Back to archives

28.1 (2006)

Download complete volume

Articles

  • A. Jesús Moya. On Pragmatic Functions and their Correlation with Syntactic Functions: A Functionalist Perspective. Atlantis 28.1: 9-28.
    [Abstract] [Full text]
  • Celestino Deleyto. 1999, A Closet Odyssey: Sexual Discourses in Eyes Wide Shut. Atlantis 28.1: 29-43.
    [Abstract] [Full text]
  • Andrés Romero Jódar. "A Stranger in a Strange Land": An Existentialist Reading of Fredrick Clegg in The Collector by John Fowles. Atlantis 28.1: 45-55.
    [Abstract] [Full text]
  • Clara Escoda Agustí. Julie Taymor's Titus (1999): Framing Violence and Activating Responsibility. Atlantis 28.1: 57-70.
    [Abstract] [Full text]
  • Carolina Rodríguez Juárez. A New Parameter for the Description of Subject Assignment: The Term Hierarchy. Atlantis 28.1: 71-88.
    [Abstract] [Full text]
  • Laura Mª Lojo Rodríguez. Female Iconography and Subjectivity in Eavan Boland's In Her Own Image. Atlantis 28.1: 89-100.
    [Abstract] [Full text]
  • Pilar Bellver Sáez. Nilda de Nicholasa Mohr. El Bildungsroman y la aparición de un espacio puertorriqueño en la literatura de los EEUU. Atlantis 28.1: 101-113.
    [Abstract] [Full text]
  • Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo and Manuel Almagro Jiménez. Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl. Atlantis 28.1: 115-129.
    [Abstract] [Full text]

Reviews

  • Juan E. Tazón Salces and Isabel Carrera Suárez, eds., 2005: Post-Imperial Encounters: Anglo-Hispanic Cultural Relations, reviewed by Christopher Rollason. Atlantis 28.1: 133-138.
    [Full text]
  • Helen Cooper 2004: The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare, reviewed by Jordi Sánchez-Martí. Atlantis 28.1: 139-144.
    [Full text]
  • Fernando Galván y José Santiago Fernández, ed. and intr. 2005: Joseph Conrad. El corazón de las tinieblas, reviewed by Jesús Varela Zapata. Atlantis 28.1: 145-149.
    [Full text]
  • Carmelo Medina Casado y José Ruiz Mas, eds. 2004: El bisturí inglés. Literatura de viajes e hispanismo en lengua inglesa, reviewed by José Carlos Redondo Olmedilla. Atlantis 28.1: 151-154.
    [Full text]
  • María Pilar Safont Jordà 2005: Third Language Learners. Pragmatic Production and Awareness, reviewed by Patricia Salazar Campillo. Atlantis 28.1: 155-159.
    [Full text]
  • Enric Llurda (ed.) 2005: Non-Native Language Teachers. Perceptions, Challenges and Contributions to the Profession, reviewed by María del Pilar García Mayo. Atlantis 28.1: 161-166.
    [Full text]
  • Andrew Blake 2002: La irresistible ascensión de Harry Potter, reviewed by Mª del Carmen Espínola Rosillo. Atlantis 28.1: 167-172.
    [Full text]
  • Christian Isobel Johnstone 1815: Clan-Albin: A National Tale, reviewed by Alexis Easley. Atlantis 28.1: 173-176.
    [Full text]

Abstracts

On Pragmatic Functions and their Correlation with Syntactic Functions: A Functionalist Perspective

A. Jesús Moya
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha

The aim of this paper is to analyse two different text types within a discourse functional framework, in order to determine whether there is a difference in their formal realizations of new and known topics. This will be done by investigating how introductory and given topics are realized in clause structure in a sample of sixty news items and tourist brochures. In line with Biber, I have assumed that linguistic features vary with communicative purpose and topic. The results of the analysis carried out seem to conflict with Dik's claim that the new topics tend to be located towards the final slot of the clause. The study also shows that these two text types differ in terms of how the known topics are realized syntactically.

KEYWORDS: Functional Grammar; text type; new topic; known topic; subject; initial position

Back

1999, A Closet Odyssey: Sexual Discourses in Eyes Wide Shut

Celestino Deleyto
Universidad de Zaragoza

Eyes Wide Shut offers at least three perspectives on sex: sex as death, sex as commerce, and sex and love. In this essay I explore the third of these perspectives, that is, the relation between sex as love, one that has so far been neglected in critical accounts of the film. The nature of this relationship, as articulated by the text, culminates in the final scene in which Alice (Nicole Kidman) takes the initiative in the reconciliation with her husband Bill (Tom Cruise). This dialogue works as a complex summary of twentieth-century discourses about sex, including concepts such as the sexualisation of love, confluent love, intimacy, or the tension between love and desire. This scene, less ironic than it may seem, celebrates the most positive dimensions of sex and its inextricable link with love in our culture.

KEYWORDS: film studies; love; intimacy; heterosex; marriage; fantasy; Stanley Kubrick

Back

"A Stranger in a Strange Land": An Existentialist Reading of Fredrick Clegg in The Collector by John Fowles

Andrés Romero Jódar
Universidad de Zaragoza

This essay analyses the influence of French Existentialism in John Fowles's The Collector, making use of three of Albert Camus's works, Le mythe de Sisyphe, L'Étranger, and L'Homme révolté, and how the protagonist of John Fowles's novel fits the pattern of the absurd man established by Camus. The Collector is not only just an allegorical representation of the power struggle between the Few and the Many, a recurrent topic in the fictions of Fowles; it is also a practical example of the evil nature of Camus's absurd man, stemming from his absurd innocence. Clegg, like Meursault, the protagonist of L'Étranger, is an isolated (anti)hero who struggles against his passions in an existence of the Absurd. A Tantalus-like figure, the collector's aimless efforts are the fruit of chance. He is a stranger in a strange land of Existence provoking the nausea, in Sartre's terms, of both Miranda and the reader.

KEYWORDS: 1950s English literature; John Fowles; The Collector; Existentialism; Albert Camus; Jean-Paul Sartre; the absurd; intertextuality; The Tempest

Back

Julie Taymor's Titus (1999): Framing Violence and Activating Responsibility

Clara Escoda Agustí
Universitat de Barcelona

This essay argues that Julie Taymor's film Titus (1999) offers a successful deconstruction of the violence in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1594), thus continuing the debate on the film's explicit violence. The essay begins by analyzing the added scenes that correspond to the visions and flashbacks of the protagonists, arguing that Taymor does not deconstruct violence by subverting its values and then pointing out alternative discourses or new patterns of interaction, but by reproducing it as a symptom of a larger, cultural reality. However, she also wants to actively implicate the audience in imagining alternative paths of conflict-resolution to the violence portrayed, and she does so by introducing the figure of the witness, with which the audience must identify. The witness characterizes itself by being able to empathize with difference, and this quality is visually represented by his androgynous look, as well as by his non-hierarchical mode of relating. Strategically, the witness's experiences are shown in a fragmented manner, thus, if the audience wants to provide closure, it must recreate the hidden story from these unconnected elements of repair. Finally, this exercise on the part of the audience acquires the same character of solitary responsibility as that of the witness with which it identifies.

KEYWORDS: identity; testimony; violence; media; intertextuality

Back

A New Parameter for the Description of Subject Assignment: The Term Hierarchy

Carolina Rodríguez Juárez
Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

The theoretical framework of Functional Grammar proposed by S. C. Dik highlights the relevance of implicational hierarchies for the different grammatical operations found in natural languages. In the case of the grammatical operation of Subject assignment, a group of priority hierarchies which predict the accessibility of term positions by virtue of their intrinsic properties have been claimed to directly impinge on the operation of Subject assignment. These typological hierarchies present term properties which are related to the term itself and to their referents. After balancing the postulates of Classical Dikkean Functional Grammar in general and the above-mentioned priority hierarchies in particular to a sampling of written material from the LOB Corpus, the main conclusion that emerges is that the internal structural complexity of the term must be recognised as a new relevant parameter for Subject assignment in English. Thus, I propose a new hierarchy, viz. the Term Hierarchy, which predicts the accessibility of term positions taking into account the internal structural complexity of the term in question.

KEYWORDS: accessibility; functional (discourse) grammar; implicational hierarchies; Subject assignment

Back

Female Iconography and Subjectivity in Eavan Boland's In Her Own Image

Laura Mª Lojo Rodríguez
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

In 1980 the Irish poet Eavan Boland published In Her Own Image a volume of poetry which stands as a landmark in her career as a writer for its subversive potential to revise creational myths that have contributed to the traditional construction of female subjectivity. The aim of this paper is to discuss Boland's textual strategies in In Her Own Image and see how she subverts the traditional female iconography that constrains the female psyche and disempowers women. Rather than a set of ornamental female figures, Boland's volume produces more authentic representations of women that move away from man's own image and from his icons, which have often been taken as "natural" within the construction of female subjectivity. Resistance to such genderings provides, as the volume illustrates, emancipatory possibilities for the woman writer who regains control over her own body image within the very terms of a culture and of a particular poetic tradition.

KEYWORDS: Eavan Boland; In Her Own Image; Ireland; women's poetry; female iconicity; subjectivity

Back

Nilda de Nicholasa Mohr. El Bildungsroman y la aparición de un espacio puertorriqueño en la literatura de los EEUU

Pilar Bellver Sáez
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

In his classic study The Way of the World Franco Moretti argues that the characteristic journey from youth to maturity that the Bildungsroman narrates amounts to a symbolic representation of the integration of the bourgeoisie self into modernity. According to Moretti, this genre becomes obsolete by the end of the First World War, when the loss of faith in the civilizing ideals of modernity make it impossible to represent integration into a coherent social whole. However, many critics argue that the genre is being revitalized by writers who stand in the margins of modern society due to their gender, race or class. Nilda, by, Nicolasa Mohr, illustrates the transformations the Bildungsroman undergoes in the hands of the US born-and-raised Puerto Rican writer of the second half of the 20th century. In Nilda the education of the heroine does not symbolize the poor immigrant's successful acceptance and integration into mainstream culture. On the contrary, the awakening of the self serves as a metaphor for the appearance of a distinctive Puerto Rican space within the American literary experience, a complex space from which Mohr reaffirms her heritage while at the same time she critically examines pervading patriarchal roles within Puerto Rican culture.

KEYWORDS: Bildungsroman, Latino literature, Puerto Rican literature, Puerto Rican women writers, feminist literature, US ethnic writers, twentieth-century novel

Back

Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl

Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo
Universidad de Sevilla

Manuel Almagro Jiménez
Universidad de Sevilla

Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl is not simply a new recreation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in hypertext format; it also tries to develop some of the implications in the original text from the paradigms of contemporary science and criticism. This study is an attempt to bring to light the ways in which these paradigms, characterized by their emphasis on fragmentariness, are made to interact dialogically with Shelley's novel in order to produce a postmodern version of the old Promethean myth. Apart from exploring the filial connections that one might expect in any rewriting exercise, this essay focuses on the way Jackson questions the concept of authorship, origin(ality) and literary property, and related issues such as intertextuality and assemblage, all of which are indices of the theoretical concerns underlying Jackson's text and of the ways in which it follows, re-writes or invites us to re-read Shelley's "hideous progeny."

KEYWORDS: hypertext; re-writing; intertextuality; postmodern literature; Mary Shelley; Shelley Jackson; Frankenstein

Back