Research and Innovation

Dr. Cae Joseph-Masséna, an assistant professor of French Language and Literatures in the Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences and University of Maryland alumni, has won a Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW).

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the figuration of migratory movement in A Seventh Man (1975), a photo-essay reportage produced by the writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr, and Transit (2018), a film by the German director Christian Petzold. It seeks to make sense of the curious figure of the migrant one finds in Petzold’s film (based loosely on Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel by the same name about World War II refugees). As a close reading of the film shows, Transit rejects the coherence of the history or period film genre, plays with multiple generic forms, uses incongruous modes of narration, and introduces a protagonist who pretends to be someone else and whose time is therefore someone else’s time. In these ways, the film ties the figure of the migrant to an experience of time that is essentially one of discontinuity and crisis—time as a superimposition of discordant temporalities. To set in relief the historical novelty of such a migratory figure, the chapter approaches Transit through a reading of A Seventh Man, a text that relates the temporal discord of migratory movement to the Marxist historical schema of combined and uneven development. What is new about Transit, and what the film offers as a distinct problem for the figuration of migration in our own situation, is precisely the waning or even the absence of any such historical schema or shared temporal horizon. Based on this diagnosis, the chapter argues, the task of the figuration of migratory movement today lies in reinventing a shared sense of temporal existence, a collective time that would allow the figure of the migrant to not only inscribe the crises of our present moment but also prefigure future forms of emancipation.

Jonathan Malone is the Interim Director of Maryland English Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Ph.D. candidate in Second Language Acquisition. His dissertation research utilizes eye-tracking methodology to improve our understanding of how listening while reading impacts vocabulary learning, both in processing and learning new information.  

TIRF Research Topic Investigated: Digital Technology in Language Education

Project Title: Toward a Theory-based Account of the Vocabulary Processing and Learning Benefits of Reading While Listening

In Haitian Creole, bay lodyans means to tell stories to an audience, and more generally, to entertain. This book is the first to analyze popular contemporary Haitian films, looking especially at how they respond to the needs and desires of Haitian audiences in and beyond Haiti. Produced between 2000 and 2018 and largely shot with digital cameras and sometimes cellphones, these films focus on the complexities of community, nostalgia, belonging, identity, and the emotional landscapes of exile and diaspora. They reflect sociopolitical and cultural issues related to family, language, im/migration, religion, gender, sexuality, and economic hardship. Using storytelling and other less traditionally "academic" techniques, Cécile Accilien advances Haitian epistemological frameworks. Bay Lodyans integrates terms and concepts from Haitian culture, such as jerans and kafou (derived from the French words for "to manage" and "crossroads," respectively) and includes interviews with Haitian filmmakers, actors, and scholars in order to challenge the dominance of Western theoretical approaches and perspectives.

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.