Faculty Research Forum

Fall 2008

Abstracts

Wednesday, September 17th, 1-3pm (SUB II Room 3&4):

Heritage Language Preservation and the International Institutes:

A counterexample to language ideologies in US social work 

Lisa Rabin

            In the US Progressive Era, prominent social reformers advocated for the preservation of what Hull-House leader Jane Addams called “immigrant gifts” – arts, crafts, folk songs, and festivals - in the dominant Anglo-American culture.  Immigrant languages, however, were seen as roadblocks to immigrants’ assimilation.  Leaders at Hull-House and other settlement houses – sites that gave birth to the US social work movement - influenced school boards in the eradication of bilingual education and the provision of monolingual English classes for adults. In contrast Edith Bremer, who launched the International Institutes with the YWCA in 1910, argued that immigrants’ languages were a resource in their communities.  Institutes across the nation offered decades of classes in Italian, Polish, Spanish, and Russian, to name a few examples.  Using evidence from Institute national and local records, I will discuss heritage language preservation theories and practices in this unique organization.

Same, But Different:  The disappearance of /s/ in Puerto Rican Spanish and the maintenance of /s/ in Mexican American Spanish spoken in Lorain, Ohio

Michelle Ramos-Pellicia

            According to Trudgill (1986), it is impossible to predict when assimilation between similar varieties will take place.  In the Spanish-speaking community of Lorain, Ohio, where Mexican American (MAS) and Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) are in continuous contact, the varieties are diverging in their alternatives for /s/ in coda position.  The data consist of speech samples (readings and informal conversations) of sixteen speakers:  four Mexican Americans and twelve Puerto Ricans.

            MAS, retains /s/ with very few cases of /s/ aspiration and deletion.  PRS presents an intergenerational transmission of /s/ aspiration and deletion.  Third generation Puerto Ricans acquire /s/ deletion instead of [s] and [h], alternatives available in their ancestral variety.

            Despite the interaction of these dialects in the same community, speakers’ affiliation is signaled by the different use of the resources available through their linguistic variety.  Speakers maintain their varieties different enough to be distinguished from one another.

The Sermon’s Structure in the Prólogo of the Libro del Buen Amor

Alberto Descalzo de Blas

      In addition to other profane influences, the book receives influences of the techniques displayed in the educated and popular sermons, in the exempla collections, through the catechisms, the confession’s treatises, and religious lyrics.

      The prologue is written in prose as a highbrow sermon of the kind of sermons directed at the clerics, without exempla or other resources used in front of uneducated people that characterized popular sermons. The educated sermon was usually written in Latin, however some pieces were preserved in the 1400s, so then other sermons had to exist as well in the common tongue. At the end of the prologue, the author confess to us that, although he wants to reprimand the people against “the mad love of the people’s sin” nevertheless he says that he will give advice about the insane love to the people that want to sin any way.

Wednesday, October 22nd, 1-3pm (SUB II VIP 2):

Paradigmatic Pairs and Postmodernist Poetics in Don Quixote and             American Popular Culture

Antonio Carreño-Rodríguez

      This ongoing research pretends to highlight Don Quixote’s creative impact upon American pop culture, since the nineteenth century and vaudeville to contemporary situational comedy. It focuses on artistic expressions within visual and popular media that share significant affinities and continuities with Cervantes’ aesthetics and his poetics of fiction. These include a focus on physically and morally extravagant characters, pervasive verbal humor, intertextuality, parody, ironic self-reflexivity, metafictionality, and the reciprocity of life and art.

Missing Malinche: Absence and influence in Salvador Carrasco’s La otra            conquista

Colleen Sweet

      Salvador Carrasco’s debut film as director and screenwriter, La otra conquista (The Other Conquest), quickly became a huge box-office hit upon its release in Mexico in 1999.  The film depicts not only the physical conquest of the Aztec civilization, but also the damaging impact of the conquest on their religious and cultural traditions.  While the protagonist Topiltzín is a purely fictional character, the other major characters in the film are based on historical figures from the Conquista.  Almost all of the major players are present, with the conspicuous exception of Malinche, the polemical translator and mistress of Cortés.  Although Malinche may not be physically present in the film, her influence appears in the actions and characterizations of others.  Like the destroyed statues of Aztec deities that Topiltzín continuously dreams about, her spirit remains.    

Wednesday, November 19th, 1-3pm (SUB II Room 3&4):

Transcultural Narratives: Linguistic, rhetorical, and emotional experiences of     writers living in in-between spaces

Sufumi So

      This paper explores the macro issue of transculturalism by focusing on the micro-level concrete phenomena of linguistic, rhetorical, and emotional experiences of writers who produce their works in the languages that they learned after having developed literacy skills in their native languages. I will present some selected findings from the analyses of their experiences documented through one-on-one semi-structured in-depth interviews and attempt to explicate their conceptual implications using an analytical framework derived from Ohashi’s (1999) view of the contemporary world as the intersection of the vertical axes of a multiplicity of local cultures and the horizontal axes of technology.

Hatred, Headscarves and Identity: Immigration and assimilation in France

Laura Fyfe

      Immigration and national identity have been two of the most debated issues in contemporary France. Controversial laws have been enforced since the 1990s illustrating an obvious anti-immigration sentiment in France. Immigrants from the Maghreb but also French citizens of North African descent have been the target of a great deal of criticism and have been perceived as invaders or intruders in opposition to what supposed to be a French National identity. I will examine how immigrants and first generation French citizens from the Maghreb depict their experiences in France in their novels, short stories, films, music.

Poems in Search of the Human Condition

Rei Berroa

      The reading will contain poems from two of my latest books: Book of Fragments and Other Poems (Caracas, 2007), De adinamia de mente de umnesia (Murcia, Spain, 2008), and from the forthcoming books: Otherness (Zamora, Spain, 2009), and Libro de los bienes (México, 2009). Most of the poems selected will deal with five main issues: irony-humor, ecology, philosophy, oppression, and the suffering of the human being due to war and the exercise of power.

Please contact Jenny Leeman (jleeman@gmu.edu) or Kristina Olson (kolson4@gmu.edu) with any questions.