Familiar Texts Research Articles

Does the Cultural Context Influence on Reading Comprehension?

Language is an essential tool that shapes human interactions and understanding from birth, blending innate abilities with environmental factors. Oral language is the first form of communication, while written language develops through structured learning. Piaget's theory suggests a strong connection between language development and cognitive growth, with cultural context playing a significant role. Sociolinguistic theory also emphasizes how social and cultural factors influence linguistic interactions, shaping expression in different settings. This study examined the relationship between reading comprehension and cultural identity. A reading test, featuring texts reflecting diverse linguistic and cultural realities, was administered to 120 students in Barranquilla. The test included informal, informational, and literary readings, each tied to specific contexts. The results demonstrated that students more easily understood culturally familiar texts, while unfamiliar contexts posed greater challenges. This suggests that cultural familiarity significantly enhances reading comprehension, while cultural distance can hinder interpretation. The findings highlight the critical role of cultural and linguistic context in reading comprehension. Texts aligned with a reader's cultural experiences improve understanding and retention, pointing to the need for educational approaches that integrate students' cultural backgrounds to enhance learning and motivation.

Dostoevsky in the Plain Language: The Problems of Modern Literary Translation

The article is devoted to the functional analysis of one of the modern adaptive models of the national literary language — the plain language. This concept is actively discussed and implemented in modern translation practice today, including in numerous literary translations of the works of Dostoevsky, the most widely read Russian writer in the world. From a historical and typological point of view, the new translation strategy correlates with the principles of the Russian translation of the first book from Dostoevsky’s reading circle — “One Hundred and Four Sacred Stories of the Old and New Testaments,” as well as the New Testament published in 1823, which includes the writer’s hard labor Gospel that became a key precedent text in his post-reformation work. The article analyzes the work performed in the early 2000s. Japanese scientist Ikuo Kameyama translated the novel “The Brothers Karamazov,” which was a representative experience of modern artistic interpretation and adaptation of Dostoevsky’s work. Thanks to the translator’s orientation to the plain language, the novel of the Russian writer found its foreignspeaking readers and became an understandable and familiar text for them.

Character in the Adapted Series “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries”: Playing with Tradition

The Australian TV-series “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” follows a trend that has emerged in mystery film genre over the last few decades. On the one hand, it is an old story about a private detective; on the other – a new narrative, that fascinates the viewer with an extraordinary setting. This effect is provided by the intertextual links that the series forms with the texts of its surroundings. This article examines how various intertextual elements form the image of the “Roaring Twenties”, linking the cinema text with the ‘classic detective’, while at the same time referring to modern cinema. These challenges are reconciled through the image of the main character. The ironic play with the familiar texts produces a light atmosphere of the series, and the references to the fashion and art of the 1920s construct the illusion of the “reality” of Miss Fisher, who finds her own place in the canon owing to the connections with the world of a detective story

‘What is it?’ ‘It is a lewd goblin’: Taking Critical Cues from Illustrative Adaptations of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market

Abstract When adapters interpret a work over and over again, they focus on details that can shape the way we think about a text. Focusing on these adaptive details can often lead to seeing gaps in the criticism of a text. Such is the case with Goblin Market, a poem that critics have been noting is ‘ambiguous’ since its first publication in 1862. While most critics understand that this ambiguity centres on the sexual undertones of the poem, the key to understanding this allegory might be discovered by turning to illustrative adaptations. In all illustration, one detail is reproduced consistently: the goblins are visualised as animals. Yet animality is rarely discussed in criticism of the poem, and almost never with any depth. I argue that we can view adaptation as a type of meaning-making that literary and cultural critics might build upon when analysing familiar texts.

Interpretation of the Mikhail Lermontov’s Poem “Demon” in the Works of Sergei Parajanov

The article represents a comparative analysis of Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Demon” and the unrealized script for the film “Demon” by Sergei Parajanov – a completely different view of the familiar text of the poem. Possessing a unique style and taste, Parajanov introduces many new elements and plots which modernize the perception of the poem. The main distinguishing feature of the script is the personality of Tamara. Moving away from the canonical principle of building the text, where the Demon appears in the foreground, Parajanov wants to show the process of soul transformation on behalf of Tamara, while using a large number of symbols.

Effect of Culturally Familiar Text on Low-Proficiency Reader’s Reading Comprehension

The study examines the effect of culturally familiar text on the reading comprehension of low-proficiency readers in Indonesia. There were sixty-two second-year college students involved in the study as participants. The study used reading comprehension tests to gather the data. The results revealed that students with culturally familiar text had outperformed those with culturally unfamiliar text in reading comprehension. It is also found that these low-proficiency readers’ reading comprehension has improved significantly by using culturally familiar text in their reading practices. Interestingly, the students showed good engagement after being taught text that contained familiar culture. Finally, it can be concluded that the research results provide important insights, particularly for EFL educators, researchers, and learners, on the impact of culturally familiar contexts in facilitating reading comprehension achievement for low-proficiency readers in Indonesia.

Victoria Moul. A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry: Bilingual Verse Culture in Early Modern England

The Latin poetry of early modern English writers has typically been the preserve of classical reception studies; scholars of English literature have tended to regard it as tangential, inferior, or merely derivative. Moul’s groundbreaking study insists upon the inseparability of early modern English and Latin poetry and the impossibility of reading one without the other. Drawing extensively on her own recent investigations of early modern Latin manuscript holdings in English collections—the first such survey in modern times—as well as on early printed texts, she argues forcefully for the bilingualism of early modern English verse culture, demonstrating the constant counterpoint between the respective strands of Latin and vernacular poetry. For English literary scholars, the book’s most striking achievement is to demonstrate, as Moul puts it, ‘how English verse culture as a whole looks, feels, sounds and makes sense differently if we stop pretending that all that Latin is not there’ (p. 2). She shows not only the extent to which early modern readers and writers were steeped in classical literature but also how the classical canon as taught in humanist grammar schools differed from that of the modern curriculum and the generic, lexical, and thematic implications of that difference. In a valuable correction to a conventional view of Renaissance writers as determinedly ‘classicizing’, she demonstrates the importance of medieval and later Latin literature, as well as the biblical and vernacular traditions. By showing how the neo-Latin tradition feeds into the vernacular, and by setting vernacular poetry in its contemporary neo-Latin context, she is able to provide some new and arresting readings of familiar texts. Both Latinists and English scholars will welcome the array of virtually unknown authors who appear at every turn, offering tantalizing prospects for further study.

Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton

Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton

Structure as a Clue to Rhetoric: Discourse Analysis of Psalm 89:1–53

Abstract: Fresh analysis of familiar texts has the potential to yield intriguing results. Discourse analysis of Psalm 89 serves as a case in point. Since few scholars have analyzed Psalm 89 using discourse analysis, this article aims to fill a gap in the literature on Psalm 89 by closely analyzing the discourse structure of the final form of the Hebrew text. Moreover, based on the discourse analysis, this article draws attention to the movements of the psalm and to the neglected role of Psalm 89:53 in the rhetoric of the final form of the psalm. The structure of the final form of Psalm 89 suggests that YHWH deserves praise despite his apparent violation of the Davidic covenant.

Hemispheres and Stratospheres: The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment, ed. Kevin L. Cope

<i>Hemispheres and Stratospheres: The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment</i>, ed. Kevin L. Cope

Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature: Critical Encounters and Nostalgic Returns by Carol Dougherty

Reviewed by: Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature: Critical Encounters and Nostalgic Returns by Carol Dougherty Hilary J. C. Lehmann Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature: Critical Encounters and Nostalgic Returns. By CAROL DOUGHERTY. Classical Presences. Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 175. Hardback, $90.00. ISBN: 978-0-19-881401-6. You can't step into the same river twice, and you can never return to the same home you left. When you (a reader, a teacher) come back to the Odyssey after some time, it is not the same epic it was because you are not the same you. Something you've read, or watched, or lived through in the meantime sparks a new way of reading this old, familiar text. If you're like me (and, if you're reading this, you probably are) you think about the Odyssey all the time. I'm not a Homerist, but the Odyssey is under my skin. I bring it with me into everything I read or write, every class discussion or casual conversation; in turn, every time I come back to the Odyssey, I bring back to it everything I've experienced since our last encounter. Carol Dougherty is well known for her sophisticated yet accessible theoretical readings of Homer and archaic poetry. What a delight, when encountering her new monograph Travel and Home in Homer's Odyssey and Contemporary Literature, to realize that, of course, famous classicists also walk around with the Odyssey under their skin. Travel and Home, published through the Classical Presences series, is a very new sort of book. As much a study of the influence of Homer on contemporary literature as of the influence of contemporary literature on Homer, this book models a dynamic sort of reception using improvisation and nostalgia as its interpretive framework. This approach is appealingly subjective, as reading truly is a personal experience: the occasional presence of such phrases as "we might compare" (101 n.12) or "this calls to mind" (103, n.18) reminds us that we have been graciously invited to accompany Dougherty, a very smart but still relatable reader, on her own personal journey through the Odyssey and 20th and 21st-century fiction. The book's Introduction explains the improvisational approach by framing it through Odysseus' own improvisations, his process of finding himself by testing different, polytropic, versions of himself over the course of the poem, and through the improvisational nature of epic performance—like Odysseus, the bard changes his narrative on each occasion to suit the performative time and place. Following this Introduction, each of the book's chapters focuses on a different novel: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1994), Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), Rebecca West's [End Page 242] The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Toni Morrison's Home (2012). These five novels are thematically arranged in two groups, the first three exploring the opposition between staying and leaving and the last two focusing on the role of nostalgia in reestablishing a returning soldier's identity following the traumas of war. Each chapter dances between the Odyssey and the novel under discussion, offering deep and rich readings of both. The section on The English Patient, a novel of slowly revealed pasts, found identities and reinvented homes, provides an elegant model for the subsequent chapters as well as a kind of thesis statement on the relationship between reading and home: "Texts like the Odyssey and The English Patient not only take us to new places, fashioning worlds beyond our imagination, but they create new homes for us to inhabit there, even if just for a while, even if we soon long to leave them and return home again" (43). The second and third chapters destabilize the gendered binary between home and travel. In Housekeeping, the protagonists–the transient Sylvie and her nieces Ruth and Lucille–wrestle with the question of whether "the essence of domesticity" is found in the house, or with those who occupy it (62). In the end, Lucille remains at home while Ruth and Sylvie set off to make...

John Huxtable Elliott (1930–2022)

John Huxtable Elliott (1930–2022)

Latin Vocabulary Knowledge and the Readability of Latin Texts: A Preliminary Study

Studies have found a strong correlation between vocabulary knowledge and L2 reading comprehension. This preliminary study of the readability of Latin texts considers how common measures of lexical complexity (word length, word frequency, lexical sophistication, lexical density, and lexical variation) can inform instructors about what texts have the least (and most) lexical complexity. By defining several key measurements of Latin lexical complexity, we establish a provisional account of the lexical difficulty of some familiar Latin texts that are frequently taught in elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels, and propose LexR, a single, informative, integrated score that provides a sense of the comparative lexical complexity of Latin texts.

Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Happiness and Ultimate Purpose by J. Budziszewski, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020, pp. xxxvi + 666, £120.00, hbk

Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's <i>Treatise on Happiness and Ultimate Purpose</i> by J. Budziszewski, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020, pp. xxxvi + 666, £120.00, hbk

Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages

Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages

Review of The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman, ed Christopher Looby

Christopher Looby's anthology of queer nineteenth-century American short stories is a fascinating collection of both obscure and familiar texts that together constitute a powerful argument for the queerness of the short story and for the centrality of queerness to American literary aesthetics.

Perspectives of Lavana in Charaka samhita: a review

Salt plays an important role in maintaining normal physiology of the human body health. Salts are referred as Lavana in Ayurveda that are vital ingredients in food and in medicine as well. Traditionally, Ayurveda classics distinguish several varieties of Lavanas. Specific salts have been described along with respective properties and actions. Charaka samhita, a familiar text for medical treatment, has advocated varieties of Lavanas and their applications in multiple pathological conditions. However, the information is found scattered across the classical texts. The current review is an attempt to screen this classical treatise and to compile information pertaining to utilization of various Lavanas for medicinal and other purposes referred. Screening through the classic revealed description of about 16 different Lavanas and about 250 compound formulations with salt as a component, inferring that different types of salts have specific action on health and/or disease. Judicious consumption of Lavana is repeatedly advised, and it is said that Lavanas produce good results when used properly (aapaatbhdra prayogasamsaadgunyaat), whereas injudicious use may cause exacerbation of various doshas leading to the manifestation of diseases. Though an important component of life cycle, salts are to be used in limited quantities judiciously.

How Many Siblings Had Philip Pirrip?: Counting Brothers and Sisters in the Victorian Novel

In this paper, following a midrange methodology that combines insights from narrative theory with human and machine reading, we gather data from fifty domestic realist novels. We find that while the average mid-Victorian family hovered just below six children, the average family in the Victorian novel has 2.8 children, and more than a third are only children. Novelists responded to the demands of the narrative when constructing their sibling sets: certain quantities and gender configurations of siblings are wrought from formal necessity. We identify several patterns stemming from our data in the composition of the novelistic Victorian sibling set, including orphans, heiresses, brother-sister pairings, and the long family as a joke. We find that the Victorian novel's focus on lineage leads novelists to prune the long families of history quite aggressively, representing them vaguely if at all. We conclude by offering our methodology, which relies on a combination of minimal computing and close reading, as an example and provocation to scholars seeking to embark on more empirical projects, and to see familiar texts anew.

Empire of Diamonds: Victorian Gems in Imperial Settings, by Adrienne Munich

Reviewed by: Empire of Diamonds: Victorian Gems in Imperial Settings by Adrienne Munich Stefanie Markovits (bio) Empire of Diamonds: Victorian Gems in Imperial Settings, by Adrienne Munich; pp. xiv + 273. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020, $29.95. In October 2018, three weeks after the gruesome murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi under the direction of Mohammed bin Salman, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex wore a pair of diamond earrings to a state dinner, ones that had been given to her as a wedding gift by the Saudi Crown Prince. The Duchess, biracial and American, was castigated by the British press for her act. It is an episode that Adrienne Munich might have made much of, crystallizing as it does so many traces of what she describes as the "imperial consciousness" attached to the gemstones in question (9). Adrienne Munich's Empire of Diamonds: Victorian Gems in Imperial Settings tells a tale, alternately sparkling and bloody, of how such gems traversed Victoria's realm, helping to shape its many facets and give form to an Englishness constituted by these fundamentally foreign objects. Vibrantly interdisciplinary, Munich's archive stretches from a Mughalstyle miniature watercolor of a Sikh prince to illustrations in a J. Peterman Catalogue of a reproduction of the "Heart of the Ocean" necklace from the film Titanic (1997), and from Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud to memoirs of mining the South African diamond fields. Along the way, she offers a wide survey of Victorian diamond literature, primarily focused on novels but also considering poems such as Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859–85) and stories such as Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Blue Carbuncle" (1892). As Munich shows, it is a rich vein to explore, in which named stones both historical and imaginary assert their presence as forcefully as fictional characters—or as their respective owners and authors. [End Page 594] When faced with so many brilliant diamonds, how best string them together? How construct a setting that lets them shine? Munich's great stroke here was to realize that the shifting geographical associations of the gemstone across the century could help her tell her tale. Beginning in part I with India, the source of many older diamonds, she traces the history of British engagements with the stones as they travel from the East, considering especially how and whether these gems (and their owners) can be "converted" by changing their settings (29): the Koh-i-noor or "Mountain of Light," as it underwent various recuttings and resettings; Duleep Singh, whose family had owned this most famous diamond; and Rudyard Kipling's Kim O'Hara, whom Munich reads as reflecting India's facets. She also explores the various ways Indian stones like Wilkie Collins's Moonstone resist imperial shaping by proving their ability to "strike back at the Empire" (69). Part II moves away from the sacred powers of Indian gems into the heart of the British metropole, to questions of national, racial, and familial hierarchies. Munich describes how the diamonds of Tennyson's Idylls and Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1855–57) serve as "talismanic signs of masculinity" (113) or fetishized "trophies," like the women who wear them—proof of status in a culture of new mobility, icons of authenticity and (racial) purity that are nevertheless dangerously transferable and subject to imitation and taint (14). The pleasures of Munich's readings of the more familiar texts lie less in their novelty than in their careful arrangement within her own narrative setting. John Plotz has also shown, for example, how diamonds crystalize the distinction between affective and commercial value, and others have considered links between imperialist crimes and literary gems. But one shining strand in this section (and the next) follows the long association between Jews and this particular jewel. Here, Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) serves as Jamesian germ and original gem, and Munich argues convincingly for the legacy bequeathed by Rebecca of York on British literature, from Anthony Trollope's novels to Daniel Deronda's (1876) Jewish plot and beyond. Beyond takes us to South Africa, which became in the 1870s the locus of a mad "scramble" after the stones, as unprecedented quantities of diamonds...

Teaching historical literacies to digital learners via popular culture

We argue that students can understand an historical period by building on the foundations of their existing knowledge. Specifically, popular media can be used to develop students’ historical literacies – that is their ability to engage with past societies vastly different from their own. Our methodology takes inspiration from the ancient Romans’ own partial literacies and utilises pedagogy drawn from Classical Reception Studies, which examines how the ancient world has been subsequently reinvented in everything from poetry to cinema. While traditional methods of teaching Classics potentially alienate learners and entrench the discipline’s elitism, we advocate learning about the past from a point of familiarity. Harnessing familiar texts and platforms to teach history can engage non-traditional learners and develop their historical literacies by leveraging pre-existing digital literacies. Furthermore, digital pedagogy fosters in students a sense that they can valuably contribute to disciplinary knowledge by recontextualising ancient sources.