Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies

The Human Future: Artificial Humans and Evolution in Anglophone Science Fiction of the 20th Century, by Stefan Lampadius (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020)

María Torres Romero — 2023-12-19

Review of The Human Future: Artificial Humans and Evolution in Anglophone Science Fiction of the 20th Century by Stefan Lampadius.

Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance: A Mediterranean Approach to the Anglosphere, edited by María Isabel Romero-Ruiz and Pilar Cuder-Domínguez (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

J. Javier Torres-Fernández — 2023-12-19

Review of Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance: A Mediterranean Approach to the Anglosphere (2022) edited by María Isabel Romero-Ruiz and Pilar Cuder-Domínguez.

“Sluts” and “Slaves”: The Internet and the Evolution of Fantasy in Dennis Cooper's Online Work

Jaime Garcia-Iglesias — 2023-12-19

This article explores a yet unresearched part of Dennis Cooper’s production: his blog posts and, in particular, his “Sluts” and “Slaves” monthly posts, where he compiles explicit and sometimes sordid texts and images of gay sex workers apparently found online. First, this paper will situate these blog posts in the fields of citational and online literature, arguing that they are an example of ‘flarf’. In so
doing, it also extends the notion of “flarf” from poetry to narrative. Then, this paper explores the continuities and differences between the blog posts and Cooper’s other work, most notably The Sluts (2005), to argue that —while similar in their focus on the internet and “the impossibility of truth”— the blog posts present a significant transformation that compels readers to confront their own desires.

The Royal Master and El villano en su rincón Revisited: More than the Motif of the Reluctance to see the King

Luciano Garcia García — 2023-12-19

In 1890, in an article titled “Die Nachhamung spanischer Komödien in England unter der ersten Stuarts”, the German scholar A.L. Stiefel solidly demonstrated the clear textual relationship between James Shirley’s The Opportunity and Tirso de Molina’s El castigo del penseque. In 2003, following an intriguing footnote in that article, which pointed to five more dramatic Spanish sources, I postulated another transtextual relationship concerning Shirley’s The Royal Master and Lope de Vega’s El villano en su rincón. My analysis focused on the specific motif that he named “the reluctance to see the king” in the character of the English fool Bombo and the Spanish farmer Juan Labrador. However, after a review of the two plays, it seems clear that there are more textual relationships than the one disclosed in my previous study. Relying on Gerald Genette’s category of transtextuality, this article widens further the scope of the motif, explores its relationship with the topic of court versus country life, unearths architextual transferences of elements of plot and characters, proposes affinities based on the palatine affiliation of both plays and the similarities in the use of the dramatic method of matchmaking, and, finally, reveals the creative use that the Caroline playwright made of his Spanish source.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom as a 21st-Century Gothic Tale

Xiana Vázquez Bouzó — 2023-12-19

This paper considers Juan Antonio Bayona’s 2018 film Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom as a Gothic film which disrupts the archetypal conventions of monster films, especially in relation to the antispeciesist conception of monsters —in this case, the genetically-engineered dinosaurs which feature in the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World sagas. Through an analysis of its cinematography, character construction, scenarios and plot development in the light of Gothic Studies, I will argue that this film is not just Gothic in appearance, but also in the sense that it
breaks with contemporary anthropocentric conventions of normalcy, unity and species boundaries, and that it confirms the trend in filmic narratives that takes into account the monsters’ perspectives in order to challenge human exceptionalism.

Margaret More Roper: A Survey of Her Writings

Eugenio M. Olivares-Merino — 2023-12-19

As a contribution to the forthcoming 500th anniversary of the publication of Margaret Roper (née More)’s A Devout Treatise (1524-2024), the purpose of this article is to make a survey of her written production (public and private), including those works that were preserved as well as those others that were written but have been lost. The trial and death of Thomas More necessarily resulted in the loss of documents and writings, not only by More but by his daughter too. Sixteenth-century biographies of Thomas More are the main source of information about his daughter Margaret (1505-1544) and her written production. These early biographers were clearly concerned with the promotion of the figure of More, but they did not let pass the opportunity to ponder and testify to the scholarly excellence of his eldest daughter. This is particularly the case of Nicholas Harpsfield (1557) and, more especially, Thomas Stapleton (1588). Cresacre More’s biography of More (Douai, 1631), even though in general terms it offers no original information, has also been used in this study. Another important corpus of information is the epistolary writings of Margaret and her father, as well as of Erasmus. Various other documents subject to recent literary criticism are also consulted.

Diasporic Roots/Circular Routes: Kamin Mohammadi’s Search for Home in The Cypress Tree; A Love Letter to Iran (2011)

Parisa Delshad — 2023-12-19

This paper explores Kamin Mohammadi’s position regarding the discourses of national belonging through the scrutiny of her circular route from England to Iran. Reflecting the interrelation between identity, home and the modern nation-state, The Cypress Tree: A Love Letter to Iran (2011) recounts the story of Mohammadi’s journey back to Iran in search of a singular self. It recounts her story of growing up in Iran and England and the reason behind her displacement from both of these countries in 1979 and 1997. Indebted to Stuart Hall’s take on the diaspora, Gaston Bachelard’s reading of home and Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, this paper rejects the synonymy between home and home country as well as exclusive belonging intrinsic to nationalism. The aim of this paper is to read Mohammadi’s ultimate choice to settle down in England as a challenge to the homogenizing forces of nationalism that inhibited her sense of belonging to Britain and drew her toward Iran. As she embraces a hybrid identity by telling her circular story, beginning and ending in London, her literary contribution is a way to dismantle the link between belonging and the nation-state, as well as a challenge to the alleged homogeneity of the nation-states to which she belongs.

European Migrants as "Strange" Figures in Ali Smith's Autumn

Laura Aldeguer Pardo — 2023-12-19

This article examines the representation of the European protagonist in Autumn by Ali Smith from a gender, intersectional and cultural studies perspective. The novel is a pioneering work in Brexlit, an emergent literary movement which aims to reflect the current political and social landscape of the United Kingdom after the 2016 European Union referendum. Firstly, this article offers an overview of the political, social and literary phenomenon of Brexlit, followed by an outline of Sara Ahmed’s theorisation of the sociological concept of the stranger. Secondly, the article further contextualises Brexit fiction, presenting its crucial role in putting forward a fair portrayal of migrants, a collective largely misrepresented in the UK media. The article then considers the centrality of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet to the reworking of the British social imaginary. The subsequent two sections explore the encounters in which Daniel’s strange(r)ness manifests itself through his heterogeneous and relational yet singular identity, owing to his connection to the migratory experience. Retaining his differences and from a position of agency, the solidary bonds he establishes with Elisabeth convey strange(r)ness as a label that must be overcome in order to ensure a better coexistence within the British nation.

A Look at the Nativization of Bangladeshi English through Corpus Data

Cristina Suárez-Gómez — 2023-12-19

This paper explores Bangladeshi English, a relative newcomer to the family of world Englishes. First, we chart the evolution of English in Bangladesh across several phases of development. These show that a number of political and ideological factors make the evolution of English in Bangladesh unique in that it wavers between the status of an exonormative foreign language (English in Bangladesh) and the development of a local variety (Bangladeshi English). From a linguistic perspective, recent studies agree that the current level of proficiency is very low, with a dearth of teachers and an absence of quality education. Second, we examine the degree of nativization of Present-day Bangladeshi English on the basis of (i) its postcolonial evolution and the more recent effects of globalization, following the most popular models of analysis (the Dynamic Model and the Extra- and Intra-Territorial Forces Model), and (ii) linguistic evidence obtained through the analysis of a selection of linguistic features associated with this variety, as represented in the GloWbE corpus.

Formative Performance Assessment in the Process of Developing Translation Sub-competences

Malgorzata Godlewska — 2023-12-19

This research paper pertains to the method of student performance evaluation applied to the process of online collaborative learning. The model of evaluation is intended for the developing translation sub-competences and involves the analysis of the team members’ discourse in the process of negotiating meanings, in compliance with Gery Stahl’s claim that discourse constitutes interpretation (2004: 22). The devised individual assessment form encompasses the study of performance of collaborating team members in two dialogic spaces, the content space and the relational space of collaboration (Janssen and Bodemer 2013). The assessment procedure comprises the analysis of the students’ individual achievements as well as their contribution to the team expert knowledge building. The main goal of this research paper is to highlight the regulatory function of the formative performance assessment method for team learning and to indicate the interdependences between the collaborative learning, formative performance assessment as well as the communicative approach to learning, the latter constituting the theoretical framework for this research.

Early Bilingual Education: A General Bibliometric Approach and Content Analysis Using SciMAT

Ana Otto — 2023-12-19

Bilingual and multilingual education have certainly gained popularity in the past decades since societies are increasingly becoming more aware of the need to welcome additional languages into the school curricula in order to equip citizens with a functional use of several languages. However, research about the extent to which bilingual practices are present at preschool education has not been fully exploited, mainly because this is a non-obligatory educational stage in most countries, and the wide variety of educational contexts in which practices can take place. This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of early bilingual education, using as a reference the publications in the Web of Science Core Collection from 1988 to 2022. For this purpose, 1011 publications were analysed by applying advanced bibliometric techniques in SciMAT bibliometric analysis software. This research is hoped to serve as a framework to identify existing research lines and outline new ones, establishing synergetic relationships that were not visible without the maps generated herein.