Department of World Languages and Cultures
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Item “El Enemigo es Múltiple y Adopta Disfraces”: La Performatividad y la Identidad Queer en El Placer Desbocado de Ernesto Schoo(2013-12) Brant, Herbert J.En El placer desbocado (1988), Ernesto Schoo (1925–2013) explora las complejas relaciones sexuales, emocionales y políticas de un grupo de argentinos que viven en Italia entre 1956 y 1967. La novela narra la historia de Marcelo P. Cabrera y su viaje psicosexual desde una identidad homosexual (tradicional y secreta) hacia una identidad queer (anticonvencional y contemporánea). Empleando las teorías actuales sobre la construcción del género y de la sexualidad, sobre todo las de Judith Butler y de la performatividad queer, este ensayo analiza cómo los personajes de Schoo sirven como “estudios de caso” de la deconstrucción de los conceptos tradicionales sobre el género y la sexualidad. El final de la novela revela que lo queer existe en la sociedad—a veces de forma oculta, enmascarada—dentro de las instituciones supuestamente normativas como el matrimonio y la paternidad. En última instancia, la novela de Schoo revela un mundo queer que funciona subrepticiamente dentro de la hegemonía heterosexista en la cultura argentina.Item An intercultural analysis of sources of medical information in Spanish-speaking diabetes patients(2012-12) Antón, Marta; Connor, Ulla; Lauten, Kathryn; Balunda, StephanieUnderstanding and improving health literacy have become important goals in health communication. Research has shown that limited health literacy is associated with poor health outcomes and that it is more prevalent in culturally and linguistically diverse populations. The goals of this study are to describe English-speaking (ES) and Spanish-speaking (SS) diabetic patients’ perceptions of sources of health information, to identify the actions patients report taking in seeking that information, and to test reading comprehension of medical information among SS patients. Data for this study were based on semi-structured interviews, life-story narratives, and a reading comprehension test with diabetic patients (43 native ES patients and 22 native SS patients with limited English proficiency) collected at a bilingual clinic and at an English-speaking clinic in the Midwestern United States (Indianapolis, Indiana). The results showed that the three approaches to the assessment of health literacy revealed disparities in access and use of sources of information as well as disparities in reading comprehension of health information. In view of the results, we argue that understanding and assessing health literacy, particularly in the case of ethnic minorities, requires complementary approaches of study. Emphasis should be placed on addressing the disparities SS patients face. Interventions should aim at maximizing the role of oral sources of information, training patients to use a wider variety of sources, and designing linguistically and culturally appropriate sources of health information for patients with limited English proficiency.Item La Escritura Diarística y la Autorrepresentación en Los deseos oscuros y los otros. Cuadernos de New York, de Luisa Valenzuela(2010) Tezanos-Pinto, RosaOne of the most remarkable aspects of Luisa Valenzuela’s novel Los Deseos oscuros y los otros. Cuadernos de New York (2002) is its diary-like structure. In addition to recounting a chronicle of passionate affections, Valenzuela’s diary comprises dreams, puns, humorous phrases, events, adages, summaries of lectures as well as letters, logbooks, short stories, poems and a drama. This article examines Valenzuela’s multi-level diaristic writing, her construal of gender and eroticism, and the roles she assumes as author, character and critic of her own process of autorepresentation. Comparable to Clarice Lispector’s weekly contributions to the Jornal do Brasil between 1967 and 1973, Los deseos oscuros y los otros. Cuadernos de New York is analyzed as a hybrid narrative whose resourceful ego scriptor expands the context of diaristic writing by incorporating numerous discursive configurations and valuable observations on literary authors as real and fictional subjects.Item Materials Development in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2015-04-17) Wang, JingMaterials development usually consumes a lot of money and effort, and therefore it deserves great attention. It is even more important to study the subject in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) because limited research has been carried out. Professionals in the CFL field have noticed the following phenomenon: On the one hand, many new textbooks appear on the market every year; on the other hand, instructors of the Chinese language still find it difficult to get the ideal textbooks for their students. This presentation aims to reveal perspectives from expert textbook writers. Four expert textbook writers participated in the study, and each was interviewed for an hour. A qualitative method of grounded theory was used to analyze the interview data, and four themes emerged from the data. This presentation discusses the themes and provides pedagogical applications of the findings.Item Topic-Continuity and Topic-Shift Effects in Spanish Discourse: A Comparative Analysis of Referring Expressions(Brill, 2016) Zulaica-Hernández, Iker; Department of World Languages and Cultures, School of Liberal ArtsDifferences in use among referring expressions are usually explained on the basis of the cognitive accessibility of their antecedents, where antecedent accessibility has been operationalized differently in the literature; i.e. as a grammatical role, as syntactic prominence or as antecedent distance. On these grounds, it has been proposed that personal pronouns prefer topical antecedents whereas demonstratives prefer non-topical antecedents. This paper investigates the referring properties of Spanish demonstratives and direct object personal pronouns with the aim to unveil their differences and similarities. My analysis shows that these two expressions are very similar referentially when a narrow view of discourse context is considered. However, important differences show up when a broader notion of context is thrown into the picture; i.e. contexts that extend beyond the immediate previous sentence and beyond the immediate local topic of discourse. Based on my corpus evidence and on previous research on the pragmatic interpretation of referring expressions, I claim that direct object personal pronouns and demonstrative noun phrases crucially differ in the way they contribute to discourse coherence; the former playing the role of topic continuity markers and the latter focalising referents that reintroduce suspended or declining topics and marking (sub)-topic shifts in the discourse.Item “Pero vos ya conocés bien mis delirios místicos”: The Search for Sublime Union in the Fiction of Pablo Pérez(2015) Brant, Herbert J.; Department of World Languages & Cultures, School of Liberal ArtsItem A Writing Language Online Class: Design, Content and Library Connections(Indiana Foreign Language Teachers Association, 2016-11-05) Schuvaks Katz, Daniela; Maxson, Bronwen K.Item Borges' "Homosexual Panic": Christensen's Film Version of "La instrusa"(1996-04-19) Brant, Herbert J.In this paper, I compare Borges' story “La intrusa” with Christensen's 1981 film version to note the way in which a homoerotic element in Borges' fictional world has been perceived and translated from subtle suggestivity in the written text to a more explicit visual depiction. I will then analyze Borges' subsequent horrified reaction to the more direct rendering. In the story and the film, the Nilsen brothers make use of a communal woman for the purpose of connecting physically and emotionally with each other. Christensen's reading of Borges' text shows that the erotic desire of the two men is plainly not directed towards a female, but rather towards each other, with the female as the intermediary focal point at/in which the two men may coincide. The film seems to imply that Borges has substituted an intervening female body between the men as a way to permit the men to connect physically without transgressing hetero-patriarchal prohibitions. The question in this story of fraternal love that has crossed the homosocial-homosexual continuum to the homosexual side has been an issue since the story first appeared. For that reason, Borges' intensely negative reaction to Christensen's film is all the more fascinating for what it suggests about the Argentine writer. As Balderston, Altamiranda and Silvestri have noted, Borges was so disturbed by the depiction of the Nilsen brothers as homosexual, that he penned an article in which he broke with his long-standing opposition to government censorship of media by suddenly advocating it in the case of this particular film. As I will show, I believe that Christensen's adaptation hits the target when it visually portrays a subtext that simultaneously attracted and repulsed Borges and his reaction is a clear case of “homosexual panic.”Item The Mark of the Phallus: Homoerotic Desire in Borges' "La forma de la espada"(Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana, 1996-05) Brant, Herbert J.Item The Queer Use of Communal Women in Borges' "El muerto" and "La intrusa"(Hispanófila, 1999) Brant, Herbert J.