Comics as a literary-didactic method and their use for reducing gender differences in reading literacy at the primary level of education

The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of the systematic use of comics as a literary-didactic method to reduce gender differences in reading literacy and reading motivation at the primary level of education. It was assumed that the use of comics would have a positive effect on pupils’ reading literacy and reading motivation, while also reducing the aforementioned differences between boys and girls. The dimensions of reading literacy and reading motivation were examined in experimental and control groups, before and after the intervention, by means of questionnaires and tests for pupils. The sample consisted of 143 pupils from second to fifth grade from two Slovenian primary schools in a rural environment, of which 73 pupils participated in the experimental group and 70 pupils represented the control group. Effects of the use of comics as a literary-didactic method were not found: using comics as a literary-didactic method did not have a statistically significant effect on pupils’ reading literacy and reading motivation. However, when the four-way structure of the research (taking into account the age and gender of the pupils) was considered, some subgroups showed a statistically significant increase in reading interest and attitude towards reading. No reduction of gender differences in reading literacy and reading motivation was found. Based on the results, guidelines for further research are established and suggestions are offered for teachers’ work. (DIPF/Orig.)

The Wounded Me: a novel and critical essay on Hugo Simberg's oeuvre and the literary engagement with his painting The Wounded Angel

No abstract available.

Making a home: the difficulty of dwelling in Genesis and its intertexts

Using an inter-disciplinary range of research on the home-space, home-making practices and the concept of ‘dwelling’, I achieve a new understanding of a central thematic concern in Genesis: its characters’ struggle to build stable, lasting homes upon the earth. Genesis starts with a lost home-space named Eden, before progressing towards other temporary dwellings such as the ark Noah builds, and Abraham’s tents. The biblical ‘home’ is constructed from a mix of materials: the birth of children, divine instructions and journeys, dreams, homemaking acts and so on. Alongside social scientific criticism, this thesis uses literary and midrashic intertexts as a way into re-imagining the ‘unhomely’ experiences of certain characters, or drawing out tensions in acts such as home-unmaking or homecomings. The investigation of the concept of ‘home’ in Genesis contributes to the study of this space more widely, as well as reinterpreting familiar biblical themes such as identity, family and community.

Eliciting nature and landscape writing through outdoor experiences

Nature and landscape writing includes creative writing about wild places. However, most authors have a literary background and are not outdoor ‘educators’. Using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, the reasons suggested are a lack of framing of outdoor experiences for this intent, the need for learning the skills of interpretation and lexicon and the offer of prolonged, powerful experiences and time for creative thinking and responses, such as an extended solo. It is suggested that outdoor educators may be too busy ‘experiencing’ to write, that they do not go ‘slow’ enough or that they are encapsulated in the ‘edginess of existence’ through adventure and just pass through their surroundings rather than connect with them. Outdoor educators have much to offer as they experience metaphorical or literal journeys comprising ‘flow’ rather than episodic encounter through lived experience to create rich embodied stories with ideological and social aspects so often overlooked in narrative.

A literary approach to teaching english language in a multicultural classroom

Literature is not generally considered as a coherent branch of the curriculum in relation to language development in either native or foreign language teaching. As teachers of English in multicultural Indian classrooms, we come across students with varying degrees of competence in English language learning. Although language learning is a natural process for natives, students of other languages put in colossal efforts to learn it. Despite their sincere efforts, they face challenges regarding pronunciation, spelling, and vocabulary. Indian classrooms are a microcosm of the larger society, so teaching English language in a manner that equips the students to face the cutthroat competition has become a necessity and a challenge for English language teachers. English today has become the key determinant for being successful in their careers. The hackneyed and stereotypical methods of teaching are not acceptable now. Teachers are no longer arbitrary dispensers of knowledge, but they are playing the role of a guide and facilitator for the students. Teachers of English are using innovative ideas to make English language teaching and learning interesting and simple. Teachers have started using literary texts and their analyses to explore and ignite the imagination and creative skills of the students. One needs to think and rethink the contribution of literature to intelligent thinking as well as its role in the process of teaching/learning. This article is, therefore, an attempt at exploring the nature of the literary experience in the present-day classrooms and the broader role of literature in life.

Tracing outsideness: young women's institutional journeys and the geographies of closed space

Understanding confinement and its complex workings between individuals and society has been the stated aim of carceral geography and wider studies on detention. This project contributes ethnographic insights from multiple sites of incarceration, working with an under-researched group within confined populations. Focussing on young female detainees in Scotland, this project seeks to understand their experiences of different types of ‘closed’ space. Secure care, prison and closed psychiatric facilities all impact on the complex geographies of these young women’s lives. The fluid but always situated relations of control and care provide the backdrop for their journeys in/out and beyond institutional spaces. Understanding institutional journeys with reference to age and gender allows an insight into the highly mobile, often precarious, and unfamiliar lives of these young women who live on the margins. This thesis employs a mixed-method qualitative approach and explores what Goffman calls the ‘tissue and fabric’ of detention as a complex multi-institutional practice. In order to be able to understand the young women’s gendered, emotional and often repetitive experiences of confinement, analysis of the constitution of ‘closed space’ represents a first step for inquiry. The underlying nature of inner regimes, rules and discipline in closed spaces, provide the background on which confinement is lived, perceived and processed. The second part of the analysis is the exploration of individual experiences ‘on the inside’, ranging from young women’s views on entering a closed institution, the ways in which they adapt or resist the regime, and how they cope with embodied aspects of detention. The third and final step considers the wider context of incarceration by recovering the young women’s journeys through different types of institutional spaces and beyond. The exploration of these journeys challenges and re-develops understandings of mobility and inertia by engaging the relative power of carceral archipelagos and the figure of femina sacra. This project sits comfortably within the field of carceral geography while also pushing at its boundaries. On a conceptual level, a re-engagement with Goffman’s micro-analysis challenges current carceral-geographic theory development. Perhaps more importantly, this project pushes for an engagement with different institutions under the umbrella of carceral geography, thus creating new dialogues on issues like ‘care’ and ‘control’. Finally, an engagement with young women addresses an under-represented population within carceral geography in ways that raise distinctly problematic concerns for academic research and penal policy. Overall, this project aims to show the value of fine grained micro-level research in institutional geographies for extending thinking and understanding about society’s responses to a group of people who live on the margins of social and legal norms.

Literary reading is a team game: exercices with Carroll and Carle.

This paper will focus on the issue of training future literary reading mediators or promoters. It will propose a practical exercise on playing with intertextuality with the aid of two children literature classics and masterpieces—The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865) and The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle (1969). This exercise is not designed to be a pedagogical or didactic tool used with children (that could alternatively be done with the same corpora), but it is designed to focus on issues of literary studies and contemporary culture. The aim of this practical exercise with future reading promoters is to enable graduate students or trainees to be able to recognize that literary reading can be a team game. However, before arriving at the agan stage, where the rules get simplified and attainable by young readers, hard and solitary work of the mediator is required. The rules of this solitary game of preparing the reading of classical texts are not always evident. On the other hand, the reason why literary reading could be (and perhaps should be) defined as a new team game in our contemporary and globalized world derives directly from the fact that we now live in a world where mass culture is definitely installed. We should be pragmatic on evaluating the conditions of communication between people (not only young adults or children) and we should look the way people read the signs on everyday life and consequently behave in contemporary society, and then apply the same rules or procedures to introduce old players such as the classical books in the game. We are talking about adult mediators and native digital readers. In the contemporary democratic social context, cultural producers and consumers are two very important elements (as the book itself) of the literary polissystem. So, teaching literature is more than ever to be aware that the literary reader meaning of a text does not reside only in the text and in its solitary relationship with the quiet and comfortably installed reader. Meaning is produced by the reader in relation both to the text in question and to the complex network of texts invoked in the reading process and plural connections provided by the world of a new media environment.

Black women's writing: contributions to the literary, feminist and gender studies.

This work is a reflection on black women’s writing, which has been and yet, sometimes, is marginalized and reduced to invisibly in our literary field due to several factors . Therefore, it becomes important to give visibility to this writing so as to discuss the marks of feminism, race and gender that it brings, showing its contributions for the construction of a new and empowered discourse on black women, which represents a differential for literary discourse and affects the canon, since it t promotes the construction of a new perspective, a differentiated representation of black women, emphasizing their forms of struggle and resistance, front the exclusionary sociocultural systems.  In order to do that, I bring up some theoretical voices such as that, of Guacira Lopes Louro (1997); Abdias do Nascimento (2000); Tatau Godinho (2008), among others that deal with the theme, as well as texts written by  black women writers such as Alzira Rufino, Esmeralda Ribeiro e Cristiane Sobral to argue and think about a literature that deals with black women autonomy,  and challenges the dominant power systems, a literature that gives emphasis to women and ethnic-racial issues from perspective of the black person herself , since this project was relegated to oblivion for too long or portrayed in as stereotyped way by other voices, other discourses guided by a masculine and eurocentric bias. In this way, we hope to show how it is relevant to black women's literature, because makes us reflect and face the mechanisms of oppression, subalternization against women, especially black women, and race and gender prejudice, and its effects, that still can be seen daily in different social and cultural contexts.  

Analogy between the socio-cultural thematic of Macunaíma and the Tarsila do Amaral’s paintings: a possibility of broaden the senses of literary texts

This research seeks establishing relationships between the socio-cultural theme of Macunaíma and the some paintings by Tarsila do Amaral bringing reflections to literature teaching to suggest the seek to broaden the sense of literary texts. We will discuss the literature importance at school according to what is to predicted in the Diretrizes Curriculares de Língua Portuguesa. Research is based  on the notions of intertextuality by Bakhtin (2003),  on the postulates by Etienne Souriau (1983), on the criticism by Candido (2006) on the Reception Aesthetics, by Jauss (2002), Iser (1999) and on the writings by Bordini and Aguiar (1993).

OSWALD DE ANDRADE’S THEATER: THE LITERARY FUNCTION AND THE HISTORICAL SERIES

Studies carried out so far allow us to observe important aspects regarding the transformation of the dramatic genre. They show how either traditional or new formal elements are assimilated or reworked by the authors in Modernism and in contemporary productions, with different meanings, transforming the dramatic genre in such a way that typical elements of the ancient tragic genre assume different meanings in the contemporary tragic drama. The same phenomenon can be identified in the elements of metatheater, which undergo displacements in the Vanguard Theater, defining new functions. This approach assumed by most contemporary cultural practices is celebrated as a creative possibility to renew the cultural matrixes; however, such practices are not new, and are found in the production of the poet, playwright and writer Oswald de Andrade. It is important to mention that even Oswald de Andrade revisited traditional sources, as observed by Gilberto Mendonça Teles (2009) when addressing the models of cultural interpretation in the current days. Although there are several studies on Oswald de Andrade’s works, focusing mainly on his prose and poetry, his theatrical texts are still poorly studied. Considering Oswald de Andrade's productions, his theatrical texts present procedures that testify his modernity in the capacity of anticipating changes, which are currently conceived as procedures and trends of contemporary poetics. This reflection is what is intended in the present text.

READER’S ROLE AND THE LITERARY GENRE IN TEXTUAL RECEPTION: TZVETAN TODOROV AND VINCENT JOUVE CONTRIBUITIONS

Regarding the importance the reader takes on in studies about reading and literary genres, this paper presents reflections about the reader’s role in the constitution of the literary genres as esthetics conventions which the writer dialogues, as well as, about the literary genres theory issues, important to literary analysis, and allow to an useful understanding, and consequently, the esthetical experience in reading literary texts. This paper focuses particularly, in a reflection about the reading concepts and esthetical conventions of the fantastic genre, from the theoretical assumptions of Tzvetan Torodov and Vincent Jouve. From reflections developed related to reception theories, about the reading processing and the reader’s contribution in the creation of the fantastic genre, was possible propose an approach and establish analogies between the referential from de Todorov and Jouve Both authors recognize the importance of the reader’s role to the literary text completeness and suggest the text to present features and conventions, as textual strategies of stylistic, linguistic and formal order which conduct the reader to the achievement of the text meanings.

CULTURAL CANNIBALISM: A TURNING POINT IN THE PROPOSITION OF AMBIVALENT POETICS IN THE LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY DISCOURSE

The concept of cultural cannibalism was discussed and re-established by intellectuals from the field of literary and cultural criticism, and it was also the object of creative appropriation by a significant group of writers in Brazil and in the Latin America context. Nevertheless, this concept is revitalized in the contemporary context, reflecting the critical consciousness of the writer on the understanding of social inequalities that shape Latin America, in its different segments, be they political, economic or cultural.

WRITING AND SPEECH: WHAT TEACHES US THE NON LITERARY TEXTS

Until the early twentieth century only written texts documenting the language. From the analysis of non-literary documents of the seventeenth century, we shall show how the writing reflects the facts of speech. Two sets of phenomena will be especially focused on: the graphic representation of unstressed vowels and that of sibilant fricatives (palatal and non-palatal). It is intended to alert to problems concerning the interference of speech in writing, drawing a parallel between the writing of the speaker common, off-hand that was contaminated by his standard speech and writing.