Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies

Discourses and Identities in Romance Fiction. Anglophone Visions from Madeira and the Canaries, edited by María Isabel González Cruz (Málaga/Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2022)

Paloma Fresno Calleja — 2024-06-24

Book review: Discursos e Identidades en la Ficción Romántica. Visiones Anglófonas de Madeira y Canarias / Discourses and Identities in Romance Fiction. Anglophone Visions from Madeira and the Canaries

Corpus Linguistics and Translation Tools for Digital Humanities: Research Methods and Applications, edited by Stefania M. Maci and Michele Sala (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)

Susana-Luisa Costa-Otero — 2024-06-24

Changes in Argument Structure: The Transitivizing Reaction Object Construction, by Tamara Bouso (Bern: Peter Lang, 2021)

Andreea Rosca — 2024-06-24

Female Animal Characters in Roald Dahl’s Children’s Books: A Misogynistic Portrayal

Sarah Caré — 2024-06-24

Children’s literature introduces children to the world, stimulates their imagination, and mirrors the society they live in by reproducing its social rules and accepted norms. This is especially true with gender stereotypes, which display and reinforce the masculine and feminine roles constructed by a given society. This binary, onedimensional, and conventional representation is harmful as it negatively impacts young readers’ apprehension of gender roles as well as their personality, behaviour, and aspirations for the future. World-renowned children’s author Roald Dahl has recently been criticised as a controversial author and a racist, misogynistic person. By adopting a feminist literary critical approach, this study analyses Dahl and his illustrator Quentin Blake’s portrayal of female anthropomorphic characters, generally neglected by previous researchers in favour of human characters, in four books: James and the Giant Peach (1961), The Magic Finger (1966), Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), and The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (1985). Female characters are weak, inactive, confined indoors, and constantly belittled by their male counterparts who are portrayed as adventurous and as decision makers. Therefore, this study aims to encourage parents and educators to teach young learners to read children’s books with a critical eye to identify and interpret different stereotypical representations.

The Affective Forces of the State: Overcoming Biographies of Violence in Yejide Kilanko’s Daughters Who Walk this Path

Cristina Cruz-Gutiérrez — 2024-06-24

This article delves into the abuses stemming from the Nigerian state forces and their failure to protect Nigerian citizens as illustrated in Yejide Kilanko’s Daughters Who Walk this Path (2012). The novel narrates the struggles undergone by young Morayo as she is repeatedly abused as a child by an elder cousin, Bros T. Here, I seek to trace a parallelism between the instances of physical and affective violence against Morayo and the episodes of “intra-societal violence” (Hill 2012: 15) occurring in Nigeria from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, when the country’s sociopolitical sphere was marked by the social chaos resulting from armed robberies, military coups, rigged elections, and instances of police brutality towards women. I shall analyze such episodes as instances of ‘forced intimacy’ within the public and private spheres, which translates into the impositions of negative forms of affect upon personal and collective development. In this context, the physical and psychological abuses suffered by Morayo will be presented as shaping what Ahmed refers to as one’s “biographies of violence” (2017: 23). My ultimate aim is to trace Morayo’s development of what I will describe as ‘affective resilience’ against the affective forces of the state.

“Some kind of peace will follow”: Archivism and Anarchivism in Shakespearean Appropriations of Rome (HBO/BBC/RAI, 2005–2007)

Víctor Huertas Martín — 2024-06-24

This article explores the appropriation of Shakespeare’s works in Rome (Heller, MacDonald and Milius 2005-2007). Drawing on archive theory, it looks into the use of Shakespeare’s archive in this TV series by examining gender variables. The results of this research show that the traces of Shakespeare’s archive in Rome form different assemblages for female and male characters. This fact reflects the cultural hierarchies of the TV seriality of the period in which Rome was aired. Nonetheless, the appropriations of different Shakespearean dramatic genres —mainly tragedy and romance— raise transformative possibilities for those gender politics in Rome’s narrative world.

"A Picayune Fragment of the Possible Total": Stone Allegories in Saroyan's Life-Writing

Mauricio Damián Aguilera Linde — 2024-06-24

This article explores William Saroyan’s notion that life can only be grasped as a fragment of the Absolute, and that any attempt to understand one’s existence is by definition a frustrated project. By applying Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s theory of the fragment, the mark of the ‘incompletable incompletion’ (1978), I will read Saroyan’s formless autobiographical experiments (ranging from 1952 to the late 1970s) as the author’s failure to endow his elusive identity with a stable meaning and order. The culmination of his concern with fragmentation finds its best expression in the finding of a stone, an object trouvé which operates either as the transcendentalist symbol of the recovery of the totality or else as a negative allegory in the sense adumbrated by Walter Benjamin, i.e., a concept which allows the author to revisit and interrogate history as the landscape of death and decline. Steeped in the mythical aura of Armenia as the country of stones, Saroyan’s petrified fragment can only be interpreted not as a vehicle of unity and fulfilment but as a reminder of tragedy, dispersion, and the failure to coalesce, all of them inevitably linked with the writer’s diasporic consciousness.

The Reciprocal Relationship Between the City and its Subjects in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For

Silvia Pérez — 2024-06-24

This article seeks to examine the significance of geographical setting in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (2006 [1956]) and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005) in order to understand the undeniable reciprocal relationship that exists between the city and its subjects. Hence, I will analyse the role played by London and Toronto in the construction and development of their inhabitants’ identities, as well as the power that city dwellers have in (re)shaping urban spaces. The article aims to examine the dynamic and fluid character of the city and intends to identify the effects that migrant communities have on rewriting and remapping urban spaces when exercising their agency.

The Feminine Heroic Archetype in Contemporary Epic Fantasy. Daenerys Targaryen, Relentless Heroine and Mother of Dragons

Antonio Castro Balbuena — 2024-06-24

Epic fantasy is known for its abundant male protagonists, who embody the heroic model inherited from its mythological and legendary tradition. In contrast, female characters are often relegated to the roles of maiden-in-distress or award for the hero. But is there no female character in the current state of the genre who can follow her own heroic archetype? Looking for answers, this essay turns to tradition to develop —from a narratological and literary perspective— a vision of common female archetypes that can evolve toward heroism. From this point, the archetype of the Relentless Heroine is proposed, based on three main traits: one, the rebellion of the female character against the oppressive system; two, the relationship with war, which will shape the different stages of her narrative evolution; and three, the fictional world as a context that will influence her actantial behavior. As a practical application of this archetype, Daenerys Targaryen, character of the series A Song of Ice and Fire (George R.R. Martin), is analyzed to identify the guidelines that make her a Relentless Heroine, a Mother of Dragons and ultimately a proactive heroine, who does not need a masculine hero.

Lexical Availability in Multilingual CLIL: Gender-dependent Differences in English and French

Leah Geoghegan — 2024-06-24

It has been suggested that Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) positively affects learners’ content-related vocabulary. While CLIL has become increasingly popular throughout Spain, the language of instruction in this learning environment has predominantly been English, largely to the neglect of other languages. Calls have consequently been made to conduct comparative research across other languages to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of CLIL irrespective of the language of instruction. In addition, female learners have been found to outperform males in areas of vocabulary such as lexical availability (LA) in English. However, given suggestions that CLIL may blur gender differences, it is unclear whether this difference is also found in a multilingual CLIL context. This study thus aims to determine whether an English advantage is observed in LA in a multilingual CLIL environment, and whether this advantage varies in male and female learners. Results indicate that there is a clear dominance in English over French, regardless of gender. However, analysis across different grades reveals that CLIL instruction has a clear effect on the students’ LA in different languages, but in different ways for male and female learners. The findings are of key importance to CLIL stakeholders wishing to support male and female learners in multilingual classrooms.

Translating the Representation of Malabo in the United States and Spain

Patricia Martín Matas — 2024-06-24

In this paper we analyze how Malabo and Africa appear represented in the novel The Lower River, by American author Paul Theroux, and how his cultural and linguistic vision of- the city and the continent reach Spain through the translated version. In order to do so, a description of the publishing market is provided to understand its importance both for the original text and for the translation in Spain. Through a textual analysis of both texts using the software Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2004), including word-frequency and concordance searches, we will explore if there is a positive or negative portrayal of Malabo. Finally, through a linguistic comparative analysis of the original and the translation, we will determine to what extent the reader in Spain can draw the same inferences as the English reader of the original.

Stress Shift in Noun-Verb Conversion Pairs: The Case of ImportN-ImportV Pairs

María Méndez Ruiz — 2024-06-24

Conversion is a word-formation process characterised, among other aspects, by the formal identity between the original word and the resulting one (bottle à to bottle). However, there are a few cases of conversion-related words which challenge this formal identity characteristic of conversion. One of these cases is that of noun-verb conversion pairs such as import^N-import^V, in which a type of phonological base allomorphy occurs: stress shift. In such cases, stress shift consists in nouns tending to be stressed on the first syllable (import^N /ˈɪmpɔːt/) while verbs are usually stressed on the last one (import^V /ɪmˈpɔːt/). This study aims to determine which are the most frequently occurring noun-verb conversion pairs displaying stress shift and why this type of allomorphy occurs. To answer these questions, a corpus of 157 noun-verb conversion pairs was compiled from frequency lists of nouns and verbs. Out of these pairs, 25 presented stress shift. Additionally, information about the etymology and the year of introduction into English of the 25 pairs with stress shift was gathered. It was found that all the noun-verb conversion pairs with stress shift are of Romance origin. Furthermore, the results suggest that the stress shift in noun-verb conversion pairs might be due to their adaptation to the Germanic stress system after being introduced into English from either Latin or French.

Language for Specific Purposes and Audio Description Tasks: A Case Study

Mª Ángeles Escobar-Álvarez — 2024-06-24

In the Foreign Language (FL) classroom, video description and dubbing have recently been introduced for the development of communicative skills in various types of didactic methods (Vermeulen and Ibáñez 2014, 2017; Talaván 2020; Ávila-Cabrera and Rodríguez-Arancón 2021). This paper offers an innovative didactic proposal of Audio Description (AD) in the English for Tourism (ET) classroom. It supports the hypothesis that authentic tasks enhance communicative skills in LSP (Language for Specific Purposes) education (Melnichuk et al. 2017). It presents a quasi-experimental study of student performance in two different productive tasks (writing and speaking). The study follows a Task-Based Learning (TBL) approach and addresses a group of 119 students within an undergraduate program of ET (B2 level) at a Spanish distance-education university (UNED). As a post-task, a twofold rubric, designed in a previous teaching project, scored and analyzed student writing and speaking responses to an AD script of a mute video about a touristic place of their choice. Results show that implementing an AD task in the LSP classroom had a positive effect on students’ marks in their final test. In addition, the number of students who completed the writing task was around 50% greater than those who completed the speaking task. Introducing ICT tools in the LSP classroom seems to be positive, and it will be argued that developing digital technologies, such as mobile apps, may be a necessary step to foster future professionals’ language performance and competences.