Masculinity, Violence, Resistance: A New Psychoanalytic Reading of Raging Bull
Leighton Grist
University of Winchester
Long regarded as a canonical text of recent Hollywood cinema, Raging Bull has enjoyed not inconsiderable critical attention. The film's particularized representation of violent masculinity would correspondingly appear to invite psychoanalytic consideration. However, the influential analyses of Pam Cook and Robin Wood excepted, Raging Bull has received little detailed or sustained psychoanalytic examination. Attempting to rectify the situation, this article embeds psychoanalytic discussion within a close formal expounding of the text. In part the article builds upon the work of Cook and Wood, but it also significantly addresses the connotations of the seeming masochism of the film's protagonist, Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro): a masochism that in discussions of Raging Bull has too often tended to be assumed as axiomatic. Taking a Freudian/Lacanian approach, the article ultimately contends that while Raging Bull can be considered, ideologically, as potentially progressive, the film reaches a conclusion that can be regarded, psychoanalytically, as radical.
KEYWORDS: Raging Bull; Martin Scorsese; psychoanalysis; Sigmund Freud; Jacques Lacan; masculinity; masochism
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How is Low Morphological Productivity Measured?
Jesús Fernández-Domínguez
Universidad de Jaén
Ana Díaz-Negrillo
Universidad de Jaén
Pavol Štekauer
Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice
Morphological productivity has become a central issue in present-day English word-formation over the past decade. However, most proposals for assessing productivity have focused on the most productive processes and how to measure them, to the detriment of processes which give rise to fewer items than the ones usually studied in analyses of word-formation productivity. The present paper looks at the major models for productivity measurement and applies them to a BNC-based 5,891-item corpus to test how they account for low productivity. The results obtained highlight significant differences between various productivity counts in an area which, from this point of view, needs further methodological development.
KEYWORDS: English morphology; present-day word-formation; low productivity; productivity measurement; constraints; corpus-based research
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'The Great Good Place' No More? Integrating and Dismantling Oppositional Discourse in Some Recent Examples of Serial Killer Fiction
Isabel Santaulària
Universitat de Lleida
Serial killer narratives delight in portraying a gothic social landscape of pervasive and endemic crime, violence and evil in a postmodern context of apathy, indifference and institutional incompetence. In this paper I analyse the extent of the critique of contemporary society in this popular genre. Using some recent examples of serial killer narratives - both novels and films - as case studies, I argue that, even though they accommodate a discourse that jeopardises the comfortable imagining in detective fictions of an innocent society threatened by occasional crime, serial killer narratives ultimately endorse the status quo and the state apparatuses that regulate it and guarantee its preservation.
KEYWORDS: popular narratives; genre narratives; detective fiction; gothic; serial killer narratives; discourse
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Textual Input and Learning Outcomes: Enriching Input Through Genre Analysis
Rosario Caballero
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
In this paper, I explore the presence and function of English motion patterns in a corpus comprising various narrative genres, and suggest ways in which research into their rhetorical function might complement other approaches in the literature as well as help teachers introduce Spanish learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to this idiosyncratic feature of English narratives. The working hypothesis is that the use of motion patterns may also be influenced by genre. This genre approach to motion patterns may, on the one hand, shed some light on the rhetorical or communicative motivation of motion patterns in English and, on the other, help teachers choose and exploit the best input in order to include such patterns in the EFL classroom in a way that goes beyond a lexical- or grammatical-only approach, that is, one that focuses on the pragmatic aspects involved in the use of motion patterns.
KEYWORDS: manner of motion verbs; narrative genres; input; cross-linguistic influence; typological differences; EFL teaching-learning
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Negotiating Meaning in Interaction between English and Spanish Speakers via Communicative Strategies
Ana M. Fernández Dobao and Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez
Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
The main purpose of this paper is to describe and understand how learners and their interlocutors manage to communicate meaning through the use of communication strategies (CSs). Drawing on the collaborative theory of communication, CS episodes are identified and examined to describe how learners and their interlocutors co-construct meaning. The data analyzed in this study was collected at the University of Santiago through a task-based experiment, which was both audio and video recorded. Thirty-two subjects were paired on four different dyad conditions: four dyads of intermediate learners, four dyads of advanced students, four dyads of intermediate learners interacting with native speakers and, finally, four dyads of advanced students in interaction with native speakers. For the CS identification process three different sources of evidence were used: problem indicators, native language base line and retrospective interviews. The results obtained show different kinds of communication grounding techniques. In some cases CSs are accepted by the addressees (acknowledgments, displays and demonstrations, initiation of a relevant next contribution and continued attention) while in some others the initial CS uttered by the learner is not accepted and has to be followed by a negotiation of meaning process. The conclusions reached are mainly based on a qualitative analysis.
KEYWORDS: strategy; communication; negotiation of meaning; interlanguage; language interaction
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Lessing's 'To Room Nineteen': Susan's Voyage into the Inner Space of 'elsewhere'
Rula Quawas
University of Jordan, Amman
Doris Lessing draws extensively on women's inner, private experiences and on their departure from the unsatisfactory reality of life in an alienated and alienating society. In 'To Room Nineteen' (1978), she depicts a woman who wearies of the role of sustainer and comforter, and having had her fill of everything, resists the culturally stultifying enclosures and constraints, discards the various garments and social roles she has worn and adopted, retreats into her own room and experiences her own 'elsewhere', that consciousness that she retreats to for renewal, which bespeaks a world of potential actions and possibilities for human renewal. Her self-willed death is not a defeat. Rather than regressing back to the old self and abdicating self-knowledge and self-rule, she decides to remain true to the authentic self that she has discovered. Her death is a means of resisting the crushing, culturally enforced image of woman, and of positing a new politics of identity, as a first step toward bringing into the culture new formulations, new cultural alternatives, new language, for experiences which patriarchy has forced into repression.
KEYWORDS: Alienated and alienating society; social roles and masks; inner space; feminine consciousness; realm of 'elsewhere'; authentic self
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"What Good Newes from Barbary?" Nascent Capitalism, North-Africans and the Construction of English Identity in Thomas Heywood's Drama
Jesús López-Peláez Casellas
Universidad de Jaén
During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries England experienced an epistemological transition that entailed the construction of a still precarious identity. This process involved the adoption of a new economy (nascent capitalism) and the shaping of a proto- racialist project of exclusion, which was mainly addressed towards the Muslim Other. In this paper I will show how a corpus of four plays by the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Heywood problematizes this project by simultaneously reinforcing and interrogating it: I will suggest that whereas the new economy is apparently privileged and celebrated and Islam still appears to be approached without racialist assumptions, the plays develop some strategies that nostalgically question nascent capitalism and its consequences, as much as they start to display a process of racial stereotyping towards North-African Muslims. The four plays studied are Parts 1 and 2 of The Fair Maid of the West (ca. 1599-1603 and 1625-1630) and If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (Parts 1 and 2) (ca. 1604 and ca. 1605). In order to explore these texts, and to define how the plays engage with these processes, I will employ Juri Lotman's cultural semiotic notion of the semiosphere.
KEYWORDS: Thomas Heywood; drama; Early Modern period; Islam; economy; capitalism; race; semiosphere; Lotman; The Fair Maid of the West; If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody
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