Languages, Literatures, & Cultures Research Works

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1623

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    Vegetal agency: the sap controversy in early eighteenth-century France treatises on plants and gardening
    (Royal Society, 2024-01) Benharrech, Sarah
    This article examines how the apologetics of the abbé Noël-Antoine Pluche (1688–1761) impacted his presentation of botanical knowledge in the ten dialogues published in the first and second volumes of his natural history book Le Spectacle de la nature (1732–1750). Pluche popularized a conception of the physical world where plants are reducible to inert mechanisms, devoid of life and agency. First, I examine the various intertwinements of science and theology in his depiction of plant anatomy, by investigating his use of mechanical analogies, his adoption of the sap circulation hypothesis, and his application of the pre-existence theory to account for both generation and vegetative multiplication. I then compare Pluche's understanding of plant growth with those offered by contemporaneous gardening treatises, demonstrating that part of Pluche's project included opposing the materialist and animist undertones found in these gardening treatises that emphasized vegetal life, self-organization, and sap agency.
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    The Transnational Turn in African Literature of French Expression: Imagining Other Utopic Spaces in the Globalized Age
    (MDPI, 2016-05-18) Orlando, Valérie K.
    This article focuses on African literature published since 2000 by authors of French expression. While contemporary authors’ subjects are varied—ranging from climate change, human rights, to ethnic cleansing—they also imagine new “what ifs” and other utopic spaces and places that extend beyond postcolonial, Africa-as-victim paradigms. Literarily, authors such as Abdelaziz Belkhodja (Tunisia) and Abdourahman A. Waberi (Djibouti) have effectuated a transnational turn. In this literary transnational turn, Africa is open to new interpretations by the African author that are very different from the more essentialist-based, literary-philosophical movements such as Negritude and pan-Africanism; cornerstones of the postcolonial literary frameworks of the past. Belkhodja and Waberi offer original narratives for Africa that, while describing their countries as utopias, also traverse the very dystopic realities of our time.
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    Sanctifying Domestic Space and Domesticating Sacred Space: Reading Ziyāra and Taṣliya in Light of the Domestic in the Early Modern Ottoman World
    (MDPI, 2020-01-28) Allen, Jonathan Parkes
    Shrine-visitation (ziyāra) and devotion to Muḥammad (such as expressed in taṣliya, the uttering of invocations upon the Prophet), both expressed through a range of ritualized practices and material objects, were at the heart of everyday Islam for the vast majority of early modern Ottoman Muslims across the empire. While both bodies of practice had communal and domestic aspects, this article focuses on the important intersections of the domestic with both shrine-visitation and Muḥammad-centered devotion as visible in the early modern Ottoman lands, with a primary emphasis on the eighteenth century. While saints’ shrines were communal and ‘public’ in nature, a range of attitudes and practices associated with them, recoverable through surviving physical evidence, travel literature, and hagiography, reveal their construction as domestic spaces of a different sort, appearing to pious visitors as the ‘home’ of the entombed saint through such routes as wall-writing, gender-mixing, and dream encounters. Devotion to Muḥammad, on the other hand, while having many communal manifestations, was also deeply rooted in the domestic space of the household, in both prescription and practice. Through an examination of commentary literature, hagiography, and imagery and objects of devotion, particularly in the context of the famed manual of devotion Dalā’il al-khayrāt, I demonstrate the transformative effect of such devotion upon domestic space and the ways in which domestic contexts were linked to the wider early modern world, Ottoman, and beyond.
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    The Influence of Native Phonology, Allophony, and Phonotactics on Nonnative Lexical Encoding: A Vocabulary Training Study
    (Wiley, 2023-04-20) Zheng, Qi; Gor, Kira
    Second language (L2) speakers often experience difficulties in learning words with L2-specific phonemes due to the unfaithful lexical encoding predicted by the fuzzy lexical representations hypothesis. Currently, there is limited understanding of how allophonic variation in the first language (L1) influences L2 phonological and lexical encoding. We report how the Mandarin Chinese L1 phonemic inventory and allophonic variation subject to phonotactic constraints predict phonological encoding problems for novel L2 English words with the /v/–/w/ contrast. L1 English and L1 Chinese participants speaking two varieties of Mandarin Chinese differing as to the presence of [ʋ]–[w] allophonic variation for the /w/ phoneme participated in a vocabulary learning task. The novel L2 words with the /v/–/w/ contrast were systematically less robustly encoded than the control words on the day of training and 24 hours later. The degree of fuzziness in lexical representations was jointly predicted by L1 allophonic variation subject to phonotactic constraints and L2 phonological categorization.
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    Ethnography, Incongruity, History: Soviet Poetic Cinema
    (Wiley, 2023-01-22) Papazian, Elizabeth A.
    This essay examines the entangling of the poetic and the ethnographic in the art cinema of the 1960s as an indicator of a broader collision of epistemological/discursive regimes in postwar Soviet cinema—and ultimately, a clash between two fundamentally opposed approaches to the discursive production of history. In the Soviet poetic cinema of the 1960s, the temporal-spatial frameworks of the Stalin era are disrupted, shifting first of all, to what Tarkovsky called a lived experience of time—that is, to the subjective emotions and experiences of individual people; second, to localized histories that may not coincide with the supra-national Soviet developmental narrative; and third, to the positing of an archaic, even pre-historical temporality as a kind of lost ideal. I argue that poetic cinema serves as a site for playing out the contradiction among temporalities and spatialities in post-Stalin culture, and therefore among opposed sense-making projects and representational modes, creating the possibility for subverting the colonial function of Soviet cinema.
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    Revolutionary Landscapes and Kitchens of Refusal: Tomato Sauce and Sovereignty in Egypt
    (Wiley, 2022-10-09) Gaul, Anny
    This article presents a cultural history of tasbika, a tomato-based cooking technique, as a window into transformations of sovereignty in colonial and postcolonial Egypt. It draws on cookbooks, popular magazines and oral histories to argue that tasbika’s relatively recent emergence as one of the country's most ubiquitous home cooking methods was made possible not only by state-led industrialisation and modernisation projects, but also through a form of sovereignty wielded by women working in their home kitchens. This article describes this ‘kitchen sovereignty’ as an everyday form of power exercised by home cooks making decisions about how to manage scarce resources and feed their families. Moving beyond questions of food policies and market supply, this study of food and power centres the domestic labour that home cooks performed to transform raw ingredients into the flavours of everyday life in Egypt.
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    Estimating reliability for response-time difference measures: Toward a standardized, model-based approach
    (Cambridge University Press, 2023-05-29) Hui, Bronson; Wu, Zhiyi
    A slowdown or a speedup in response times across experimental conditions can be taken as evidence of online deployment of knowledge. However, response-time difference measures are rarely evaluated on their reliability, and there is no standard practice to estimate it. In this article, we used three open data sets to explore an approach to reliability that is based on mixed-effects modeling and to examine model criticism as an outlier treatment strategy. The results suggest that the model-based approach can be superior but show no clear advantage of model criticism. We followed up these results with a simulation study to identify the specific conditions in which the model-based approach has the most benefits. Researchers who cannot include a large number of items and have a moderate level of noise in their data may find this approach particularly useful. We concluded by calling for more awareness and research on the psychometric properties of measures in the field.
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    Scrutinizing LLAMA D as a measure of implicit learning aptitude
    (Cambridge University Press, 2023-01-09) Iizuka, Takehiro; DeKeyser, Robert
    Since Gisela Granena’s influential work, LLAMA D v2, a sound recognition subtest of LLAMA aptitude tests, has been used as a measure of implicit learning aptitude in second language acquisition research. The validity of this test, however, is little known and the results of studies with this instrument have been somewhat inconsistent. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that researchers’ variable test instructions are the source of the inconsistent results. One hundred fourteen English monolinguals were randomly assigned to take LLAMA D v2 under one of three test instruction conditions. They also completed two implicit aptitude tests, three explicit aptitude tests, and a sound discrimination test. The results showed that, regardless of the type of test instructions, LLAMA D scores did not align with implicit aptitude test scores, indicating no clear evidence of the test being implicit. On the contrary, LLAMA D scores were negatively associated with scores on one implicit aptitude test, the Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task, but only in the condition where the instructions drew participants’ focal attention to the stimuli. This negative association was interpreted as focal attention working against learning in the SRT task. Implicit learning aptitude may be the degree to which one is able to process input without focal attention.
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    Development of automaticity in processing L2 collocations: The roles of L1 collocational knowledge and practice condition
    (Cambridge University Press, 2023-01-27) Jeong, Hyojin; DeKeyser, Robert
    This study examined the development of automaticity in processing L2 collocations, and the roles of L1 collocational knowledge and practice conditions in the development process. Korean learners of English were assigned to one of two practice conditions (practice in identical or varied contexts). The learning gains for word combinations with and without equivalent counterparts in the L1 (L1-only and L2-only collocations) were assessed using response times (RTs) and coefficients of variation (CV) from a phrasal decision task. The results demonstrated that the learners in both groups showed significantly improved collocation processing for both types of items in terms of speed (RT) and automaticity (CV) over time. The RT and CV analyses indicated that both groups’ improvements in collocation processing in the later stages of learning were associated with automatization. Interestingly, L1 collocational knowledge played a facilitative role in processing speed only in the early stages of learning. No reliable evidence for the differential effects of the two types of practice conditions on developing automaticity in collocation processing was found.