Research and Innovation

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

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

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

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