Research and Innovation

What can we still learn from Sergei Eisenstein? Long valorized as the essential filmmaker of the Russian Revolution and celebrated for his indispensable contributions to cinematic technique, Eisenstein’s relevance to contemporary culture is far from exhausted. In Movement, Action, Image, Montage, Luka Arsenjuk considers the auteur as a filmmaker and a theorist, drawing on philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Gilles Deleuze—as well as Eisenstein’s own untranslated texts—to reframe the way we think about the great director and his legacy.

Focusing on Eisenstein’s unique treatment of the foundational concepts of cinema—movement, action, image, and montage—Arsenjuk invests each aspect of the auteur’s art with new significance for the twenty-first century. Eisenstein’s work and thought, he argues, belong as much to the future as the past, and both can offer novel contributions to long-standing cinematic questions and debates.

Movement, Action, Image, Montage brings new elements of Eisenstein’s output into academic consideration, by means ranging from sustained and comprehensive theorization of Eisenstein’s practice as a graphic artist to purposeful engagement with his recently published, unfinished book Method, still unavailable in English translation. This tour de force offers new and significant insights on Eisenstein’s oeuvre—the films, the art, and the theory—and is a landmark work on an essential filmmaker.

The book Latino-Americanizando o Brasil: A Crítica Literária e o Diálogo Transnacional focuses on the dialogues and exchanges between Brazilian and Hispanic American literary critics from the 1960s to the 1980s and their efforts to integrate Brazil in the Latin American paradigm. It shows how these engagements helped to rethink national and transnational cultural constructs producing a revision of the Hispanic-centered definition of Latin American literature and a shift in the Brazilian literary and cultural theory from a nationally based perspective to a transnational one. Moreover, Thayse Lima connects the efforts of regional integration to the process of internationalization of Latin American literature in the phenomenon known as the “Boom”. In the intellectual field, she argues, integration was also related to a desire to influence the regime of international circulation, which largely happened in the centre-periphery axis. Latin Americanist critics helped to shape a unified view of the continent’s cultural production, while also creating opportunities for the promotion and circulation of Latin American literature within the region. In addition to contributing to a greater understanding of the complex history of Brazil's insertion in Latin America, the book also sheds light on the strategies used by marginalized intellectual traditions to negotiate and imagine their place in a global sphere.

Barcelona: Anthropos, 1994. 463 p. ISBN 84-7658-438-5

This book presents a new history of German film from 1980-2010, a period that witnessed rapid transformations, including intensified globalization, a restructured world economy, geopolitical realignment, and technological change, all of which have affected cinema in fundamental ways. Rethinking the conventional periodization of German film history, Baer posits 1980-rather than 1989-as a crucial turning point for German cinema's embrace of a new market orientation and move away from the state-sponsored film culture that characterized both DEFA and the New German Cinema. Reading films from East, West, and post-unification Germany together, Baer argues that contemporary German cinema is characterized most strongly by its origins in and responses to advanced capitalism. Informed by a feminist approach and in dialogue with prominent theories of contemporary film, the book places a special focus on how German films make visible the neoliberal recasting of gender and national identities around the new millennium.

This book explores modern political and intellectual movements to protect local languages and cultures in the Sinophone world. The first half of the twentieth century saw East Asia-wide pressure to suppress and erase local languages in favor of enforcing national and colonial languages. This book analyzes language activism in Japan-occupied Taiwan, British Hong Kong, and Northwestern China by situating it in a pan-regional anti-colonial consciousness that sought to protect indigeneity from nationalism and imperialism.

Rutas is an integrated intermediate Spanish textbook and online platform utilizing current research in language teaching and learning. It is specifically designed for hybrid or flipped learning environments, but works well for total online learning and traditional classroom environments. The materials are completely integrated so that students are constantly working with recycled grammar and vocabulary. In addition, culture is intertwined throughout the text, while dedicated Cultura sections explore themes related to the country or region and chapter theme. Authors: Danielle C. Velardi, Roberta Z. Lavine, Paula V. Croci Date: 2019

This volume is the first to focus on teaching about Haiti’s complex history and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective. Making broad connections between Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean, contributors provide pedagogical guidance on how to approach the country from different lenses in course curricula. They offer practical suggestions, theories on a wide variety of texts, examples of syllabi, and classroom experiences. Teaching Haiti dispels stereotypes associating Haiti with disaster, poverty, and negative ideas of Vodou, going beyond the simplistic neocolonial, imperialist, and racist descriptions often found in literary and historical accounts. Instructors in diverse subject areas discuss ways of reshaping old narratives through women’s and gender studies, poetry, theater, art, religion, language, politics, history, and popular culture, and they advocate for including Haiti in American and Latin American studies courses.

Written entirely in Spanish, the volume is the first handbook on Spanish Language Teaching to connect theories on language teaching with methodological and practical aspects from an international perspective. It brings together the most recent research and offers a broad, multifaceted view of the discipline.

Samuel Blank is working on his doctoral thesis. Still in its fundamental stage, it is an interdisciplinary research project at the crossroads of French and Judaic cultures. It is projected to be a comparative study among the works of various Franco-Judaic authors, including Romain Gary and Albert Cohen. More specifically, Samuel is interested in researching the roles of marginalized sexualities within this literary corpus. He analyzes how trends of twentieth century francophone literature coincide with those of the European Jewish experience, all of which serve as a framework to depict LGBT characters. It is his suspicion that these characters showcase a certain hidden spirituality within the Abrahamic tradition towards alternative sexualities. There is a morsel of Jewish wisdom that states that all learning is discovery of the self. Samuel believes that his research reveals greater understanding of not only literature and the world, but of himself and his calling. Similar to his masters thesis, themes of identity, religiosity, trauma, and marginalization are key pillars of this study. As this is an entirely theoretical research project. Samuel uses primary sources from these authors along with literary theory.

As a five-member international team including my former PhD students, we have developed the fuzzy lexical representations (FLRs) hypothesis. We are co-editing a Research Topic Fuzzy Lexical Representations in the Nonnative Mental Lexicon for Frontiers in Psychology and Frontiers in Communication. We propose the fuzzy lexical representations (FLRs) hypothesis that regards fuzziness as a core property of nonnative (L2) lexical representations (LRs). Fuzziness refers to imprecise encoding at different levels of LRs and interacts with input frequency during lexical processing and learning in adult L2 speakers. The FLR hypothesis primarily focuses on the encoding of spoken L2 words. We discuss the causes of fuzzy encoding of phonological form and meaning as well as fuzzy form-meaning mappings and the consequences of fuzzy encoding for word storage and retrieval. A central factor contributing to the fuzziness of L2 LRs is the fact that the L2 lexicon is acquired when the L1 lexicon is already in place. There are two immediate consequences of such sequential learning. First, L2 phonological categorization difficulties lead to fuzzy phonological form encoding. Second, the acquisition of L2 word forms subsequently to their meanings, which had already been acquired together with the L1 word forms, leads to weak L2 form-meaning mappings. The FLR hypothesis accounts for a range of phenomena observed in L2 lexical processing, including lexical confusions, slow lexical access, retrieval of incorrect lexical entries, weak lexical competition, reliance on sublexical rather than lexical heuristics in word recognition, the precedence of word form over meaning, and the prominence of detailed, even if imprecisely encoded, information about LRs in episodic memory. The main claim of the FLR hypothesis—that the quality of lexical encoding is a product of a complex interplay between fuzziness and input frequency—can contribute to increasing the efficiency of the existing models of LRs and lexical access.

Co-edited with Karine Bertrand (Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada), this special issue focuses on the tensions between local, national and transnational as they are expressed, and shape Québec cinema and (new) media since 2000. Re-examining the role of nationalism within Québec evolving culture, exploring increasingly diverse and inclusive representations of Québec, and constantly redefining what it means to be "Québécois," Québec cinema and (new) media are evolving under the influence of new global tendencies while remaining deeply preoccupied with defining and redefining itself.