Research and Innovation

Abstract

This essay examines the entangling of the poetic and the ethnographic in the art cinema of the 1960s as an indicator of a broader collision of epistemological/discursive regimes in postwar Soviet cinema—and ultimately, a clash between two fundamentally opposed approaches to the discursive production of history. In the Soviet poetic cinema of the 1960s, the temporal-spatial frameworks of the Stalin era are disrupted, shifting first of all, to what Tarkovsky called a lived experience of time—that is, to the subjective emotions and experiences of individual people; second, to localized histories that may not coincide with the supra-national Soviet developmental narrative; and third, to the positing of an archaic, even pre-historical temporality as a kind of lost ideal. I argue that poetic cinema serves as a site for playing out the contradiction among temporalities and spatialities in post-Stalin culture, and therefore among opposed sense-making projects and representational modes, creating the possibility for subverting the colonial function of Soviet cinema.

Since Gisela Granena’s influential work, LLAMA D v2, a sound recognition subtest of LLAMA aptitude tests, has been used as a measure of implicit learning aptitude in second language acquisition research. The validity of this test, however, is little known and the results of studies with this instrument have been somewhat inconsistent. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that researchers’ variable test instructions are the source of the inconsistent results. One hundred fourteen English monolinguals were randomly assigned to take LLAMA D v2 under one of three test instruction conditions. They also completed two implicit aptitude tests, three explicit aptitude tests, and a sound discrimination test. The results showed that, regardless of the type of test instructions, LLAMA D scores did not align with implicit aptitude test scores, indicating no clear evidence of the test being implicit. On the contrary, LLAMA D scores were negatively associated with scores on one implicit aptitude test, the Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task, but only in the condition where the instructions drew participants’ focal attention to the stimuli. This negative association was interpreted as focal attention working against learning in the SRT task. Implicit learning aptitude may be the degree to which one is able to process input without focal attention.

"“Don’t start with the good old days but the bad new ones.” -- Bertolt Brecht

An exploration of how film has made legible the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition

Traditionally, the definition of political cinema assumes a relationship between cinema and politics. In contrast to this view, author Mauro Resmini sees this relationship as an impasse. To illustrate this theory, Resmini turns to Italian cinema to explore how films have reinvented the link between popular art and radical politics in Italy from 1968 to the early 1980s, a period of intense political and cultural struggles also known as the long ’68.

Italian Political Cinema conjures a multifaceted, complex portrayal of Italian society. Centered on emblematic figures in Italian cinema, it maps the currents of antagonism and repression that defined this period in the country’s history. Resmini explores how film imagined the possibilities, obstacles, and pitfalls that characterized the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition. From workerism to autonomist Marxism to feminism, this book further expands the debate on political cinema with a critical interpretation of influential texts, some of which are currently only available in Italian.

A comprehensive and novel redefinition of political film, Italian Political Cinema introduces its audience to lesser-known directors alongside greats such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, and Bellocchio. Resmini offers access to untranslated work in Italian philosophy, political theory, and film theory, and forcefully advocates for the continued artistic and political relevance of these films in our time.

Howard Lasnik and Juan Uriagereka “were there” when generative grammar was being developed into the Minimalist Program. In this presentation of the universal aspects of human language as a cognitive phenomenon, they rationally reconstruct syntactic structure. In the process, they touch upon structure dependency and its consequences for learnability, nuanced arguments (including global ones) for structure presupposed in standard linguistic analyses, and a formalism to capture long-range correlations. For practitioners, the authors assess whether “all we need is Merge,” while for outsiders, they summarize what needs to be covered when attempting to have structure “emerge.”

Reconstructing the essential history of what is at stake when arguing for sentence scaffolding, the authors cover a range of larger issues, from the traditional computational notion of structure (the strong generative capacity of a system) and how far down into words it reaches, to whether its variants, as evident across the world's languages, can arise from non-generative systems. While their perspective stems from Noam Chomsky's work, it does so critically, separating rhetoric from results. They consider what they do to be empirical, with the formalism being only a tool to guide their research (of course, they want sharp tools that can be falsified and have predictive power). Reaching out to sceptics, they invite potential collaborations that could arise from mutual examination of one another's work, as they attempt to establish a dialogue beyond generative grammar.

« L'horrible vrai est toujours plus horrible encore ! » s'exclame un personnage d'Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit – conte saturé de violence que Balzac intègre, avec Le Grand d'Espagne, au recueil collectif des Contes bruns, composé à la faveur de la mode frénétique et horrifiante. Ces textes, qui ironisent sur les lois de la littérature marchande tout en y acquiesçant, apportent un éclairage essentiel sur les questionnements que l'écriture balzacienne émet sur elle-même, alors que Balzac s'apprête à abandonner la forme du conte pour le projet, expansif et totalisant, d'une œuvre représentative de la société moderne.

In the most widely accepted narratives about the recent history of cinema, the introduction of digital technology typically figures as a significant break, in which the loss of cinema’s analog photographic basis brought about a profound transformation of its nature or ontological status. This essay proposes to revisit this rather straightforward and vision-centric narrative of the digital break in order to question it from the perspective of a more rigorous understanding of cinema as an audio-visual discourse. Drawing on the work of Michel Chion and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the essay develops a concept of audio-visual discourse as something structured around a constitutive nonrelation between image and sound. Following this, the essay interrogates what consequences such a discursive and non-relational conception of audio-visual phenomena might have for our understanding of cinema’s historicity, in particular when the latter is derived from some kind of figuration of a historical break.

Luka Arsenjuk, ""The Audio-Visual Nonrelation and the Digital Break," in The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, ed. Kyle Stevens (Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 359–375

Drawing on foundational and cutting-edge knowledge of antiracism, authors Hines-Gaither and Accilien address the following questions: what does antiracism look like in the world language classroom; why is it vital to implement antiracist practices relevant to your classroom or school; and how can you enact antiracist pedagogies and practices that enrich and benefit your classroom or school?

Aligned with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages standards, the book is filled with hands-on antiracist activities, strategies, and lesson plans. The book covers all necessary topics, including designing antiracist units of study, teaching across proficiency levels, advocacy and collaboration in the community, and how to facilitate self- reflection to become an active antiracist educator. The tools, prompts, and resources in this book are essential for any world language teacher, department chair, or school leader.

This article reviews the different forms of collaboration that existed between Balzac and Janin, before and after Balzac’s identification, in a famous January 1831 article, of a “school of disenchantment”, which he associated with Janin, Nodier and Stendhal. Beyond this grouping as imagined by Balzac, the latter’s short-lived collusion with Janin reveals the paradoxical nature of the inherently competitive relationship between two young authors who are united in their clever and coordinated manipulation of the new machinery of literary publicity.

Cet article se propose de revenir sur les différentes formes qu’a pu prendre la collaboration entre Balzac et Janin, de part et d’autre de la célèbre théorisation balzacienne de « l’école du désenchantement », par laquelle ce dernier s’associait à Janin, Nodier et Stendhal, en janvier 1831. En-deçà du collectif fantasmé par Balzac, son éphémère collusion avec Janin permet de mettre en lumière la relation paradoxale de deux jeunes auteurs, unis par leur maniement, aussi habile que coordonné, de nouveaux mécanismes de publicité littéraire.

''This edited volume brings together a diverse group of established and emerging practitioners in the field of Persian literary translation. Together, they examine for us not only the challenges, but also the joys experienced by those who translate premodern and modern Persian poetry and prose.'' Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Associate Professor of Persian Literature, University of Oxford, UK