RECENT FACULTY PUBLICATIONS

Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing, eds. Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

Since the show's debut in 2007, Mad Men has invited viewers to immerse themselves in the lush period settings, ruthless Madison Avenue advertising culture, and arresting characters at the center of its 1960s fictional world. Mad Men, Mad World is a comprehensive analysis of this groundbreaking TV series. Scholars from across the humanities consider the AMC drama from a fascinating array of perspectives, including fashion, history, architecture, civil rights, feminism, consumerism, art, cinema, and the serial format, as well as through theoretical frames such as critical race theory, gender, queer theory, global studies, and psychoanalysis.

 

 

Manuel Rota. A Pact with Vichy: Angelo Tasca from Italian Socialism to French Collaboration. Fordham University Press, 2013.

Through Angelo Tasca’s complex life, A Pact with Vichy vividly reconstructs and elucidates the even more complex networks and debates that animated the Italian and French Left in the first half of the 20th century. After his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party as a result of his refusal to conform to Stalinism, Tasca reinvented his life in Paris, where he participated in the intense political debates of the 1930s. Rota explores how Tasca’s political choices were motivated by the desperate attempt to find an alternative between Nazism and Stalinism, even when this alternative had the ambiguous borders of Vichy’s collaborationist regime. A Pact with Vichy uncovers how Tasca’s betrayal of his own ideal was tragically the result of his commitment to political realism in the brief age of triumphant Fascism.

 

Ericka Beckman. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America's Export Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Capital Fictions investigates the key role played by literature in imagining and interpreting the rapid transformations unleashed by Latin America’s first major wave of capitalist modernization between 1870 and 1930. Questioning the opposition between culture and economics in Latin America and elsewhere, Ericka Beckman shows that literature operated as a powerful form of political economy during this period.

 

 

José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea & Erin O'Rourke, eds. The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

It is estimated that there are currently more than 400 million Spanish speakers worldwide, with the United States being home to one of the world's largest native Spanish-speaking populations. Reflecting the increasing importance of the Spanish language both in the U.S. and abroad, The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics features a collection of newly-written essays contributed by top Spanish linguistics scholars that explore all facets relating to the origins, evolution, and geographical variations of the Spanish language. While coverage is provided on applied concerns such as second language learning, Spanish in the classroom, immigration, heritage languages and bilingualism, several essays also address the significant body of theoretical work emerging in Spanish linguistics in the areas of Phonology, Phonetics, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics and Psycholinguistics. By combining the most crucial elements of current findings in theoretical and applied research, The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics sheds new light on the increasing growth and importance of the Spanish language

 

Silvina Montrul. El bilingüísmo en el mundo hispanohablante. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

This wide-ranging introduction to Spanish bilingualism covers the social, political, and cultural contexts of Spanish in the US, Spain, and Hispanoamérica. Written for non-native Spanish learners, it offers the first textbook of its kind for students of Hispanic linguistics.

Esta amplia introducción al bilingüismo en español abarca los contextos sociales, políticos y culturales del español en EE. UU., España y Hispanoamérica. Escrito para estudiantes no nativos de español, es el primer libro de texto de estas características para los estudiantes de lingüística hispánica.

 

Eleonora Stoppino. Genealogies of Fiction: Women Warriors and the Medieval Imagination in the "Orlando furioso". Fordham University Press, 2011.

Genealogies of Fiction is a study of gender, dynastic politics, and intertextuality in medieval and Renaissance chivalric epic, focused on Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Relying on the direct study of manuscripts and incunabula, this project challenges the fixed distinction between medieval and early modern texts and reclaims medieval popular epic as a key source for the Furioso.

Tracing the formation of the character of the warrior woman, from the amazon to Bradamante, the book analyzes the process of gender construction in early modern Italy. By reading the tension between the representations of women as fighters, lovers, and mothers, this study shows how the warrior woman is a symbolic center for the construction of legitimacy in the complex web of fears and expectations of the Northern Italian Renaissance court.

 

Mariselle Meléndez. Deviant and Useful Citizens. The Cultural Production of the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Peru. Vanderbilt University Press, 2011.

Deviant and Useful Citizens explores the conditions of women and perceptions of the female body in the eighteenth century throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru, which until 1776 comprised modern-day Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Mariselle Melendez introduces the reader to a female rebel, Micaela Bastidas, whose brutal punishment became a particularly harsh example of state response to women who challenged the system. She explores the cultural representation of women depicted as economically productive and vital to the health of the culture at large. The role of women in religious orders provides still another window into the vital need to sustain the image of women as loyal and devout -- and to deal with women who refused to comply.

 

Antonio Luciano Tosta, ed. (w/ Robert Moser). Luso-American Literature: Writings by Portuguese-Speaking Authors in North America. Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Portuguese and Cape Verdean immigrants have had a significant presence in North America since the nineteenth century. Recently, Brazilians have also established vibrant communities in the U.S. This anthology brings together, for the first time in English, the writings of these diverse Portuguese-speaking, or "Luso-American" voices. Historically linked by language, colonial experience, and cultural influence, yet ethnically distinct, Luso-Americans have often been labeled an "invisible minority." This collection seeks to address this lacuna, with a broad mosaic of prose, poetry, essays, memoir, and other writings by more than fifty prominent literary figures--immigrants and their descendants, as well as exiles and sojourners. It is an unprecedented gathering of published, unpublished, forgotten, and translated writings by a transnational community that both defies the stereotypes of ethnic literature, and embodies the drama of the immigrant experience.

 

Melissa A. Bowles. The Think-Aloud Controversy in Second Language Research. Routledge. 2010

The Think-Aloud Controversy in Second Language Research aims to answer key questions about the validity and uses of think-alouds, verbal reports completed by research participants while they perform a task. It offers an overview of how think-alouds have been used in language research and presents a quantitative meta-analysis of findings from studies involving verbal tasks and think-alouds. The book begins by presenting the theoretical background and empirical research that has examined the reactivity of think-alouds, then offers guidance regarding the practical issues of data collection and analysis, and concludes with implications for the use of think-alouds in language research. With its focus on a much-discussed and somewhat controversial data elicitation method in language research, this timely work is relevant to students and researchers from all theoretical perspectives who collect first or second language data. It serves as a valuable guide for any language researcher who is considering using think-alouds.

 

Arregi, K., Z. Fagyal, S. Montrul, and A. Tremblay. Interactions in Romance. Selected papers from the 38th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010.

The sixteen papers here united have been selected from the 38th Linguistic Symposium of the Romance Languages held in Champaign-Urbana in 2008. The papers, whose authors include both well-known researchers and younger scholars, cover a broad and truly interdisciplinary range of topics in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and their interfaces. Among the plethora of topics examined are stress in Quebec French, vowel deletion in Tuscan Italian, bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese, case in Romanian, and hiatus in Argentine Spanish. The volume’s novelty is to extend the traditional scope of linguistic inquiry to dynamic cognitive and societal connections between Romance and other languages, investigating, among others, how Spanish phonotactics informs psycholinguistic models of speech production, how bilinguals express subject pronouns in Chipilo contact Spanish relative to monolingual Mexican Spanish, and whether Spanish-speaking immigrants in Montreal acquire the constraints typical to natives in loanword adaptations.

 

José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, Anna María Escobar & Catherine E. Travis. Introducción a la lingüística hispánica. Cambridge University Press. 2001 [2nd expanded ed. 2010]

Written entirely in Spanish, this is the ideal introduction to Spanish linguistics for students. Using clear explanations, it covers all the basic concepts required to study the structural aspects of the Spanish language - phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax - as well as the history of Spanish, its dialects and linguistic variation. This second edition incorporates new features designed to enhance its usefulness for classroom teaching: chapters have been added on the sociolinguistics of Spanish in the USA, and on semantics and pragmatics. The chapter on syntax has been considerably expanded. Numerous exercises have been added throughout the book, as well as a new glossary to help with technical terms.

 

Silvina Montrul. Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism. Re-examining the Age Factor. [Series on Studies in Bilingualism]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008.

Age effects have played a particularly prominent role in some theoretical perspectives on second language acquisition. This book takes an entirely new perspective on this issue by re-examining these theories in light of the existence of apparently similar non-native outcomes in adult heritage speakers who, unlike adult second language learners, acquired two or more languages in childhood. Despite having been exposed to their family language early in life, many of these speakers never fully acquire, or later lose, aspects of their first language sometime in childhood. The book examines the structural characteristics of "incomplete" grammatical states and highlights how age of acquisition is related to the type of linguistic knowledge and behavior that emerges in L1 and L2 acquisition under different environmental circumstances. By underscoring age of acquisition as a unifying factor in the study of L2 acquisition and L1 attrition, it is claimed that just as there are age effects in L2 acquisition, there are also age effects, or even perhaps a critical period, in L1 attrition. The book covers adult L2 acquisition, attrition in adults and in children, and includes a comparison of adult heritage language speakers and second language learners.

 

Escobar, Anna María and Wolfgang Wölck, ed. Contacto lingüístico y la emergencia de variantes y variedades lingüísticas. Madrid / Frankfurt: Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2009.

Analiza el contacto lingüístico que caracteriza el multilingüismo de los países americanos modernos. Estudia los perfiles lingüísticos que emergen con la migración y las nuevas ecologías socioeconómicas de la zona.

 

 

 

 

 

Robert A. Rushing. Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture. New York: Other Press, 2007.

Detective fiction, a category that, broadly defined, runs the gamut fromOedipus Rex to "The Purloined Letter," continues to draw a range of fans and scholars, and to play a pivotal role in popular entertainment, contemporary literature, and psychoanalytic theory. But how do we derive pleasure from reading about or watching a detective's exploits? Is our enjoyment in the vicarious experience of genius? Or in witnessing the commission of a crime, an equally vicarious experience of violence?

Resisting Arrest looks at the detective genre in its many different cultural manifestations, from popular fiction (Christie) to high literature (Eco), from art films (Antonioni) to popular television series (Monk). In each case, Rushing finds that detective stories have less to do with fulfilling our hidden desires, as psychoanalytic explanations have traditionally asserted, than with purposively thwarting them. He argues that the genre is in fact constituted principally by the promises on which it fails to deliver, including the vicarious experience of both genius (readers expecting to play Sherlock Holmes are almost always cast as Watson) and antisocial violence, so that our pleasure is based on what Slavoj Zizek has called "the endless circulation around the always-missed object." Organized around the key ideas that structure the detective genre ("Desire," "Repetition," "Violence"),Resisting Arrest offers a thoroughly new interpretation that will appeal to scholars interested in questions about genre and cinema studies, popular culture, and psychoanalysis.

 

Jennifer Cole & José Ignacio Hualde (Eds.) Laboratory Phonology 9. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007.

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the 9th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, which was held in June 2004 at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The theme of the conference was Change in Phonology, broadly conceived as to include both language evolution at the level of the speech community and development within the individual speaker/hearer. The chapters in this book are organized in five sections: phonological variation and change within the speech community, mechanisms of change in sound systems, phonological acquisition from different experimental perspectives, second language phonology, modeling of language variation, and segmental and suprasegmental phenomena related to the timing of speech gestures. These topics are explored from a number of perspectives, both within and outside of traditional linguistics. We believe that the papers included in this volume demonstrate that the Laboratory Phonology approach has reached maturity and has succeeded in its aim not only to bridge the gap between phonetics and phonology but also to establish a fruitful and mutually beneficial dialog between linguists and other scientists and scholars concerned with the study of the sound patterns of human language from different perspectives.

 

Slabakova, R, S Montrul, and P Prévost. Inquiries in Linguistic Development. In Honor of Lydia White. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006.

The focus of this collection is on important themes in L2 acquisition, the nature of grammatical systems developed by language learners in L1 acquisition, third language acquisition, and bilingualism and language attrition. The chapters present an interesting mix of theoretical contributions, overview studies, and experimental designs exploring various research questions, such as learnability and access to UG, L1 influence, the nature of initial and endstate grammars, and variability. The linguistic domains investigated are also extremely diverse: morphosyntax, phonology, the lexicon, argument realization, language processing, and interface phenomena. This book, edited and written by McGill University alumni, is intended as a tribute to Lydia White's contribution to the field of generative second language acquisition. The authors present current work on language acquisition which further investigates several themes developed by White's research. Through these state-of-the-art contributions the reader will be able to identify important new directions in which generative language acquisition is developing and expanding.

 

José Ignacio Hualde. The sounds of Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005

This accessible textbook provides a clear introduction to the sounds of Spanish, designed specifically for English-speaking students of the language. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, it explains from scratch the fundamentals of phonetics (the study of sounds) and phonology (the study of sound systems) and describes in detail the phonetic and phonological characteristics of Spanish as it is spoken in both Spain and Latin America. Topics covered include consonants, vowels, acoustics, stress, syllables, intonation, and aspects of variation within Spanish. Clear comparisons are made between the sounds of Spanish and those of English, and students are encouraged to put theory into practice with over fifty graded exercises. Setting a solid foundation in the description and analysis of Spanish sounds, The Sounds of Spanish will help students improve their pronunciation of the language, and will also be useful to those studying the linguistic structure of Spanish for the first time. All the sounds described in this book are demonstrated on The Sounds of Spanish Audio CD included with this book.

 

Silvina Montrul. The Acquisition of Spanish. Morphosyntactic Development in Monolingual and Bilingual L1 Acquisition and in Adult L2 Acquisition. [Series on Language Acquisition and Language Disorders]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004.

This is the first book on the acquisition of Spanish that provides a state-of-the-art comprehensive overview of Spanish morphosyntactic development in monolingual and bilingual situations. Its content is organized around key grammatical themes that form the empirical base of research in generative grammar: nominal and verbal inflectional morphology, subject and object pronouns, complex structures involving movement (topicalizations, questions, relative clauses), and aspects of verb meaning that have consequences for syntax. The book argues that Universal Grammar constrains all instances of language acquisition and that there is a fundamental continuity between monolingual, bilingual, child and adult early grammatical systems. While stressing their similarities with respect to linguistic representations and processes, the book also considers important differences between these three acquisition situations with respect to the outcome of acquisition. It is also shown that many linguistic properties of Spanish are acquired earlier than in English and other languages. This book is a must read for those interested in the acquisition of Spanish from different theoretical perspectives as well as those working on the acquisition of other languages in different contexts.

 

José Ignacio Hualde & Jon Ortiz de Urbina (Eds.) A grammar of Basque. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003.

As the only surviving pre-Indo-European language of western Europe, Basque has often attracted the interest of linguists. Whereas, traditionally, descriptive work on Basque has primarily focused on morphological features, including its complex system of verb-argument agreement and its strict ergative pattern of inflection, during the last two decades a new generation of Basque linguists has produced very sophisticated, theoretically-informed work on many aspects of the syntax, morphology and phonology of the language, revealing, for instance, a process of focalization with many interesting properties and the existence in some dialects of an accentual system strikingly similar to that of standard Japanese. The book, bringing together this accumulated knowledge on the structure of Basque, is considerably more complete than any other existing grammar of the language. Another interesting feature of this grammar is that the description is illustrated with fully-glossed examples extracted from a great number of written sources. Although the focus is the modern standard language, dialectal features are considered in detail and examples are taken from all dialects and periods.

 

Anne J. Cruz, Rosilie Hernández-Pecoraro and Joyce Tolliver, eds. Disciplines on the Line: Feminist Research on Spanish, Latin American, and U.S. Latina Women. Newark DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2003.

This anthology brings together a cross-disciplinary collection of research on gender and sexuality within the context of Spanish, Latin American, and U.S. Latino cultures.  Featuring articles by scholars such as Mary Louise Pratt, Debra Castillo, and Mary Elizabeth Perry, the essays in this volume represent scholarly examinations from a wide range of fields in the Humanities, social sciences, and the arts.

 

 

 

 

Silvina Montrul and Francisco Ordóñez, ed. Linguistic Theory and Language Development in Hispanic Languages. Selected Papers from the 5th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium and the 2001 Conference on the Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 2003.

 

 

 

 

 

Luisa Elena Delgado. La imagen elusiva: lenguaje y representación en la narrativa de Galdós. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000.

La imagen elusiva parte del cuestionamiento de la idea clave en la poética del realismo: la neutralidad del referente, invitándonos a indagar en el concepto de "representación " como construcción ideológica. Apoyándose en un sólido aparato teórico-crítico, en la teoría estética decimonónica y en materiales de archivo, Delgado plantea una reflexión sobre la función del lenguaje como capital simbólico en el contexto cultural e histórico de la España de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. El estudio analiza cómo la narrativa de Galdós representa la manera en que las estructuras de poder (social, político, económico, sexual) operativas en la sociedad de su época se articulan discursivamente. Asimismo, Delgado demuestra cómo al poner de manifiesto los puntos de articulacion entre lo ideológico y las prácticas discursivas concretas, el proyecto narrativo galdosiano cuestiona las propias convenciones literarias y estéticas en que se apoya la armazón de la novela realista decimonónica. Finalmente, % La imagen elusiva explora también la relación entre subjetividad e identidad social, revelando la imbricación de ambas con el proceso de significación y planteando que en la narrativa de Galdós la conciencia es siempre, como el significado, social, plural y contradictoria.

 

Escobar, Anna María. Contacto social y lingüístico: El español en contacto con el quechua en el Perú. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2000. [Digital version available at the Andean Digital Library]

Este libro constituye un replanteamiento novedoso, tanto conceptual como metodológico, de los problemas que enfrenta el estudio del castellano andino. Su autora propone abordar el estudio del castellano que surge con del contacto con el quechua, no sólo situándolo dentro del contexto histórico-cultural y demográfico de la sociedad peruana, sino teniendo en cuenta -y aquí lo novedoso del asunto- factores lingüísticos que rebasan el concepto mecanicista de las estructuras formales de ambas lenguas para tomar consideración de aspectos propios de la episteme que subyace a aquéllas. De esta manera, la autora presta mayor atención a la dimensión semántica del contacto lingüístico, pues es en este terreno en el que, más allá de los efectos de tipo gramatical, de carácter más bien adquisitivo y al parecer contingente, se resuleven y definen, como resultado de procesos de reorganización y resemantización, las particularidades del español andino. Procesos pragmáticos y comunicativos, tendencias universales, aspectos relativos a la adquisición de primera y segunda lengua ayudan a comprender, en su conjunto, los fenómenos derivados del contacto lingüístico en razón de lo que Malkiel denominaba, y con bastante precisión, causación múltiple. (Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino)

 

Joyce Tolliver. Cigar Smoke and Violet-Water: Gendered Discourse in the Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell, 1998.

As Virigina Woolf would do a generation later, Emilia Pardo Bazán argued that literature should be “androgynous,” and that works written by women should be judged by the same standards as works written by men. She ridiculed the notion that “ladies’ writing” should send off a delicate whiff of “brisas de violeta” and that “masculine” writing should be redolent of cigar smoke.  Yet her own writing insistently positions gender at the narrative core, both thematically and structurally. This is particularly true of her short stories, a genre she turned to more frequently during the years in which she developed her wider theories of feminism.  Cigar Smoke and Violet Water features close analyses of a selection of these stories, arguing that the stories’ commentary on gender mores is reflected in the key roles played by gender in the narrative structure and linguistic discourse of the texts themselves.

 

Emilia Pardo Bazán. "El encaje roto" y otros cuentos. Ed. Joyce Tolliver. MLA, 1996.

Although written a century ago, the sixteen stories by Emilia Pardo Bazán collected in this volume are strikingly relevant to contemporary concerns. Noted for narrative complexity, stylistic variety, and feminist themes, Pardo Bazán's stories explore many aspects of the relationships between men and women. Readers of these stories will encounter memorable and affecting characters. A mysterious nun spends her days in a convent crying over something that happened to her many years ago, when she was a young woman. A young man tries to uncover the true reason a scheming woman married his uncle. An unwed pregnant woman finds unexpected help from a misogynist doctor. A bachelor wishing to marry develops a special test for prospective wives, only to see it backfire. And in the title story, a bride suddenly calls off her wedding at the last possible moment without an explanation. Both outspoken and witty, melancholy and humorous, these stories will interest general readers as well as students and scholars of Spanish literature.