Moda e literatura: a poética do vestuário em Macedo e Alencar

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

La vision d'Athenes et de Constantinople dans les recits de voyage du XIXᵉ siecle

Le sujet de cette recherche est la perception chez les voyageurs occidentaux et grecs du XIXᵉ siècle de zones de la Méditerranée depuis toujours point d’intersections culturelles : les villes d’Athènes et de Constantinople. L’objectif de la recherche est de reconstruire la contribution des hommes de lettres, français et grecs, à la constitution de l’identité nationale selon le schéma mis en évidence par Benedict Anderson dans « Communautés Imaginées » On a tenté en se référant au corpus d’identifier dans la littérature de voyage du XIXᵉ siècle, dans le sillage de « Orientalismo » de Edward Said, comment Philhellénisme et Exotisme orientalisant, tous deux d’empreinte romantique, ont contribué à inventer pour Athènes une identité occidentale et pour Istanbul une identité orientale, ignorant presque l’existence entre les deux villes d’une commune matrice byzantine–ottomane ou mieux, l’appartenance commune à l’ensemble géopolitique de la Région Intermédiaire identifiée par Dimitri Kitsikis.

So Very Far Away

I began my thesis planning to craft pieces of both fiction and nonfiction. I had very much enjoyed working on a travel essay during the fall semester, but I have always had an inherent interest in writing short stories, so I had hoped to explore both genres, using my previous work from a seminar in fiction and a travel writing class as a springboard. However, in writing “So Very Far Away,” my second nonfiction piece, which I developed from material that I was unableto keep in the essay “Lunch with the Americans,” I discovered that nonfiction was an incredibly freeing genre because the essential ingredients were already present. My personal experiences provided the basic elements of plot, character, and setting, yet I discovered new challenges as I attempted to present these experiences in a way that moved beyond mere memories and reflections and towards a larger meaning that would matter to others as well. I became sointrigued by this process of creating cohesive narratives through the editing and shaping of memories that I decided to focus completely on nonfiction for my thesis work and write a collection of essays about my time abroad.

She, With a Warm Palm, the Skin Over My Spine

She, with a Warm Palm, the Skin over My Spine is a collection of sixnonfiction essays and three vignettes divided into two parts. The first part tells the stories of my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother, and is entitled Home; the second part is entitled Away and consists of travel writing set in Thailand, Egypt and India.

Del orden del cosmos al "yo" disperso : distancias, espacios y experiencias en una perspectiva diacrónica de las escrituras del viaje

El presente trabajo constituye una propuesta para abordar textos referidos al viaje que se basa en analizar la mayor o menor relevancia dada a la distancia recorrida, al exotismo o extrañeza de los espacios visitados y a las experiencias en cuanto modificadoras de la persona del viajero. Las concepciones de diversas épocas sobre el mundo exterior y sobre el interior del "yo" han ejercido una influencia fundamental en la gran variabilidad de estas valoraciones. Pero no se trata de un proceso desarrollado de forma lineal y por lo tanto, en los ejemplos presentados se subrayan las interrelaciones entre pormenores de dicho proceso histórico y los desfases y matices propios de cada texto.

El viajero posmoderno : un aporte a la tipología de viajeros

El trabajo tiene por objetivo identificar las características que distinguen al viajero de la segunda mitad del siglo XX de sus antepasados: el peregrino medieval, el colonizador, el viajero moderno. El marco teórico lo brindan las reflexiones sobre postmodernismo (Hutcheon, Lyotard, Nogerol, Vattimo) y las tipologías clásicas de viajeros según el comparatismo (Pageaux, Wolfzettel).Es la hipótesis que el escritor viajero de la segunda mitad del siglo XX, lejos de ser simplemente un turista masificado, viaja en soledad, bajo las demandas de su individualismo. Su texto sin compromisos ideológicos fracciona la realidad, la deconstruye usando la fina ironía, la contradicción y la ambigüedad. No se interesa por la originalidad de su escrito, sino que lo arma como un collage inter- y paratextual, y es leído ampliamente, porque pertenece a la sociedad postmoderna con sus marcas de Individualismo, valores materialistas, multiplicidad espacio-temporal, mediatización de la realidad, masificación de la cultura y consumismo. Así, el relato de viajes que tradicionalmente ha sido siempre un texto subjetivo, con estilo aditivo y que ha servido de intermediario entre culturas resulta una tipología textual apropiada para la expresión de las experiencias del viajero postmoderno.

An evolutive approach for the delineation of local labour markets

This paper presents a new approach to the delineation of local labour markets based on evolutionary computation. The main objective is the regionalisation of a given territory into functional regions based on commuting flows. According to the relevant literature, such regions are defined so that (a) their boundaries are rarely crossed in daily journeys to work, and (b) a high degree of intra-area movement exists. This proposal merges municipalities into functional regions by maximizing a fitness function that measures aggregate intra-region interaction under constraints of inter-region separation and minimum size. Real results are presented based on the latest database from the Census of Population in the Region of Valencia. Comparison between the results obtained through the official method which currently is most widely used (that of British Travel-to-Work Areas) and those from our approach is also presented, showing important improvements in terms of both the number of different market areas identified that meet the statistical criteria and the degree of aggregate intra-market interaction.

Writing in French in secondary schools in England and Germany: are the British really 'bad language learners’?

It is widely assumed that the British are poorer modern foreign language (MFL) learners than their fellow Europeans. Motivation has often been seen as the main cause of this perceived disparity in language learning success. However, there have also been suggestions that curricular and pedagogical factors may play a part. This article reports a research project investigating how German and English 14- to 16-year-old learners of French as a first foreign language compare to one another in their vocabulary knowledge and in the lexical diversity, accuracy and syntactic complexity of their writing. Students from comparable schools in Germany and England were set two writing tasks which were marked by three French native speakers using standardised criteria aligned to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEF). Receptive vocabulary size and lexical diversity were established by the X_lex test and a verb types measure respectively. Syntactic complexity and formal accuracy were respectively assessed using the mean length of T-units (MLTU) and words/error metrics. Students' and teachers' questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used to provide information and participants' views on classroom practices, while typical textbooks and feedback samples were analysed to establish differences in materials-related input and feedback in the two countries. The German groups were found to be superior in vocabulary size, and in the accuracy, lexical diversity and overall quality – but not the syntactic complexity – of their writing. The differences in performance outcomes are analysed and discussed with regard to variables related to the educational contexts (e.g. curriculum design and methodology).