CRÍTICO, COMISARIO Y CINEASTA EXPERIMENTAL: NÉSTOR ALMENDROS EN NUEVA YORK, 1957-1959

El reconocimiento internacional de Néstor Almendros (1930-1992) como director de fotografía ha eclipsado, dentro de la historia convencional del cine, otras dos facetas fundamentales de su trayectoria: la de crítico cinematográfico y la de director de cine experimental y documental. Este artículo analiza las actividades profesionales de Almendros durante el comienzo de su carrera en Nueva York, entre 1957 y 1959, y estudia con detenimiento su producción como comisario (para el cineclub de Vassar College), como crítico (para Film Culture) y como director de cine experimental (con los cortometrajes de vanguardia, El monte de la luna y 58-59). A su vez, y a través de un estudio crítico de materiales de archivo inéditos, propone una nueva lectura de la obra de Almendros que tiene en cuenta su carácter multidisciplinar y resitúa al cineasta como una de las figuras principales del cine español en el exilio.

Spirituality in Mary Oliver’s Poetry

Mary Oliver is an American poet who has been so much fascinated by the natural world since her childhood. Natural world occupies a very large space in her poetry, if not her entire poetic work. She was born in Ohio 1935, and she spent her childhood there surrounded by Nature. She graduated from high school and went to Vassar college and Ohio State University, yet she could not get a degree. She moved to New York where she met the sister of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the famous American poet and playwright. She got a closer look to Edna’s works by organizing her papers for almost seven years. As for career, she held the position at Bennington College by being the Catherine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching. Later on she settled in Provincetown, Massachusetts for almost forty years inspired by the natural scenes there which are conveyed in her collections.

Words May Jump-Start Meaning More Than Vision: A Non-Replication of Early ERP Effects in Boutonnet and Lupyan (2015)

We report a replication of Boutonnet and Lupyan’s (2015) study of the effects of linguistic labelling on perceptual performance. In addition to a response time advantage of linguistic labels over non-linguistic auditory cues in judging visual objects, Boutonnet and Lupyan found that the two types of cues produced different patterns in the early perceptual ERP components P1 and P2 but not the later, semantics-relevant N4. This study thus adds an important piece of evidence supporting the claim of genuine top-down effects on perception. Given the controversy over this claim and the need for replication of key findings, we attempted to replicate Boutonnet and Lupyan (2015). We replicated their behavioral findings that response times to indicate whether an auditory cue matches a visual image of an object were faster for match than mismatch trials and faster for linguistic than non-linguistic cues. We did not replicate the main ERP effects supporting a positive effect of linguistic labels on the early perceptual ERP components P1 and P2, though we did find a congruence by cue type interaction effect on those components. Unlike Boutonnet and Lupyan, we found a main effect of cue type on the N4 in which non-linguistic cues produced more negative amplitudes. Exploratory analyses of the unpredicted N4 effect suggest that the response time advantage of linguistic labels occurred during semantic rather than early visual processing. This experiment was pre-registered at https://osf.io/cq8g4/ and conducted as part of an undergraduate cognitive science research methods class at Vassar College.

Obliquities

This chapter explores how obliquity functions as both a narrative mode and a literary style in the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. It contends that, for Bowen, confrontations with history and modernity are best handled indirectly and tactfully, to the point that obliquity becomes a signature of her short story style. The early part of the chapter outlines Bowen’s poetics of the short story. Her thinking on the short story is compared with that of her compatriots, Seán O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor, whose stories informed her discussion of ‘national imprint’ in a class on short fiction that she taught at Vassar College in 1960. The latter part of the chapter analyses how Bowen develops an aesthetics of oblique representation of Irish history in her own fiction, with particular reference to ‘Sunday Afternoon’ and ‘A Love Story 1939’, two stories set during the Second World War.

Frances Jewell McVey and the Refinement of Student Culture

This chapter introduces Frances Jewell McVey, a graduate of Vassar College and Columbia University, and illustrates her impact on UK women’s academics and social life and how she sought to instill aspects of student culture that she had known at Vassar into a southern public coeducational university. It explains Jewell’s difficult decision to marry the university president and abandon her professional career goals. It also explores the impact of World War I on both women faculty and students, and it discusses the entrance of women students into nontraditional academic areas, such as engineering.

Sarah Blanding and the Modern College Woman

This chapter highlights the changes in UK women students in a post–World War I environment during the 1920s. It introduces Dean of Women Sarah Blanding, a protégé of Frances Jewell McVey, who followed McVey as Dean of Women and would later become the first woman president of Vassar College. In response to an ever-expanding social culture on campus, Blanding introduced new rules and regulations for women students, both on the campus and beyond; and she enforced them vigorously. The chapter also examines the demise of women’s intercollegiate athletics and its impact on women students. This decade brought an even greater emphasis on social status and relationships between women and men students, and it saw the rise of the “beauty queen” as a fixture on the college campus.

“Can’t You See I’m White?”

This essay was originally delivered as the keynote address at a conference on passing held at Vassar College in April of 2019. Titled “Quiet As It’s Kept: Passing Subjects, Contested Identities,” the conference was inspired by the legacy of Vassar’s first African American graduate, Anita Hemmings, who passed for white before being outed by her roommate shortly before graduation in 1897. DuCille maintains that the timeliness and importance of the conference theme are signaled by what both the media and the masses tout as the most diverse slate of candidates ever to vie for the office of president of the United States. Challenging the practical application of theoretical claims of race as a social construction, “Can’t You See I’m White?” explores the ways in which their racial and gender “difference” from the typical roster of white males seeking the presidency has made some of the candidates—most notably Senators Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts—the subjects of unprecedented debates about identity, biology, and culture. These debates, which raise questions not only about who gets to be black or brown or red but also who gets to be American, duCille claims, take on even greater significance in the time of Trump and the rise of white nationalism.