWhat happens when we, as researchers, are living through a world crisis such as Covid-19, whilst studying a family epistolary archive produced during World War Two, another world crisis? What epistemological and methodological bridges can be made between the personal experiences of two women (great aunt and great niece) living in two moments of history but who are connected by the process of writing and reading epistolary documents? By conducting a feminist autoethnography of my experience in the Covd-19 pandemic, I reflect upon what it has meant to do feminist historic and archival research of the experience of Trixie Mayer, the first Mexican volunteer to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in Great Britain from 1942 to 1946 and who produced more than 200 personal documents during her war work and afterwards kept them, together with the documents she received form her family in Mexico, for more than 70 years. I analyse how living through a pandemic has helped me understand my great aunt’s crisis experiences from a different perspective, questions, partialities and, at the same time, how these personal and familiar writings have helped me understand and question our current reality and PhD thesis from an alternative perspective
A New ‘Stockholm Syndrome’: Physical Impairment and Hospital Confinement as Post-Holocaust Sequelae in Ilona Karmel’s Stephania
No full textIlona Karmel was a Holocaust victim. She endured diseases, Nazi ‘madness’, and imprisonment in the Krakow Ghetto and in concentration camps in Poland and Germany. At the end of World War II, she was abandoned to die by the retreating German enemy. Nevertheless, Victory Day in 1945 saw the beginning of another period of infirmity and confinement for Karmel, who was hospitalized in Sweden to treat leg injuries she had suffered by the Nazis. This essay, bringing together disability and Holocaust studies, explores harrowing post-Shoah sequelae in Karmel’s life, as reflected in Stephania (1953). To recover her sense of self after the bloodletting and to make visible physical impairment in her novel, Karmel creates the fictional Stephania: A Polish patient with spinal curvature worsened during wartime captivity who seeks medical treatment in Stockholm, all the while refusing to accept her body’s disfigurement. This article examines how disability and voluntary hospital confinement are portrayed in the novel Stephania and connected with Holocaust trauma. Despite memories of pain and incarceration invading their minds as survivors, Karmel and her creation Stephania inescapably must come to terms with their respective postwar impairments, heal from their emotional wounds, and cling to life during and beyond their convalescences
‘Women Bleed in Private’ / Miscarriage Goes Public: A Relational Response to Social Silence over Miscarriage in Sarah Ruhl’s Writings
No full textThis article discusses Sarah Ruhl’s miscarriage experience in her autobiographical work Smile (2022) and in a selection of poems from 44 Poems for You (2020). The discussion considers Ruhl’s account as quest narratives in which she voices what she considers a tragic event in her life to underline the need to overcome the usual social silence that reigns over miscarriage. Ruhl’s prose and lyrical approaches to her miscarriage are both physical and emotional, but also social, cultural and political. Her accounts help to destigmatize this loss and to hold control over her own experience in ways that transcend the social constructions of how to experience miscarriage. As argued, Ruhl’s approach is that of a communicative dyadic body that informs us on the signals of miscarriage, of her personal experience, and what she did to get pregnant again and reconcile with this loss. Beyond the medical usefulness of her work, through her writings, Ruhl invites readers to question the social and cultural assumptions surrounding miscarriage. And in doing so, she helps women who have experienced miscarriage to regain confidence in their own bodies and the strength to revisit and fight against the common conception and representation of miscarriage as merely a physical and emotional wasteland