Open Access Scientific Journals of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona
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News from Spain: О деятельности Испанского Общества Достоевского 2021-2022 гг.
No full textNews from the Dostoevsky Society of Spai
(Не)знакомый Степан Верховенский
No full textThe (Un)known Stepan Verkhovensky
The article studies the sujet of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, rethinking the semantics of its intertextual connections to some of Turgenev’s emblematic heroes, such as Rudin and Bazarov.
Keywords: F.M. Dostoevsky, Demons, I.S. Turgenev, Rudin, Fathers and Son
«Мистический вздор» или «Последнее милосердие»? : (Два способа прочтения рассказа Ф.М. Достоевского Бобок)
No full text"Mystical Nonsense" or "\u27Final Mercy\u27?" (Two ways of reading F.M. Dostoevsky\u27s story Bobok)
The short story Bobok, published in February 1873 as part of the Writer\u27s Diary, is one of the major works in Dostoevsky\u27s entire creative legacy in terms of the depth and acuteness of its existential problems. To clarify the artistic nature of this story, it will be productive to include it in a number of Dostoevsky\u27s creative works, the dominant genre-compositional architectonics of which is an openly expressed fantastic element. A striking moment of essential closeness between The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and Bobok are the pictures of the posthumous stay of the heroes of the two works in the cemetery in graves without movement, but in fullness of consciousness and feelings. However, the similarity of the grave scenes in their naturalistic concreteness sharpens the contrast of artistic solutions of the two stories, making them a peculiar diptych among the works of "small prose" published in the pages of Dostoevsky\u27s Writer\u27s Diary. The main point is that Bobok\u27s characters enthusiastically accept the afterlife, rejecting another perspective of postmortem existence as "mystical delusion". We will turn to the artistic conception of this highly unusual story.
Keywords: Bobok; The Dream of a Ridiculous Man; The Afterlife; Fantastic
A Corpus-based Approach to Language Learning: A Case Study in Higher Education at the University of Calabria
No full textThe use of corpus linguistics (CL) tools and methods has been shown to be of great help in fostering language learning. As argued by Aston (2000), language pedagogy has started to plan and create corpora to fit its own principles and address its own needs. Most studies focus on classroom activities based on concordances and lexical/grammatical analyses carried out on corpora (McEnery et al. 2006). To date, CL has often been combined with teaching specific topics to carry out text and discourse analyses, and data-driven learning (Friginal 2018). Therefore, it is important to further investigate the use of corpora as a valuable resource for language education.This work is testimony to the usefulness of corpus linguistics and corpus-based analyses for pedagogical purposes, while encouraging students to explore language autonomously and draw their own conclusions and considerations. Indeed, this paper outlines how CL can help learners, with different levels of language proficiency, approach English for Specific Purposes using authentic and concrete examples, and simultaneously lead them to develop new skills which may be integrated within their field of study.The case study occurred in a distance learning context with first-year students majoring in Data Science and Business Analytics at the University of Calabria. The main objective was to enhance students’ motivation while improving their English competences using statistical analyses and corpus tools to investigate data retrieved from the social network Instagram and related to the topic of climate change. In particular, hands-on activities allowed students to create their own corpora, analyze language use through the corpus analysis toolkit AntConc (3.5.8), and carry out topic framing. Students’ final projects were then discussed at the oral exam
Digital English as a Lingua Franca: Shaping New Models through Question-and-Answer Websites. Annarita Taronna
No full textReview of Digital English as a Lingua Franca: Shaping New Models through Question-and-Answer Websites, by Annarita Taronna
The Deconstruction of the Traditional American West: A White Woman’s Alternative Story of the Frontier through the Eyes of Laura Ingalls Wilder
No full textFrederick Jackson Turner’s impact cannot be overstated when it comes to the presence of the American West in not only American history but in popular culture as well. Turner’s hyper-masculine version of the West is well documented as being fully imprinted into the rhetoric that many Americans continue to use even today when discussing the ‘pioneering’ and ‘establishment’ of the western United States. Within Turner, the roles of women are regularly ignored, Native Americans are often relegated to the ‘Vanishing Indian’ trope, and impacts of settler colonialism on the environment are consistently disregarded (1893). Laura Ingalls Wilder, however, writes a pioneer narrative that is not the Turnerian tale of male success and adventure that generally comes to mind when discussing Western mythmaking. Rather, Wilder’s autobiographical Little House series works toward the destruction of the masculinized West that has long outlived Turner in American culture. Wilder’s main character, Laura, has a renegade personality when it comes to, most particularly, the rules of femininity as established by her mother, and thus, Wilder is an activist of sorts as her works offer a nontraditional narrative that exemplifies what a girl’s life could be like during Western Expansion. The Little House series brings voice to white females who, as Laura experiences in the novel, were usually shushed rather than welcomed in terms of conversations and situations that greatly affected their own lives.
“The Whole Thing Is a Merry-go-round”: The Mechanism of Circularity in Horace McCoy’s “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”
No full textAnticipating the tone and the tropes of the classic Hollywood novels, Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, published in 1935, investigated the condition of marginality of Hollywood’s ‘outsiders’ along with the destruction of their dream. Set during the Great Depression, McCoy’s novel portrayed not only the valuable psychological role of Hollywood in reassuring a demoralized nation but also its dynamic of exploitation and pipedreams, aligning itself with the broader debunking strategy of the hardboiled novel in confronting the contradictions of New Deal Liberalism. McCoy’s fictional account of dance marathons—with their endless circular movement—portrays the commercial exploitation of tawdry events which cruelly exploit young people and that becomes a metaphor or a parody of the Hollywood dream factory.
Against the post-Marxist theoretical background of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, this essay tries to highlight and question a mechanism of circularity that seems to be rooted in the novel’s narrative function. In particular, by considering Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Lacanian desire and drive, I stress the correspondence between the circular movement of the drive and the self-regenerating circulation of capital that the Slovenian philosopher proposed in The Parallax View (2006). Starting from this correspondence, my analysis of the novel aims to uncover its mimetic apparatus with regard to the representation of circularity which affects the whole narration
Writing from the Rift: Cosmopolitanism and the Multiracial Condition in Rebecca Walker, Barack Obama, and Mat Johnson. Agnese Marino
No full textReview of Writing from the Rift: Cosmopolitanism and the Multiracial Condition in Rebecca Walker, Barack Obama, and Mat Johnson. Agnese Marino by Agnese Marino