International Journal of English Studies
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Published By Servicio De Publicaciones De La Universidad E Murcia

1989-6131, 1578-7044

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-155
Author(s):  
Iris Melanie Lucio-Villegas Spillard
Keyword(s):  

Alice Munro published in 2012 her last collection of short stories, Dear Life, which includes “Finale”, a quartet of stories introduced by the author in semiautobiographical terms. The relevance of the themes addressed is, as may be inferred, significant in relation to her life and previous work. In fact, they echo her first two collections of short stories —Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and Lives of Girls and Women (1971)— not only in motifs and events, but also in style. This paper analyses and compares this last section —Munro’s conclusive contribution to the literary world— with her early work to establish joint features and similarities in order to support and extend the often-claimed autobiographical dimension of Munro’s fiction from this unexplored perspective. In addition, this process of analogy has recognised the author’s literary and emotional closure in relation to her mother, a hitherto elusive endeavour in her work.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Paweł Sobkowiak

The qualitative research reported in this article investigated whether and to what extent students’ intercultural competence is developed in the English language classroom at the secondary education level in Poland. In interviews teachers demonstrated their positive attitudes toward intercultural teaching and decent knowledge of the issue. However, the teachers’ narratives uncovered that they assigned the interculturality the secondary role, focusing on developing linguistic and sociolinguistic competences. The collected data revealed that students in class had very few opportunities to explore foreign cultures and compare/ contrast one culture with another. There was a lack of attention to teaching that promotes critical thinking skills among learners along with activities which foster them. However, there is insufficient evidence that teachers can currently do anything more, given the context in which they work, their constraints and lack of training and support. The findings of the current study have clear implications for curriculum designers, textbook writers and institutions in charge of teacher training - EFL syllabuses, teaching materials and teacher training should focus more on developing students’ intercultural and critical thinking skills.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-81
Author(s):  
Vladimir Bondar

In the current study, data from A Corpus of English Dialogues (1560-1760) are used to consider contexts with the have-perfect and temporal adverbs of the definite past time such as yesterday, last night, ago. Data analysis is conducted within the framework of a usage-based approach, which gives evidence to the hypothesis that in Early Modern English the have-perfect in spoken register was gradually developing perfective semantics and that it followed the stages of generalization of meaning depending on the degree of event remoteness. Investigation of the instances where the have-perfect is used in narrative passages shows that the have-perfect in such contexts does not lose its pragmatic component of current relevance but is employed to highlight a crucial event out of a chain of past events. The paper proposes the hypothesis that the main mechanism preventing the have-perfect from further aoristicization is the operation of syntactic analogy within the syntactic paradigm of the present perfect, which had already fully developed by the time of Early Modern English.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-138
Author(s):  
Jeroen Vermeulen

This article discusses how John Keats’s biography and poetry exerted influence on the development of the plot, structure, protagonists and metaphorical framework of Patrick McGrath’s novel Dr Haggard’s Disease (1993). Furthermore, it contends that the novel does not simply aim to pay tribute to Keats or to function as a literary emulation or even mimicry of Keats’s life and oeuvre. Instead, the novel suggests a postmodernist comment on Keatsian Romanticism as expressed in Keats’s poetry. An interpretation of Dr Haggard’s Disease as historiographic metafiction with an emphasis on the intertextual links between McGrath’s novel and Keats’s work makes clear that the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Edward Haggard, by way of subversion and distortion devaluates the Keatsian dichotomies of real/ideal and Truth/Beauty.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-121
Author(s):  
Dolores Herrero

One of the effects of globalisation has been population mobility as a result of famine, climate warming and war conflicts, among other things. This flow of refugees, however, is often seen as a menace to the rule of law and human rights concomitant with the Western lifestyle. Refugees are no longer regarded as human beings and victims, but rather as danger, even as potential terrorists, which has led many governments, including the Australian, to detain them indefinitely in detention centres where they are confined in inhuman conditions. The main aim of this paper will be to describe Australian immigration policies and how contemporary Australian narratives on and by refugees are reflecting this situation, mainly by analysing a selection of texts from three recently published collections, namely, A Country Too Far (2013), They Cannot Take the Sky (2017) and Seabirds Crying in the Harbour Dark (2017), and Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2018).


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Gabriel Insausti
Keyword(s):  

Edwin Muir has often embarrassed critics as a rara avis. He was overlooked by anthologists before 1950 and, although subsequent anthologies never failed to include him, he was still hard to place for many readers. Labelled as a “traditionalist” or a “craftsman”, his later work proves however that Muir was much more. Understanding his use of myth, form and intertextuality enables us to rethink the significance of his work in the twentieth-century context.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-55
Author(s):  
Amparo Lázaro-Ibarrola ◽  
Izaskun Villarreal

Studies on multi-stage writing tasks with adults and children have shown that model texts and task repetition aid language acquisition, especially when learners work in collaboration. However, these studies have not included measures of task motivation, which is vital in young learners (YLs) and could help develop a more comprehensive understanding of task effectiveness. The present study analyses task motivation in 24 EFL YLs writing in pairs during three sessions divided into a model group (MG) and a task repetition group (TRG). Results show that students’ task motivation is high in general but declines in the MG while it is maintained in the TRG. As for the motives, working together is the main reason students give to justify their positive scores. These results complete previous knowledge about models and TR, reinforce the value of collaborative writing and encourage the inclusion of motivation measures in task-based research.  


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-54
Author(s):  
Eva Pelayo-Sañudo

The aim of this article is to examine how failed family sagas have defined early Italian/American culture and female literary tradition through Julia Savarese’s The Weak and the Strong (1952) and Marion Benasutti’s No Steady Job for Papa (1966). The idea of failed (female) lineages is articulated in a thematic sense that is overtly expressed in the depiction of both families in the texts. These convey a doomed plot which matches the coarse realities of immigration and the depression, as well as reflects the boundaries represented by the intersecting limitations of embodying racial and gender difference. Particularly, the article focuses on how male lineage is paramount in the novels and define Italian/American culture. In this sense, the analysis also contends that, as the authors themselves also encountered similar limitations, the lost genealogy of these early precursors has equally endangered the Italian/American female literary tradition.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-37
Author(s):  
Vicent Cucarella-Ramón

Black Canadian writer Wayde Compton’s short story collection The Outer Harbour (2015) is located in the Afroperiphery of British Columbia which stands as a ‘contact zone’ that enables the alliances between Black and Indigenous peoples and also establishes a fecund ground of possibilities to emphasize the way in which cross-ethnic coalitions and representations reconsider imperial encounters previously ignored. The stories participate in the recent turn in Indigenous studies towards kinship and cross-ethnicity to map out the connected and shared itineraries of Black and Indigenous peoples and re-read Indigeneity in interaction. At the same time, the stories offer a fresh way to revisit Indigeneity in Canada through the collaborative lens and perspective of the Afroperipheral reality. In doing so, they contribute to calling attention to current cross-ethnic struggles for Indigenous rights and sovereignty in Canada that rely on kinship and ethnic alliances to keep on interrogating the shortcomings of the nation’s multiculturalism.


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