Research Colloquium (2017-2018)

Every academic year the CFLLC holds a Research Colloquium, at which a colleague presents current research in an informal setting, with ample opportunity for discussion, feedback, and questions. This year’s colloquia will include the following discussions:


Little Italy, Big Japan: Patterns of Continuity and Displacements among post-World War II Italian Writers in Japan

Tuesday, November 7, at 4PM, in Hollander 241
Michele Monserrati, Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian

Michele MonserratiIn this chapter I concentrate on the post-war years and the years of reconstruction featuring rapid economic growth in both Italy and Japan. I look at the writings of Fosco Maraini, Goffredo Parise, Alberto Moravia and Italo Calvino through the ideological framework of continuity and change that was widely debated in Japan at the time of its rapid modernization. Anthropologists, sociologist and philosophers (Chie Nakane, Robert N. Bellah, Maruyama Masao, among others) in the 1960s debated the nature of the intensive Japanese recovery, by highlighting the paradox of a society that was rapidly embracing modernization, democracy and a capitalist economy, while by the same token maintaining unaffected major features of its traditional structure. The paradox of structural change and continuity with the past is of particular interest to Italian observers because their society embraced a similar set of problems at the dawn of the foundation of the Italian Republic. I contend that the Japanese model of societal evolution played a central role in the writing of Italians traveling to Japan in this period by virtue of generating a contrast with the Italian model of evolution, which was predicated upon rupture and displacement. During the 1950s and 60s, Italy experienced a similar economic development followed by an intense phenomenon of migration from the south to the cities driving the “economic miracle” in the north. The consequence of this rapid growth was unprecedented social and cultural transformations that engendered a perceived discontinuity with the past and a change in the national identity. I analyse this sense of disappointment among Italians intellectuals by referring to the thesis of Emilio Gentile in his essay La Grande Italia: The Myth of the Nation in the 20th century. According to Gentile, at the dawn of the new Republican government, leading Italian intellectuals suffered from an inferiority complex despite the fact that the democratic process was leading the country toward an unexpected economic miracle. As Fascism brought the nationalistic project of building “La grande Italia” to a tragic end, Italians came to term with the fallacy of the nationalistic myth of continuity between the ancient Roman Empire and the colonialist project. In fact, I argue that the waning of the political dream that Mussolini’s propaganda stirred up ultimately informed the social imaginary of Italians traveling to Japan.
 

Dostoevsky’s Underground and Leningrad Unofficial Culture of the 1970s: The Poetry of Viktor Krivulin

Wednesday, November 29, at 4PM, in Hollander 241
Vladimir Ivantsov, Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian

Vladimir IvantsovThe poet Viktor Krivulin (1944-2001) was the leading representative of Leningrad underground culture of 1960s-80s, and its theoretician. In his poetry and cultural criticism, Krivulin directly addresses the concept of the underground, thus both participating in the creation of the cultural myth of which he was part and analyzing it from a scholarly distance. While scholars have mostly focused on Krivulin’s creative dialogue with the preceding traditions of 19th and early 20th-century poetry, his engagement with Russian classical prose, namely Dostoevsky, has not yet been studied. I discuss the conceptualization of the underground in Krivulin, placing it in the broader context of Russian unofficial culture of the time. I show that Krivulin employs the underground as an intertextual motif that involves his texts in a dialogue with Dostoevsky and Dostoevsky’s notion of podpol’e (underground).

“Developing Foreign Language Learners’ Comprehension of Dialects and Non-Standard Speech”

Tuesday, April 17, at 4PM, Hollander 241
Cornelius Kubler, Stanfield Professor of Asian Studies

Cornelius KublerMost languages have not only one or more standard forms, which are the variety of language ordinarily taught to non-native learners, but also a number of dialects or dialect-influenced varieties of non-standard speech, which are seldom taught but may in fact be spoken by sizeable populations of native speakers. If educated native speakers of a language can understand most speech in most of the varieties of their language, then it would seem that non-native learners of that language who wish to attain advanced levels of proficiency should be able to approximate that ability. I’m currently working on a book project with the tentative title A Practical Guide to Chinese “Dialects” and Accented Mandarin. The assumptions of the book include that: (1) background knowledge about dialects and the ability to recognize particular accents constitute part of the socio-cultural knowledge which advanced learners of a language should possess; (2) the ability to comprehend dialects and dialect-influenced non-standard speech is important; (3) strategies and shortcuts for promoting this ability can and should be taught explicitly in class; and (4) this ability is most efficiently acquired through an initial period of organized study in the classroom followed by an extended period of residence and language use in country. Though my own research deals with Chinese, I’ll be citing examples from English, German, French, and other languages, to which the same principles would apply.

“Opacity and Untranslatability in New Cuban Literature”

Wednesday, April 25, at 4PM, Hollander 241
Walfrido Dorta, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish

Walfrido DortaThe paper focuses on authors born in Cuba in the early 1980s, such as Jorge Enrique Lage, Osdany Morales, and Legna Rodríguez. Their texts address the possibility of their cultural translation through certain warnings about the risks of their readiness to be translated. This sort of critical conscience appears in scenes of the untranslatable. The proliferation of narrative plots in these works can be understood as a cosmopolitan experience of writing that sublimates the precarious access to certain areas of the Cuban and global literary and cultural archive. These writings act as an impediment for the market, the State, and the Cuban cultural institutions, which are accustomed to dealing with certain kind of narratives and political subjectivities. The opacity of these texts in relation to identitarian logic and demands for transparency regarding “Cubanness” is one of the cornerstones of their literary politics.