Modern Languages & Literatures

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    Citizens of Memory: Refiguring the Past in Post-Dictatorship Argentina
    (Modern Language Association, 2007-01-01) Tandeciarz, Silvia
    If, as Angel Rama claims in The Lettered City, the city dictates everything one must think, forcing its inhabitants to repeat its discourse, how might shifts in the city’s contours affect the construction of civil society? How might urban designs that facilitate the work of recollection help inform conceptions of citizenship for historical actors emerging from dictatorship? These are the questions cultural practitioners in Argentina address through interventions in the Buenos Aires cityscape that honor victims of state terrorism (1976–83). By analyzing three memorial sites that illuminate the complex relation between space and democratic practices, this essay traces how geography, architecture, trauma, and memory interface in the rearticulation of a collective Argentine national identity. (SRT)
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    The Unknown New Wave: Soviet Cinema of the Sixties
    (Caixa Cultural, 2018-01-01) Prokhorov, Alexander V
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    From Family Reintegration to Carnivalistic Degradation: Dismantling Soviet Communal Myths in Russian Cinema of the Mid-1990s
    (American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European, 2007-07-01) Prokhorov, Alexander V
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    Revisioning Aleksandrov’s Circus: Seventy Years of the Great Family
    (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007-01-01) Prokhorov, Alexander V
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    Some Notes on Racial Trauma in Peter Weir’s Fearless
    (Salisbury University, 2000-01-01) Tandeciarz, Silvia
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    Writing for Distinction? A Reading of Cortázar’s Final Short Story, Diario para un cuento
    (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2001-10-01) Tandeciarz, Silvia
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    Special issue: Brazilian Fashion
    (2016-01-01) Andrade, Rita M.; Root, Regina A.
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    Passing the Remote: Community and Television Viewing in Woobinda and La guerra degli Antò
    (2011-01-01) Seger, Monica
    This paper explores television-modeled narratives in Silvia Ballestra’s La guerra degli Antò, of 1992, and Aldo Nove’s Woobinda, of 1996. In so doing, it considers both the role of a text's author and the majority/minority reception practices that lead to its social imprint. For a definition of reception practices it turns to the work of media and reception scholars such as Henry Jenkins and Ien Ang. Employing a soap-operatic narrative and respecting the viewing practices of a minority viewer group, Ballestra navigates contemporary TV language to shape receptive communities within, and outside, of her text. Nove, in turn, models his work on majority group viewing habits to exploit and parody the homogenizing, and conversely isolating, effects of this language. In Woobinda authority lies with television, the medium of debased culture, while in La guerra degli Antò the narrator asserts her authority by adopting and mutating the codes of this same medium. Each text serves an important function, Nove’s text details the ultimate impasse of efforts to assert subjectivity, while Ballestra’s suggests a means of bypassing the impediments.
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    What is Pilgrimage?
    (2018-01-01) Greenia, George
    The term ‘pilgrimage’ has become a commonplace in modern conversations about any travel that is announced as ‘intentional,’ ‘purposeful,’ ‘transformative,’ or simply promises to be ‘authentic.’ Scholars have to navigate between the twin advantage and liability that pilgrimage studies operate under no one disciplinary lens or unified methodology, and the historical range is infinite. Many feel that modern tourism needs to preserve a place for the respectful non-believer without degrading the experience of traditional religious pilgrims. To some degree all intentional travelers are open to an experience of the transcendent that’s compatible with their belief systems and they are willing to modify their excursions and even embrace inconveniences to make themselves open to experience transcendence. This article acknowledges some of the widely accepted premises of pilgrimage and adds seven complementary aspects to the experience of being a pilgrim.
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    Bartered Bodies: Medieval Pilgrims and the Tissue of Faith
    (2019-01-01) Greenia, George
    In ‘The Bartered Body,’ George Greenia disentangles the complex desires and experiences of religious travellers of the High Middle Ages who knew the spiritual usefulness of their vulnerable flesh. The bodily remains of the saints housed in pilgrim shrines were not just remnants of a redeemed past, but open portals for spiritual exchange with the living body of the visiting pilgrim.
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    Value and Hidden Cost in André Breton’s Surrealist Collection
    (2015-04-01) Conley, Katharine
    André Breton’s collection provides a unique perspective on the environment within which the principles of surrealism were crystallized. In addition to his collection of European paintings, Breton’s Oceanic object collection grew during World War Two in New York. In essays from the 1950s and 1960s, Breton ascribed a “poetic view” and “prestige” to these things with no reference to their monetary value. And yet his history of acquisition and de-acquisition of such things and paintings show that he also understood collecting as a form of investment, despite his avowed objection to the forces of French colonialism that made it accessible to him. “Value and Hidden Cost in André Breton’s Surrealist Collection” examines the acknowledged—poetic—and unacknowledged—monetary—value of Breton’s collection and what is shows about his understanding of art acquisition as a form of patronage, in contradiction to his intellectual rejection of any form of engagement in the bourgeois economy. This contradiction constitutes a hidden cost to the consistency of his ethical position in favor of leftist politics. In his admiration for the Easter Island statuette with which he started his collection as a teenager, and his elevation of such non-Western things to works of art, he also unconsciously perpetuated a form of intellectual colonialism. This contradiction lies at the root of his slow reassessment of his pre-war attitudes in light of his growing post-war understanding of the cultures that produced the objects he revered and his intellectual engagement in the process of French de-colonization that coincided with his return to Paris from New York.
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    Secrets, Trauma, and the Memory Market (or the return of the repressed in recent Argentine post-dictatorship cultural production).
    (2012-05-01) Tandeciarz, Silvia
    Since the end of the last Argentine Dictatorship (1976-1983), a number of feature-length films have engaged in the public debate over the legacies of state terrorism. El secreto de sus ojos (2009), Argentina's most recent Oscar winner, is the latest to do so, exploring the effects of more than a decade of impunity on those who lost their loved ones. Suggesting that restoration of a justice system that works can lead to the restoration of full civic engagement in a healthy body politic, the film raises important questions about citizenship and belonging in a post-national era. This essay explores the film's phenomenal success in the global memory market to illuminate what remains at stake in contemporary narratives of reconciliation.
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    Books and Bookmaking
    (Routledge, 2003-01-01) Greenia, George
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    The Moralized Bible in Spain
    (Routledge, 2003-01-01) Greenia, George
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    R. Merritt Cox (1939-1987), Pioneer of John Bowle Studies
    (2003-10-01) Greenia, George; Eisenberg, Daniel
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    Pilgrimage and the Economy of Salvation
    (2017-07-24) Greenia, George