Modern Language Review Research Articles

The pertinence and feasibility of implementing a plurilingual approach in Quebec, Canada: the beliefs of pre-service ESL teachers

ABSTRACT The field of language pedagogy has increasingly advocated for the implementation of plurilingual approaches which promote learners’ ability to mobilize all linguistic resources at their disposal in order to communicate in different situations with various interlocutors [Cabré Rocafort 2019. “The Development of Plurilingual Education Through Multimodal Narrative Reflection in Teacher Education: A Case Study of a Pre-Service Teacher’s Beliefs About Language Education.” Canadian Modern Language Review 75 (1): 40–64; Coste, Moore, and Zarate 2009. Plurilingual and Pluricultural Competence.]. The implementation of such approaches, however, relies greatly on teachers’ openness and ability to help their learners explore their linguistic and cultural repertoires. To date, the beliefs of pre-service teachers (PSTs) in Quebec regarding the implementation of plurilingual approaches remain under-researched. This exploratory study aimed at examining the beliefs of future teachers regarding the pertinence and feasibility of implementing a plurilingual approach, as well as the impact of teacher education and previous language learning experiences on these beliefs. An online questionnaire was shared with undergraduate ESL teacher education programs across the province of Quebec and answers from 52 PSTs were collected and analyzed. Results suggest that future teachers were reluctant to implement a plurilingual approach, despite holding positive beliefs towards certain underlying principles of plurilingualism. Findings also indicate that PSTs are heavily encouraged, during teacher education, to maintain a monolingual class policy. Pedagogical implications are discussed in light of research on plurilingualism and PSTs’ beliefs.

Foreword

Foreword Andrew Hiscock Welcome to the 2022 volume of the Yearbook of English Studies published by the Modern Humanities Research Association. The first collection in this series was published in 1971 and the editor was Professor T. J. B. Spencer, who was at that time Director of the Shakespeare Institute and also Head of the Department of English Literature at the Institute. The 'Assistant Editor' was R. L. Smallwood. The introduction to the volume specified that this was to be a 'new annual publication […] devoted to the language and literature of the English-speaking world'. As the editors underlined, the Yearbook had been 'established because of the continuing rise in the amount of good work in English studies offered for publication in the Modern Language Review, and the similar increase in the number of books on the language and literature of the English-speaking countries sent for review.' In 1976 the Yearbook moved a short distance to the University of Warwick with the editorial duties now taken on by G. K. Hunter and C. J. Rawson. R. L. Smallwood remained as the Assistant Editor, but was replaced in the following year by Jenny Mezciems. At this point a new policy for the Yearbook was implemented. While it might operate as 'an additional outlet' for MLR submissions, 'a substantial portion of each Yearbook will from now on consist of specially commissioned articles on a broad topic […] in order to give each volume a greater centrality of interest and a wider readership.' And so with this new policy in place, the 1978 Yearbook (vol. 8) became an 'American Literature Special Number'. By 1984, Claude Rawson was sole editor with Jenny Mezciems continuing as Assistant Editor. In addition, by this time, the Yearbook had acquired an 'advisory panel' which included John Beer, Malcolm Bradbury, Philip Edwards, G. K. Hunter, Derek Pearsall, Pat Rogers, R. L. Smallwood, J. B. Trapp and Larzer Ziff. 1989 (vol. 19) saw the introduction of the first 'guest editor' for a Yearbook, J. R. (Dick) Watson of Durham University, who later became the Chairman of the MHRA. In 1990 Professor Andrew Gurr, Reading University, assumed the editorship of the Yearbook with Phillipa Hardman as the Assistant Editor, and in 2000 (vol. 30) he re-introduced the practice of inviting guest editors to the series. In the years which followed, Nicola Bradbury, also of Reading University, edited and commissioned a number of volumes of the Yearbook. During these years, Professor John Batchelor, Newcastle University, became English Editor for MLR, and took on the role of Series Editor for the Yearbook in the period 2006–11. He experimented with new patterns of publication for the Yearbook (two annual volumes), introduced new cover designs, and edited two Yearbook volumes himself in this period: one devoted to Victorian literature, and another entitled From Decadent to Modernist: and Other Essays. [End Page v] Apart from being a regular reader of the Yearbook in the course of my career, my first participation in its scholarly activities began when I was invited to become guest editor for the 2008 Yearbook devoted to Tudor Literature. After such a stimulating editorial project, it was an enormous pleasure to be appointed to succeed John Batchelor as series editor for the Yearbook of English Studies and as English editor for MLR in 2011. I remain enormously indebted to John for sharing his extensive knowledge of the very distinguished scholarly history of the MHRA's Yearbook of English Studies. In addition, I would like to take this opportunity to extend my sincere thanks to him, to Richard Correll (the Yearbook's editorial assistant) and to Gerard Lowe (the MHRA's Production Manager). In each case, their input and support has been invaluable. In recent years the Yearbook series has ranged in its research enquiries from early English drama to early modern prose fiction, Victorian world literatures, and to literature in the 1950s and 1960s. The present 2022 issue (vol. 52) returns attention to some of the earliest surviving literary documents in English Literature and to a culture negotiating urgent challenges of invasion, radically changing social priorities and the rigours of religious devotion. This collection, guest-edited by Clare Lees and Joshua...

Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age by David Damrosch

Reviewed by: Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age by David Damrosch Ian Ellison Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age. By David Damrosch. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2020. x+385 pp. £30. ISBN 978–0–691–13499–4. From What Is World Literature? in 2003, to the co-edited volumes of the Longman Anthology of World Literature in 2004, Teaching World Literature in 2009, and 2011’s Routledge Companion to World Literature, much of David Damrosch’s work to date has concerned the fiercely debated category of ‘world literature’. In his most recent book, however, he returns to the disciplinary purview of his Harvard professorial chair, while striving to retain an ostensibly global perspective. Anthological limitations, pedagogical practices, and interpretative approaches—to say nothing of theoretical wrangling—remain central concerns. Yet though the field of comparative literature may appear as embattled as ever, the outlook is far from bleak. [End Page 109] Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age advertises its pluralism in its title and takes this seriously throughout. Damrosch’s eight main chapters offer a broad historio-geographical survey of comparative literature, paying particular attention to its multiple nodal origins as an academic discipline and its transformations through emigration undertaken by key comparatists. He also delineates a plethora of theoretical, linguistic, and hermeneutical tools of which comparatist scholars may avail themselves. ‘Our global literary aspirations’, Damrosch asserts in the Introduction, ‘need to be matched by greater engagement with the rich variety of comparative scholarship across the past two centuries and in many parts of the globe’ (p. 6). Taking particular aim in several instances at the Warwick Research Collective’s co-authored Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, Damrosch is not unjustly dismissive of comparative studies that, for all their merits, limit their analytical purview solely to literary works whose political sensibilities match their own, that focus exclusively on male writers, and that make claims concerning global literary systems without citing a single primary or secondary text in a language other than English while discussing multiple foreign-language novels in English translation. It would have been illuminating for Damrosch’s purposes to dwell further on the grammatically varying terms for comparative literature in other languages: ‘littérature comparée’ or ‘literatura comparada’ (‘compared’), versus ‘vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft’ (‘comparing’), for example. Nevertheless, on matters of language most especially, readers of the Modern Language Review will surely find themselves in agreement with much of Damrosch’s fifth chapter which addresses head-on the thorny matter of original-language work, highlighting this as being fundamentally entwined in comparative literature’s philological roots. ‘Every formally trained comparatist’, he argues, ‘should have an excellent knowledge of at least one language beyond their “native” language (if they don’t already grow up with two or three), and some will need an equally good knowledge of at least one more’ (p. 192). Damrosch emphasizes how intrinsic learning foreign languages is to literary study and how this can—and, indeed, should—be a lifelong endeavour: ‘If we need to know more, then it is time to get back into language class—a worthwhile endeavour at any age—or to collaborate with someone who has the language we lack’ (p. 192). Comparatists must nevertheless also have the humility to recognize their own limitations: ‘If neither is an option, the topic is best left for someone else’ (p. 192). Despite his distancing himself from it, the pull of the American planet is at times irresistible and Damrosch devotes several pages to the make-up of ‘comp lit’ programmes and ‘state of the discipline’ screeds from previous ACLA meetings. Nevertheless, knowledge of one’s own history and origins is invaluable and the majority of Comparing the Literatures offers a positively pluralistic and substantial overview of how comparatists from all parts of the world have shaped and reshaped literary analysis over the centuries. The pedagogical need to overcome ethnonationalist tunnel-vision while championing critical and imaginative flexibility is glaringly evident ex negativo in the failures of international politics in recent decades. [End Page 110] Comparing the Literatures helpfully maps the current disciplinary territory, leaving it to us...

The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe. 5 vols. Stephen Bernard, General Editor. Vol. 1: The Early Plays, ed. Rebecca Bullard and John McTague; Vol. 2: The Middle Period Plays, ed. Michael Caines; Vol. 3: The Late Plays, ed. Claudine van Hensbergen; Vol. 4: Poems, ed. Stephen Bernard, and Lucan’s Pharsalia (I–III), ed. Robin Sowerby; Vol. 5: Lucan’s Pharsalia (IV–X)

<i>The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe</i>. 5 vols. Stephen Bernard, General Editor. Vol. 1: <i>The Early Plays</i>, ed. Rebecca Bullard and John McTague; Vol. 2: <i>The Middle Period Plays</i>, ed. Michael Caines; Vol. 3: <i>The Late Plays</i>, ed. Claudine van Hensbergen; Vol. 4: <i>Poems</i>, ed. Stephen Bernard, and <i>Lucan’s Pharsalia</i> (I–III), ed. Robin Sowerby; Vol. 5: <i>Lucan’s Pharsalia</i> (IV–X)

Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89. Matthew C. Augustine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. xi+269.

<i>Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89</i>. Matthew C. Augustine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. xi+269.

Explorations du sociomatériel dans les recherches sur l’apprentissage et l’enseignement des langues

For the last several years, we have seen a widening of the conceptual field in the research on language learning and teaching. Many articles published over the last 20 years in the The Canadian Modern Language Review draw on poststructural, sociocultural, and sociolinguistic theories and now occupy an important place alongside articles inspired by psycholinguistic perspectives. Recently, there has been interest in the field for theories of the material. Stemming from several disciplines, work on the topic emerges from various schools of thought, including posthumanism (Braidotti), new materialism (Bennett), and relational ontologies (Barad), among others, and several authors are inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari. According to these perspectives, discursive processes and social activities are entangled in the material world and are ontologically inseparable from it. Thus, the study of learning and teaching phenomena, inspired by these theoretical frameworks, moves away from an analysis centred solely on the person and the social. It examines the relations between the human and the material to find out how they take shape together, change continually, and affect the observed phenomena. In this article, I present some key concepts and avenues of research explored in this work. I also note how researchers explore research methods and conceptualizations of language learning and teaching that differ from those that have been privileged in the field until now.

Input-based tasks for beginner-level learners: An approximate replication and extension of Erlam &amp; Ellis (2018)

Erlam &amp; Ellis (2018) published, in Canadian Modern Language Review, an experimental study that investigated the effect of input-based tasks on the acquisition of vocabulary and markers of plurality by adolescent near-beginner learners of L2 (second language) French. The present paper reports an approximate replication of the original study with the aim of confirming or disconfirming the results.1 The research questions of both studies addressed the receptive acquisition of new vocabulary and the receptive and productive acquisition of markers of plurality resulting from instruction using input-based tasks. Both studies investigated near-beginner adolescent learners of French. The teacher, the students’ usual classroom teacher, was the same in both studies. In the replication study, a new, larger group of students were investigated, the length of the instruction was increased, involving the development of additional tasks, and productive as well as the receptive knowledge of the vocabulary items was assessed. The results of the replication study confirm and extend those of the original study. The teachers’ views about the role of input-based tasks with near-beginner learners remained constant in the two studies. The paper concludes with a discussion of the contribution that approximate replications can make to instructed second language acquisition research.

Existence of Integrated Regulation and Its Implication on Foreign Language Teaching: A Survey Study

ABSTRACTThis study employed a large-scale cross-sectional survey (n = 443) to develop and validate second language (L2) regulatory styles [Noels et al. 2000. “Why are You Learning a Second Language? Motivational Orientations and Self-Determination Theory.” Language Learning 50 (1): 57–85] in the sample of successful English learners in an English as a second language context. Confirmatory factor analysis was used in this study to test five different models and the preferred model identified as many as six factors of regulatory style (i.e. intrinsic knowledge, intrinsic accomplishment, integrated regulation, identified regulation, introjected regulation and external regulation) in that context. Integrated regulation was the most endorsed factor among all regulatory styles, and it had a medium correlation with identified regulation. Different from Noels and her colleagues’ proposition [Noels, Clément, and Pelletier 2001. “Intrinsic, Extrinsic, and Integrative Orientations of French Canadian Learners of English.” Canadian Modern Language Review 57 (3): 424–442] that it was hard to differentiate integrated regulation from identified regulation, the findings of this study suggest otherwise, and L2 regulatory styles would do well to extend its scope to allow for integrated regulation as a separate entity. Thus, foreign language teachers are expected to help students internalise the behaviour of this foreign language learning into their own goals or needs. That behaviour contributes to an individual's psychological well-being [Ryan and Deci 2000. “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-being.” American Psychologist 55: 68–78] and then contribute to an ideal L2 self. Introjected regulation was rejected, signifying that successful L2 learners need more autonomous motivation to be high achievers. Therefore, it is suggested that the specifics of a language proficiency group and different learning contexts as well should be taken into account in the future study on language learners’ motivations.

The linguistic landscape of English–Spanish dual language picturebooks

ABSTRACTPicturebooks which present stories in two languages are known as dual-language picturebooks (Daly. 2016. “Linguistic Landscapes in Māori-English Parallel Dual Language Picturebooks: Domination and Interaction.” New Zealand English Journal 29 & 30: 11–24), and the use of dual-language picturebooks has been shown to have a positive effect on community engagement with schools (Naqvi, McKeogh, Thorne, & Pfitscher. 2013. “Dual-Language Books as an Emergent-Literacy Resource: Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning.” Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 13 (4): 501–528; Peterson and Heywood. 2007. “Contributions of Families’ Linguistic, Social, and Cultural Capital to Minority-Language Children’s Literacy: Parents’, Teachers’, and Principals’ Perspectives.” Canadian Modern Language Review 63 (4): 517–538). Given the importance of these books in creating relationships between bilingual children and children's literature, it is interesting to analyse the linguistic landscapes present in these books, and what messages they are communicating to readers regarding the relative status of the languages used in the text. In this article, over 200 English–Spanish dual-language picturebooks from the Marantz Picturebook Collection for the Study of Picturebook Art, based at Kent State University, are analysed in terms of the notion of linguistic landscape (Landry and Bourhis. 1997. “Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality. An empirical study.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16 (1): 23–49). Findings are discussed in terms of the relative status of the two languages and how this is communicated via relative print size and placement. The presentation of languages in the picturebooks analysed is discussed in relation to translanguaging and ethnolinguistic vitality.

A comparative study of the effects of teacher-initiated planned preemptive and reactive focus on form on L2 learners’ accuracy in narrative writing

ABSTRACTAlthough researchers in the area of second language acquisition agree on the effectiveness of form-focused instruction, there is little consensus on the appropriate time to direct learners’ attention to linguistic items, that is, whether before or after the error occurrence [Nassaji, H. 2010, “The Occurrence and Effectiveness of Spontaneous Focus on Form in Adult ESL Classrooms.” The Canadian Modern Language Review 66 (6): 907–933; Panahzade, V., and J. Gholami. 2014, “The Relative Impacts of Planned Preemptive vs. Delayed Reactive Focus on Form on Language Learners’ Lexical Resource.” The Journal of Language Teaching and Learning 4 (1): 69–83]. In this regard, adopting a quasi-experimental design, the present study attempted to compare the effects of two techniques of focus on form (FonF), namely teacher-initiated planned preemptive and reactive FonF, on the accurate use of English third person singular -s in L2 learners’ narrative writing. Thirty-two English learners selected out of a total of 70 following a Quick Oxford Placement Test were randomly classified into two groups (one experimental and one comparison) each receiving a different FonF instruction during narrative tasks. Analysis of the groups’ performance on the pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest revealed that both techniques were equally beneficial in bringing the form in focus to the center of the learners’ attention. It can, therefore, be suggested that the teachers need to observe the time when deciding to draw the learners’ attention to the linguistic forms.

Claude Rawson in conversation with Marjorie Perloff

PREFACEClaude Rawson has been called 'perhaps the best living scholar in eighteenth-century satire, and perhaps of British satire itself', and there is frequent reference in the literature to 'Rawson’s unassailable pre-eminence as Swift’s most challenging, exciting, and erudite modern critic'. In the words of Robert Alter, 'What Rawson bracingly demonstrates is that humanistic inquiry still can be, and deserves to be, an empirically grounded activity'. Before his retirement in 2014, Rawson was the first Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale, where he had taught since 1986. Before that, he was for many years (1971–1986) professor at the University of Warwick: while at Warwick, he served as Department Chairman and was the co-editor of Modern Language Review. Rawson has held many distinguished visiting professorships around the world, most recently in China, where he was born and grew up. He is the author of numerous now-classic scholarly studies, among them God, Gulliver, and Genocide, and has edited dozens of scholarly editions, individual volumes of essays, and series like the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. He is currently the general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, now in process. In the 1980s, he was a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, writing on a great variety of literary and cultural topics, and he continues to contribute to the TLS and other periodicals. Since retirement, Rawson spends much of his time in Cambridge.Marjorie Perloff is the Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She contributed an essay 'Beckett in the Country of the Houyhnhnms' to the 2008 Cambridge University Press Festschrift for Rawson called Swift’s Travels: Eighteenth-Century British Satire and its Legacy.The interview took place via email between Cambridge and Los Angeles, which is Perloff’s home, in August-October 2016.

Editors' Introduction: Other People's Roths

Editors' Introduction Other People's Roths David Brauner (bio) and Debra Shostak (bio) Ever since its inception, Philip Roth Studies has been publishing essays dealing with Roth's relationships with other writers, exploring the ways in which his work has directly influenced, and been influenced by, novelists, dramatists, poets, philosophers, and critics; and the ways in which his works can be read intertextually—placed in dialogue with that of precursors, peers, and a younger generation of writers. In this special issue, however, we wanted to highlight some of the ways in which Roth (which is to say, his work, his public persona, and his cultural presence) has been adapted, appropriated, and translated (literally and metaphorically) by others. Consequently, this special issue features a range of forms to explore the Roths that emerge in and around other voices. We include academic essays—on the film adaptations of The Humbling (by Andrew Gordon) and Indignation (by David Gooblar), on Listen Up Philip (which implicitly invokes Roth not just in its title but in numerous other ways articulated by Tanguy Bérenger), on the uses Jonathan Franzen has made of Roth in his fiction and non-fiction (by Michael Kalisch) and on the uses Roth has made of Yeats (by Jack Knowles). The issue is enriched by an account of the challenges and opportunities afforded by the process of translating Roth into Hungarian (by Anna Nemes), an interview with a visual and performance artist (Bryan Zanisnik) who has developed a complex relationship with Roth over the course of a number of artworks and a legal dispute, and an exuberantly satirical reinvention of Roth in the form of a story by Tim Parrish, who will be known to many readers of the journal for his excellent body of critical work on Roth. What unites all these pieces—and all the various versions of Roth that these artists, film-makers, translators, and writers have produced—is a tension between reverence and irreverence, and/or a struggle to arrive at an authentic version of Roth that is at the same time a subjective reinvention of him. In this way, "Other People's Roths" both contributes to existing conversations on Roth and begins new ones. [End Page 6] David Brauner David Brauner is Professor of Contemporary Literature at The University of Reading (UK) and Executive Co-editor of Philip Roth Studies. He is the author of three books: Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001), Philip Roth (Manchester University Press, 2007) and Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). He is the co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction (2015) with Axel Stähler and of a special Lorrie Moore issue of The Journal of American Studies (46.3) with Heidi MacPherson. His essays have appeared in a wide range of journals, including The Journal of American Studies, The Yearbook of English Studies, Studies in the Novel, Modern Language Review, Canadian Literature, Studies in American Jewish Literature and Philip Roth Studies. Debra Shostak Debra Shostak is Mildred Foss Thompson Professor of English Language and Literature and co-chair of the Department of English at the College of Wooster, Ohio. Co-editor of Philip Roth Studies, she is the author of Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives and editor of Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America. She has published widely on contemporary American fiction and on film. Copyright © 2017 Purdue University

The Anglo-Norman Gospel Harmony: A Translation of the ‘Estoire de l’Evangile’ (Dublin, Christ Church Cathedral C6.1.1, Liber Niger) . By Brent A. Pitts

The present work is a translation of the medieval Anglo-Norman Gospel Harmony, recently edited, also by Brent A. Pitts, under the name Estoire de l’Evangile (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2011). The text, which attempts to unify the four Gospels into a single narrative, is extant in a single manuscript: Dublin, Christ Church Cathedral, MS C6.1.1, Liber Niger. The Introduction to the translation begins by outlining the great significance of the text as the sole extant medieval French witness to the Gospel Harmony, or diatessaron, tradition, and a textual comparison of key passages with the Middle English Pepysian Gospel Harmony follows the translation (The Pepysian Harmony, ed. by Margery Goates (London: Early English Text Society, 1922)). Those unfamiliar with the tradition will find a list of suggested further reading. Both the author and the date of composition of the Gospel Harmony are unknown, although Pitts shows convincingly that the text had a likely completion date around the mid-thirteenth century. Pitts provides compelling evidence that the author of the work may have been Thomas of Hales, an English Franciscan writer, outlining his theory with a comparison of the Gospel Harmony to one of Hales’s sermons (M. Dominica Legge, ‘The Anglo-Norman Sermon of Thomas of Hales’, Modern Language Review, 30 (1935), 212–18). The Introduction is completed with a brief analysis of some of the stylistic characteristics of the text (brevity, use of exempla, repetition); however, as the immediate source of the work is unknown (the text likely being a translation of an earlier harmony and not spontaneous creation), it is difficult to know if these elements can all be attributed to the author or to his model. The translation follows the edited text quite closely, although it is not necessary to read the two together, as the translation is in itself lively and readable. While the line-numbering found in the edition is absent in the translation, this is no great detraction, because the identical chaptering facilitates navigation between the two works. Footnotes to the translation provide comparison to key texts in the diatessaronic tradition as well as references to parallel Gospel passages. There is no doubt that the translation will prove to be of particular interest to those who are familiar with this tradition, and will facilitate further study of the text, as both the translation and the edition provide valuable insights into this unique work.

Word Skipping in Reading English as a Foreign Language: Evidence from Eye Tracking

Word Skipping in Reading English as a Foreign Language: Evidence from Eye Tracking

The Anthropology of Dario Fo: an Interdisciplinary Approach

Anthropological issues concerning socio-cultural evolution were important in the development of Marxism and led to the theories of cultural materialism. Besides Marx and Engels, anthropology was an important subject for other seminal Marxist theorists, such as Plekhanov. For the Marxist playwright-performer Dario Fo, Gramsci’s theories of hegemony are fundamental to his ideas of the development of art from utilitarian activities, and explain his insistence on drawing from folk and popular forms of performance. In this article Antonio Scuderi investigates some of the major anthropological and folkloric themes in Fo’s theatre, including the influence of anthropologists such as Toschi and Lévi-Strauss. Antonio Scuderi is Professor of Italian at Truman State University in Missouri, where he founded the Italian programme. His interdisciplinary articles on Italian performance traditions have been published in leading journals of theatre, folklore, and literary studies, including Theatre Journal, Oral Tradition, and Modern Language Review. He is the author of Dario Fo and Popular Performance (Legas, 1998), Dario Fo: Framing, Festival, and the Folkloric Imagination (Lexington Books, 2011), and co-editor of Dario Fo: Stage, Text, and Tradition (Southern Illinois, 2000).

Introduction

Introduction

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ANGLOPHONE CRITICAL WORKS ON , AND

Editorial NoteOne or more of Beckett's three novels appear in a great many pieces of literary or cultural criticism. remit for the bibliography was to be as comprehensive as possible for publications since Raymond Federman and John Fletcher's Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics: An Essay in Bibliography (Berkeley: U of California P, 1970). At the same time, to cite every piece in which Molloy, Malone Dies or Unnamable is given at least a paragraph would have been unworkable. Some of the selective principles are as follows:Only articles, essays, chapters or books which take one or more of the three novels as a primary focus are included. Pieces which use Beckett's text(s) principally for a point of comparison are not included. By contrast, pieces which focus on readings of the Beckett text(s) by other writers (for example, by Bataille, Blanchot, Coetzee) are included. Likewise, pieces which focus on allusions in Beckett's text(s) are included. Translations of essays by French writers have not been included. Monographs on Beckett are included where they give sustained attention to any or all of the three novels. Page ranges for these are not included because they could not be registered consistently: a number of the books cited here have chapters or distinct sections on pieces from the trilogy, but others bring them back at different points. Monographs not exclusively focused on Beckett are included (under 'Other Monographs') where they contain at least one chapter that gives sustained attention to any or all of the three novels. Page ranges for these are included. bibliography includes works published between 1970 and 2013. It is non-evaluative in the sense that no judgments about the relative quality of the work have been factored into selection; at the same time, it has entailed 'aesthetic' judgments regarding the degree of sustained attention given by a monograph, essay or article.Two or three examples to clarify 'primary focus': piece which has something very interesting to say about the three novels but which does not have a 'primary focus' on them is Rolf Breuer's Paradox in Beckett, in Modern Language Review 88.3 (1993), 559-80. Though it gives attention to each of the three novels - a paragraph or two each - its emphasis is on the oeuvre. Essays of this kind, whose focus is on the oeuvre, have generally not been included. dividing line in these cases has inevitably not always been absolutely certain. By way of contrast, James Meriwether's Towards a Contemporary Theoretical Structure takes the three novels as its single case study and model for the wider discussion. Martha Nussbaum's Narrative Emotions, similarly, is organised around the trilogy. Such essays are included.A database of the entries printed has been compiled and includes some further information, such as whether a piece focuses primarily on Molloy, Malone Dies, Unnamable or a combination of the three. Again, the divisions are not always clear-cut. For reasons of consistency the additional details are not printed here. However, the database can be considered a working document that may be refined and made available for scholars at a future date. There will have been oversights as well as intentional omissions in this bibliography; information on these communicated via the editors of SBT/A would be most welcome. My hope is that the bibliography will help those preparing new work on the three novels to see what has come before, as a basis for avoiding oversights of their own, and as a reference guide that gives a picture of how the field has been.Articles and EssaysAbbott, H. Porter, A Grammar for Being Elsewhere, in Journal of Modern Literature 6.1 (1977), 39-46.-, The Harpooned Notebook: Malone Dies and the Conventions of Intercalated Narrative, in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja, S. E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983), 71-79. …

Simpliciana Bellica: Grimmelshausens Kriegsdarstellung und ihre Rezeption 1667–2006

The Thirty Years War is still often referred to as the Urkatastrophe of German history, the tragic beginning of modern Germany. Few individuals have contributed more to that tradition than Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. His first novel Simplicissimus Teutsch of 1668/69 marked the beginning of a ten-volume cycle of works completed in 1675. Often read simply as a picaresque account of the war and its horrors, it is in fact an extremely complex work. […] Italo Michele Battafarano’s new study revisits this extraordinary work and explores its reception from the appearance of the first volume to 2006. The book is divided into three parts. The first part examines Grimmelshausen’s strategies as an author and puts his work in the context of other writings of the period, with particular reference to autobiographical elements and their relation to fictions and metafictions. The second part explores the relationship between key elements of Grimmelshausen’s depiction of the Thirty Years War and the reality of the war. […] The third part […], devoted to Grimmelshausen’s reception, contains material that is genuinely new. According to Battafarano, the reception of Grimmelshausen’s work really began with the publication of the first critical edition by Adelbert von Keller in 1854, and specifically with the re-evaluation of the Thirty Years War in the wake of German unification in 1871. […] Battafarano then traces the work’s subsequent reception in the First and Second World Wars, finding Grimmelshausen cited as a precursor of pan-Germanism, as well as a proponent of every conceivable pro- and anti-war view. Two particularly fascinating sections examine French views of Simplicissimus in the 1940s and references to the work at the Nuremberg Trials. Finally, Battafarano finds Grimmelshausen invoked again in Godard’s Finis Germaniae (1991), in the German discussion of the Second Gulf War (1991), and in Grass’s 2006 autobiography. These chapters of Battafarano’s book are fascinating: suitably extended, they would have made an excellent book on their own. (Joachim Whaley, Simpliciana Bellica : [review], in Modern Language Review (July 2013), vol. 108, pt. 3, p. 993-4)

The Byron Journal at Forty

In 1967, Robert Gleckner devoted two chapters in his still impressive Byron and the Ruins of Paradise to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I-II. This was a bold thing to do. Byron's poetry at that time, apart from what were pigeonholed as 'the satires' (Beppo, Don Juan and The Vision of Judgement), was almost universally patronised. Andrew Rutherford, an intelligent man and one of the time's foremost Byronists, could take for granted in a 1988 article in The Byron Journal that 'so much of Byron's poetry is downright bad or mediocre'.1 Gleckner noted that it 'is not only fashionable but critically correct to dismiss the first two cantos [of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage] almost as if they never existed'.2In 2012 in London, a symposium was held mainly on 'Byron in 1812' to commemorate the bicentenary of the poem's publication. Some very distinguished Byron critics (and these are now sufficiently numerous to be no longer a protected species) took Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I-II very seriously indeed. Times have changed. Another anniversary in 2012 might help to explain this change. Forty years ago, The Byron Journal was founded by Elma Dangerfield and Dennis Walwin Jones. It was initiated in 1972 but the first issue was on Byron's birthday, 22 January 1973. Almost unbelievably, 22 January was to be the date of Elma Dangerfield's death in 2006.It would be wrong to over-estimate the rise in Byron's reputation over this period, he is still barely taught in schools and under-taught in universities. The public at large remain convinced that Lord Byron is a Rupert Everett look-alike with a limp. It would smack of hubris, too, to explain his increased critical stature simply by the foundation of the journal but there has certainly been a change and The Byron Journal has certainly both mirrored and assisted this.The history of academic journals is an interesting and complicated one. I am no expert on the matter but it seems that they may be said to have originated with the Journal des Scavans (later Savants) in 1665, followed three months later by The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The former lasted until the French Revolution. The latter was not a regular publication but became one in 1800. Their purpose was to promote the public exchange of scientific ideas. Earlier in the seventeenth century, even Robert Boyle - 'the father of modern chemistry' - was still a believer in alchemy and it may be hazarded that anyone who thought that they had discovered a method of creating gold would not rush into print with the secret. The Royal Society gradually changed all that. Science was a public domain and knowledge a public good.Interestingly, when the Journal des Savants was refounded in 1816, it changed from being primarily a scientific journal into a literary one. The early nineteenth century was the birthplace of the academic literary journal though the contributors to and main readers of the Edinburgh (1802) and Quarterly Review were not academics. Earlier famous journals in the eighteenth century, such as The Spectator and The Tatler, sometimes featured extracts from new works but they were not journals of literary criticism. The new journals in Byron's time contained articles on many subjects, had a clear political bias, but devoted much space to the criticism of new literary books and introduced a new and powerful phenomenon - 'the reviewer'. Byron's title English Bards and Scotch Reviewers relies on the new usage, where a 'reviewer' is primarily someone who writes in a literary journal.3If we jump to the literary scene a century later, we find a diverse pattern. Academic literary journals have arrived such as the American Modern Language Review (1905) and the British Review of English Studies (1925). The Times newspaper has initiated The Times Literary Supplement (1902) with anonymous scholarly reviews. On the other hand, there are many journals that carry literary reviews which are not written or intended for an academic readership. …

Painted for the ear: Ambrogio Lorenzetti's “Fraud” and political oratory

Painted for the ear: Ambrogio Lorenzetti's “Fraud” and political oratory