Recent and Forthcoming Publications

As the old French saying goes: “On juge de la pièce par l’échantillon.” Or, in English: “The proof is in the pudding.” In the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures learning isn’t limited to the classroom, through research and publications we work together to inspire debate, solve problems and better our community. And the proof is in the pudding, of course!

Here some recent and forthcoming publications by our faculty:

Greg Dawes

Book: Multiforme y comprometido: Neruda después de 1956 (Santiago, Chile: RIL editores, 2015).

“Neruda is a Multiform poet and this book is an important contribution to understanding this fact, achieved through a careful work of reconstruction and interpretation. It is also important in exploring new and more complex forms of reading and understanding Neruda’s poetry in a decisive period of his career and his time. A poetry reaffirmed and recreated despite the collapse . A poetry whose forms — always multiple, ever changing — were drawn from reality and life.”—Jaime Pinos, Chilean writer and poet.

 Thomas Feeny

Book: Breathing in Technicolor (Hemet, CA: The Aldrich Press, 2015).

Thomas (Tom) Feeny teaches Italian and Spanish literature at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. His hobbies are gardening and listening to classical jazz. His first collection of poems, Night into Day, was published by Mellen Poetry Press in 1993.

Shelley Garrigan (Forthcoming)

Book Chapter: “The Rise of Cultural Institutions,” to be published as a contribution to the forthcoming A History of Mexican Literature, edited by José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, and Anna Nogar (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

The chapter explores the consolidation and construction of the 19th-century cultural institutions that followed the legislative reforms of 1869 and the state appropriations of cultural properties formerly owned by the Church, and their intersections with a number of Mexican novelists and journalists from the era, such as Francisco Zarco, Ignacio Ramírez, Federico Gamboa, Heriberto Frías and José López Portillo y Rojas.

Book Chapter: “Delmira Agustini, Gender and the Poetics of Collecting,” to be published in an edited volume by María Mercedes Andrade in the forthcoming anthology Collecting from the Margins (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2016).

The article proposes a new reading of Delmira Agustini’s collective works — a reading which acknowledges the multiple ways in which the female collector renders facile gender associations problematic, despite the repeated “feminine” associations with her lyrical subjects that persist in literary criticism.

Article: “El ‘pensamiento viril’: diálogos entre la ciencia y el género en El Álbum de la Mujer,” to be published in a forthcoming special issue of Cuadernos de literatura (Enero-Junio 2016).

The article deals with the marketing of the sciences to upper-class females readers through literary magazines following the creation of the Escuela Secundaria para Mujeres in 1869 in Mexico.  

Jordi Marí (Forthcoming)

Book Chapter: “Federico García Lorca as a Modern Spanish Icon,” to be published in the forthcoming  Approaches to Teaching the Works of Federico García Lorca, edited by José Ignacio Badenes y Cecelia Cavanaugh (Modern Language Association, 2016).

This essay proposes a seminar on how the figure of Federico García Lorca has been represented, disseminated, and consumed in Spain throughout the decades; what discourses have been developed around him; what political, media, and social sectors have been behind those discourses; what purposes they have served; what consequences they have produced; and how and to what degree García Lorca is still a relevant figure in today’s Spain. The representations of García Lorca’s life, death, and cultural significance will be studied in the context of the re-writings of the historical past, the 2007 law of historical memory, and the prominence that the victims of the civil war and of Francoist repression have acquired in recent years.

Jim Michnowicz

Book Chapter: “Maya-Spanish contact in Yucatan, Mexico: Context and Sociolinguistic Implications,” in S. Sessarego and M. González Rivera (eds.), New Perspectives on Hispanic Contact Linguistics in the Americas (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2015).

Much recent scholarship has sought to identify the linguistic and social factors that favor the expression or omission of subject pronouns in Spanish. This volume brings together leading experts on the topic of language variation in Spanish to provide a panoramic view of research trends, develop probabilistic models of grammar, and investigate the impact of language contact on pronoun expression.

Book Chapter: Michnowicz, Jim. “Subject pronoun expression in Yucatan Spanish,” in A. Carvalho, R. Orozco, and N. Shin (eds.), Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-Dialectal Perspective (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015).

“[A] superb collection of studies that substantially increases our understanding, not only of variation in subject personal pronouns, but also of variable morphosyntactic processes generally… Clearly relevant to all students and scholars who wish to understand the complexities of linguistic variation and dialect contact.”—Robert Bayley, professor of linguistics, University of California, Davis.

Article: With Hillary Barnes, “Broad focus declaratives in Veneto-Spanish bilinguals: Peak alignment and language contact,” in Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 8.1 (2015): 35-57.

Posted by S.F. Sotillo