Eros and Thanatos. Love across Civilizations

Alberto Castelli, Hainan University, China

'Eros and Thanatos' is about the deadly nature of love. It is remarkable that literary critics have paid so little attention to the combination between love and death in literature. This book seeks to address this significant scholarly lacuna by exploring key literary texts of the last two hundred years as exemplary of a consistent tendency toward love and death. Its emphasis on singular characters and close readings suggests the spectrum of an arbitrary dichotomy never fully resolved. The existential discussion triggered by each plot is so intense that the erotic and the merely sexual seem inappropriate. Indeed, each writer chose to reduce it to the setting and background of a story that takes place elsewhere. With this in mind, the author intends to reflect love’s paradoxical nature. If love is triggered by beauty, beauty can be immoral and love must die to preserve the illusion of beauty.

On Second Language Learner Acquisition of English Collocations

James Martin Rogers, Meijo University, Japan

Collocations are words that commonly co-occur, such as ‘jury’ and ‘verdict.’ Collocational fluency is an essential aspect of second language fluency. Learning a language via collocations improves upon the efficacy of language acquisition because it essentially kills three birds with one stone: students learn vocabulary, collocations, and also subconsciously absorb the grammar patterns of language through mastery of these chunks of language. This is, in fact, similar to the way native speakers learn language and an efficient way to become fluent. This book will detail efforts to create and then apply a methodology to develop a large-scale high-frequency collocation list and custom-tailored collocation resources for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean learners to study directly and for practitioners to utilize as reference materials to create additional resources. Presented in this book is a novel approach taken to fill a major gap in the research and to create large-scale resources that were previously unavailable. Therefore, this book should be considered a valuable contribution to research that aims to help second language learners more effectively achieve fluency in English as a second language.

Women’s Representations from Radical Naturalism to the New Woman Response

A Transatlantic Perspective of European, Latin American, and American Narratives

José F. Rojas-Viana, Louisiana State University

In this book, Rojas explores comparatively the representations of deviant and criminal women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Transatlantic perspectives in literary productions of the first-wave feminist writers of the New Woman movement and writers of Radical Naturalism. This work addresses how the writers' sex is relevant in depictions of social constructions of female characters and how they established a dialogue based on gender through the themes of 'femme fatale', marginal spaces, eugenics, and social Darwinism in the novels of Emilia Pardo Bazán's 'La piedra angular' (1891), 'La gota de sangre' (1911), and "Tio Terrones" (1920); Refugio Barragán de Toscano's 'La hija del bandido o los subterráneos del nevado' (1887); Federico Gamboa's 'Santa' (1903); Kate Chopin's (Katherine O'Flaherty) 'The Awakening' (1899); Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' (1891); and 'Grand's Ideala' (1888). There is a good volume of research on different aspects of these novels, but this book addresses issues of the social constructions of deviant and criminal women from an interdisciplinary and metatheoretical perspective often missed from established criticism. This work is not only reachable for the non-expertise reader, graduate, or undergraduate students but also it is sufficiently elaborated for the expert reader in different fields. It provides a detailed analysis of the social, historical, philosophical, and scientific background that shows how the treatment of the female characters converges and diverges from male and female writers of the New Woman and Radical Naturalism points of view. It can be a good contribution for references or classes in Hispanic studies, gender studies, women's studies, sexuality studies, nineteenth-century studies, and in other fields.

Transfiction: Characters in Search of Translation Studies

Edited by Marko Miletich, SUNY Buffalo State University

This book explores the uses of translation, translators, and interpreters in fiction as a gateway to introduce issues related to Translation Studies. The volume follows recent scholarship on Transfiction, a term used to describe the portrayal of translation (both a topic and a motif), as well as translators and interpreters in fiction and film. It expands on the research by Kalus Kaindl, Karleheinz Splitzl, Michael Cronin, and Rosemary Arrojo, among others. Although the volume reflects the preoccupation with translator visibility, it concentrates on the importance of power struggles within the translatorial task. The volume could be an invaluable tool to be used for pedagogical purposes to discuss theoretical aspects within Translation and Interpreting Studies.

Monsters in the Classroom: Noam Chomsky, Human Nature, and Education

Philip G. Hill

In this lucid, original, and comprehensive work, the articulated approaches to pedagogy are based on specific conceptions of human nature. Drawing on a vast range of Chomsky’s prodigious output in linguistics, politics, biology, cognitive science, and education, Hill highlights two fundamental elements of Chomsky’s understanding of human nature and uses these elements as the foundation of a highly creative approach to pedagogy. The originality of the work is apparent in the way the author identifies how key ideas in Chomsky’s linguistics and political discourse are rooted in a liberatory approach to education. The value of the work lies in its practical nature. Even though it makes reference to ideas in various academic disciplines, the work’s overall value is reflected in the way ideas relate to Hill’s personal teaching experiences and how they apply in a concrete classroom setting. The reader is offered a practical and highly creative way to apply Chomsky’s understanding of human nature in a classroom setting.