Conference Presentations by Laura Torres-Zuniga
Papers by Laura Torres-Zuniga
Advances in early childhood and K-12 education, Feb 6, 2023
A mi madre y a mi padre. AGRADECIMIENTOS Durante la realización de este trabajo, he tenido la gra... more A mi madre y a mi padre. AGRADECIMIENTOS Durante la realización de este trabajo, he tenido la gran suerte de contar con el apoyo académico y humano de un numeroso grupo de personas que han aliviado la soledad de la labor investigadora. Por ello, me gustaría comenzar esta tesis expresando mi más sincero agradecimiento: Al Director de esta Tesis Doctoral, Dr. Mauricio D. Aguilera Linde, por su constante consejo, su disponibilidad absoluta, y su paciencia durante todos estos años;
Postcolonial Youth in Contemporary British Fiction, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004464261 British-Indian author Jamila Gavin’s reputation as “someone... more https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004464261 British-Indian author Jamila Gavin’s reputation as “someone who could write authentically about different cultural backgrounds” was quickly established after she produced her first short story collection, The Magic Orange Tree, in 1979 with the intention of reflecting the British multicultural society in which her own children were growing (Eccleshare). In January 2019, forty years later, her volume Blackberry Blue and Other Fairy Tales (2013) was selected by the children’s book magazine Books for Keeps as one of the to-date still few exceptions to the “shortage of quality literature featuring meaningful ethnic minority presence” for young readers (Serroukh 12). Although both are praised for their portrayal of BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) youths, Gavin’s collections belong to different short fiction genres and, as such, resort to different strategies to meaningfully introduce ethnicity and other identity issues. In The Magic Orange Tree, her seminal collection of domestic fantasies, Gavin’s protagonists experience dreamy escapades in which the magical component works as the vehicle for bringing together their British identity and the ethnic background of their migrant families. On the other hand, in Blackberry Blue Gavin reworks elements from tales of the European canon such as Hansel and Gretel or Cinderella, and makes use of the generic features of the fairy tale in order to create her own original fantasy adventures in which multiethnic protagonists undergo quests and rebirths that mark their transition from childhood to adulthood. Through a revision of these two collections in connection also with other texts by the author, this paper will analyse and compare narrative strategies such as the configuration of fictional chronotopes and liminality, or the politics of fantasy and gender, in order to elucidate how Gavin’s multicultural short stories contribute to outlining the diversity of cultures, traditions and social identities in which BAME British children and youths navigate.
De la filosofia digital a la sociedad del videojuego. Literatura, pensamiento y gamificacion en la era de las redes sociales, 2021
This chapter presents an experience in an English as a Foreign Language college course for studen... more This chapter presents an experience in an English as a Foreign Language college course for student teachers that had to be moved entirely online. After taking into account some characteristics of the instructional context, such as the students’ varied language levels, the weekly synchronous online classes, and the unfeasibility of altering course contents, the chosen methodology was the Synchronous Online Flipped Learning Approach, or SOFLA (Marshall, 2019; Marshall and Rodríguez Buitrago, 2017). The SOFLA framework is a recent proposal within TESOL that combines Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and flipped learning, adapting the blended format of the latter – out-of-class CALL for instructional content and in-class face-to-face practical activities – to a fully online delivery mode. SOFLA offers an eight-step work plan that first engages students with materials in the asynchronous pre-work stage and then divides each synchronous online lesson into seven sections: sign-in, whole group application, breakouts, share-out, preview and discovery, assignment instructions and reflection. This experience implementing SOFLA has revealed as one of its main advantages the facilitation of lesson planning thanks to its consistent work plan, whose detailed description in the literature has also provided the novice online instructor with a curated collection of digital tools for both the asynchronous and synchronous stages (Marshall and Kostka, 2020). Also, as a post-test survey has proved, the approach has been mostly positively received by students, who have appreciated the quality of the materials and the innovative methodology, despite a generally-spread discontent with the online format. Most importantly, student performance in the final test has shown a clear improvement, with a failure rate descending from 24,6% in the previous academic year to 14,9%. On the other hand, several challenges have also been encountered while using this course model. On the instructor’s part, SOFLA has demanded a huge amount of effort and time in the selection and creation of materials and activities, as well as a constant flexibility to reorganize time management in response to routines too time-consuming for large groups. Students, for their part, seem not to have perceived the model’s ability to support different levels of competence nor its emphasis on formative assessment. Full ebook available at: https://www.dykinson.com/libros/de-la-filosofia-digital-a-la-sociedad-del-videojuego-literatura-pensamiento-y-gamificacion-en-la-era-de-las-redes-sociales/9788413775616/
Into Another S Skin Selected Essays in Honour of Maria Luisa Danobeitia 2012 Isbn 978 84 338 5367 7 Pags 155 165, 2012
Every house has a drama in it", O. Henry is reported to have said once (qtd. in Current-Garcia 19... more Every house has a drama in it", O. Henry is reported to have said once (qtd. in Current-Garcia 1965:115). Although most of his stories deal with public life -shops, restaurants, parks -some like the renowned "The Gift of the Magi" and "A Service of Love" depict the life of young married couples in a sentimental light. On the other hand, the images of marriage in stories such as "The Pendulum" strike us as quite somber, whereas, objectively considered, the circumstances in "A Harlem Tragedy" and "Between Rounds" would in modern times be considered reportable cases of domestic violence. This paper intends to discover the narrative strategies that make us question whether O. Henry's idealistic descriptions of married life are in fact so, and allows us to perceive the voice of William S. Porter the husband beneath that of O. Henry the narrator.
Dossiers Feministes, 2013
La comida es un código semiótico que trasciende lo biológico y se integra en lo cultural -las nor... more La comida es un código semiótico que trasciende lo biológico y se integra en lo cultural -las normas, restricciones y tradiciones culinarias son indicativas de las relaciones establecidas entre los miembros de una comunidad. En este trabajo se revisan diferentes ejemplos de referencias alimenticias en las obras del dramaturgo estadounidense Tennessee Williams para descubrir cómo los personajes femeninos más indomables -especialmente en sus relatos-hacen uso de la comida como herramienta para ejercer autoridad frente a los hombres. Palabras clave: Tennessee Williams, relatos, mujeres, negación de comida.
Docencia e Investigación, 2020
The present article explores the teaching of English as a foreign language in all the Spanish uni... more The present article explores the teaching of English as a foreign language in all the Spanish university degrees in Early Childhood Education. It analyses the syllabi of the courses specialising in Teaching English as a Foreign Language during the 2018-2019 academic year. Firstly, it examines the distribution of ECTS credits among English language, English Language Teaching and Linguistics-Literature courses to determine the weight of each of these areas. Secondly, advocating an ESP approach given the specific needs of the target context, it identifies the needs of this training and analyses the approach of the English language courses to find out whether these needs are catered for. The results of the study suggest that some universities contemplate some of the elements of an ESP approach, although this study shows evidence that most universities do not appear to be fully aware of these needs, since not all of them offer English language courses, and most of these fail to adopt an ESP approach.
Memorias del Programa de Redes-I3CE de calidad, innovación e investigación en docencia universitaria, 2017
Esta Red abordó la posibilidad de implantar el modelo de clase invertida ("flipped classroom") en... more Esta Red abordó la posibilidad de implantar el modelo de clase invertida ("flipped classroom") en la asignatura de "Literatura norteamericana hasta fines del siglo XIX" del tercer curso del Grado en Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad de Alicante. Se trata de un modelo pedagógico alejado de la tradicional clase magistral, centrado en el desarrollo individual y autónomo del alumnado. El profesorado se encarga de preparar los materiales teóricos, generalmente presentados a través de medios audiovisuales como el vídeo o el vídeoblog (vlog), o escritos, como los artículos o la información dispo-nible en bibliografías y webs. Los objetivos de la Red eran mejorar la motivación del alumnado, incentivar su aprendizaje autónomo y cooperativo y mejorar sus capacidades críticas. La primera fase del trabajo consistió en la selección de dos aspectos del temario para los que el uso de la clase invertida resultara adecuado, en concreto "La literatura del periodo puritano" (Tema 1) y "La literatura de la Revolución" (Tema 3), así como en el estudio de recursos digitales relacionados con dichos temas. En segundo lugar, se procedió a diseñar una encuesta para el alumnado en la que se estudiaban sus necesidades y actitudes hacia los aprendizajes digitales y las metodologías alternativas. Los resultados obtenidos constituyen un excelente punto de partida para la elaboración de actividades a desarrollar en el aula en próximos cursos.
De Habitaciones Propias y Otros Espacios Conquistados, 2006
La figura femenina ocupa un lugar central en la producción teatral y narrativa de Tennessee Willi... more La figura femenina ocupa un lugar central en la producción teatral y narrativa de Tennessee Williams. Desde el estreno de The Glass Menagerie (1944) hasta Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980) los verdaderos protagonistas de los conflictos de Williams han sido siempre mujeres. Son ellas quienes encarnan la angustia del deseo reprimido (Rose), quienes desafían con su comportamiento anacrónico o subversivo las convenciones sociales de su tiempo (Amanda y Cora), quienes erigen un templo al amor carnal (Olga Kredova), y quienes a en ocasiones son incapaces de abandonar su papel de seres sumisos y hasta cierto punto asexuados (Laura). Sureñas en su mayoría, la tragedia de tales mujeres no es la suma de una serie de actos equivocados sino precisamente su incapacidad de actuar sin ser impelidas por la presencia masculina. En el presente trabajo analizaremos algunos de estos personajes a fin de entender la actitud ideológica de Williams con respecto a los valores dominantes de la América de su tiempo.
Entre la creación y el aula: Estudios en honor de Manuel Villar Raso, 2007
Philosopher Erich Fromm (1900-1980) achieved a humanist perception of man that was focused both o... more Philosopher Erich Fromm (1900-1980) achieved a humanist perception of man that was focused both on his natural conditioning and his social adaptation. He combined Freud’s psychoanalysis with Marxist historicism to encompass not only the ontogenetic study of man but also the whole phylogenetic evolution, developing the notion of social character. Also deeply concerned about society’s pressure on the individual was Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). His characters are usually described as misfits torn apart by the physical and spiritual repression of a materialistic society. In view of the similarities between Williams’s depiction of a “civilization in which deviants […] always perish” (Hassan 1973: 142) and Fromm’s analysis of contemporary Western society in terms of its pathology of normalcy (Fromm [1956] 1963), we will apply the latter’s diagnosis of the human situation to Williams’s short story “Something about him” (1946). We will see how the story’s protagonists, Miss Rose and Haskell, embody the polarity between regression and progression as possible answers for our existentialist human needs. Likewise, the Southern community that constitutes their social background exemplifies Fromm’s model of an insane society and indicates the underlying ideology in Williams’s narration.
Studies in honour of Neil McLaren: A man for all seasons, 2008
American playwright Tennessee Williams found in narrative a suitable field to explicitly try out ... more American playwright Tennessee Williams found in narrative a suitable field to explicitly try out those themes and symbols that he would afterward include in his plays. This analysis of some of his short stories will reveal the insistent interest Williams shows in depicting characters whose aim is to satisfy their most basic instincts: the nutritive and sexual needs (cf. Bender 2004). For Williams’s characters sex is an integral aspect of human life as natural and necessary as eating, and so the attitude they have towards food will echo the nature of their sexual conduct. Some feel a sudden disgust upon such inherent drives and reject both, or their faulty nutritive function signals an impotent sexual condition. Others negotiate the bestowal or demand of sexual favors in exchange for nourishment, and just a few ones attain the ecstasy of unfettered enjoyment of the pleasures of both the table and the bed. After studying this connection between hunger and sex, we will learn to be cautious when encountering in one of Williams’s works an act as seemingly innocent as sharing a meal.
Periphery and Centre III, 2008
The analysis of the construction of characters in a novel and its subsequent film adaptation usua... more The analysis of the construction of characters in a novel and its subsequent film adaptation usually ends up to the detriment of the cinematographic version with the complaint that characters in novels achieve a greater complexity and that we get to know them better from the privileged position provided by subjective narration. In contrast, film characters do not seem so multifaceted and they disclose themselves to us mostly by means of dialogue, which offers a limited picture of their consciousnesses. Besides, cinema’s high dependence on the visual code made Virginia Woolf – as early as 1926 – become aware of the simplification with which characters on screen risk being depicted: The eye says, ‘Here is Anna Karenina,’ and voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls comes before us. The brain exclaims, ‘That is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria!’ For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind – her charm, her passion, her despair, whereas all the emphasis is now laid upon her teeth, her pearls and her velvet. (Woolf, “The Cinema”, 350) However, we agree with more contemporary considerations like Thomas Leitch’s that the belief that “Novels create more complex characters than movies because they offer more immediate and complete access to characters’ psychological states” is in fact a fallacy (Leitch 158). It is true that the filmic recreation of a character leaves out some details that may be rendered more directly in the novelistic genre, but those “gaps”, as Leitch maintains, are the areas where the viewer’s intuition and active interpretation of the film come into play and where the pleasure of fictional narratives – either novels or films – lies. And despite the innovations of modernist writers like Woolf herself who fill in those gaps with a polyphonic stream of consciousness technique, that closeness to the characters’ interior life is not commonly achieved by traditional modes of narration, which still present a partial profile of some of the minor participants. In order to illustrate this fallacy about film adaptation, we can try to turn Virginia Woolf’s assumption upside down and analyze the adaptation of her novel Orlando (1928) into a film directed by the English film-maker Sally Potter (Orlando, 1992). In Woolf’s mock biography we accompany Orlando throughout four hundred years of British history (and one sex change) guided by a meddlesome biographer that constantly intrudes into his “simple duty” of stating “the facts as far as they are known, and so let the reader make of them what he may” (Woolf, Orlando 46). As we have mentioned, the analysis of characters is a difficult task due to their cumulative construction all through the narrative, so we will take advantage of the episodic nature of Orlando both as a novel and a film to focus our attention on one section and one character that only intervenes at that part of the plot. Shelmerdine, Orlando’s husband/lover, makes his one and only appearance in the second half of Chapter Five, which corresponds with the nineteenth century. We will firstly compare how novel and film use their resources to portray this character, and subsequently contend that the filmic recreation of Shelmerdine not only matches up to the novelistic one, but also accomplishes a greater richness thanks to the addition of intertextual references.
Formes brèves. Au croisement des pratiques et des savoirs, 2019
Helen Simpson is a rara avis in the British literary world: despite having been included in magaz... more Helen Simpson is a rara avis in the British literary world: despite having been included in magazine Granta’s list of the Best Young British Novelists in 1993, her first novel is still to come. She belongs with Canadian Alice Munro and Irishman William Trevor in the select club of short story-only writers, and through her short story collections she has demonstrated the potential of the short form for satisfying the most demanding literary aspirations. Short stories have allowed her to express the commonalities, and glories and miseries of contemporary urban life through texts so enriched with wittiness, humour and linguistic adroitness, that she has had no wish–or need–to confront the “big bully” of the novel for achieving her poignant portraits of contemporary women. This chapter explores how Simpson’s short stories have a multifaceted relationship with the concept of fragment or fragmentation: due to their generic character, because of their thematic content, and as a result of their narrative style.
The Southern Quarterly, 2018
Tennessee Williams may be one of the “representative southern writers [... who] have used the tro... more Tennessee Williams may be one of the “representative southern writers [... who] have used the trope of eating, with its corollaries of cooking and dining, to undermine conceptions of identity and value” (Evans 142), but the attention paid to the use and patterns of such tropes in his work, both dramatic and narrative, has been limited. There is evidence of the ubiquitous inclusion of culinary references in Williams’s theater in W. Kenneth Holditch’s comprehensive list of “Food and Drink in the Plays of Tennessee Williams,” which adopts a biographical point of view to emphasize how Williams’s own acquaintance with food, for example during his upbringing in Mississippi or his stays in New Orleans, is reflected in a choice of viands and beverages that endow his plays with a realistic Southern character and reproduce typically Southern associations between food, class, and ritual. In addition, another association that seems quite inevitable in Williams’s plays is the combination of food and drink motifs and sex, although Holditch hardly devotes two pages to it, focusing mainly on the double entendre of the references to Stanley Kowalski’s “meat” and the soda boy’s “cherry” in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Previous scholarship, however, has dealt extensively with these overlapping discourses of food and sex but restricting their attention almost exclusively to their most extreme realization: the cases of cannibalism present in the short story “Desire and the Black Masseur” (1946) and the play Suddenly Last Summer (1958) in relation to the representation of homosexual desire. Seminal studies such as those by Evans (1992), Gross (1995), Sofer (1995), Clum (1997), or Saddik (1998) have made manifest Williams’s deployment of tropes of orality and consumption to signify, in a quite controversial way, the dynamics of homosexual desire. Yet the appearance of alimentary references in Williams’s work does not simply realize a metaphorical transformation of people into sexually desirable or edible things, nor is it restricted to polemic texts about homosexual desire. This paper will look at how references to food, eating, and orality in Williams’s work display a transversal consistence and reveal a use of this alimentary discourse to reflect issues of gender and power. Although not exhaustively, it will consider different examples within the plays and the fiction that illustrate the repetition of a series of symbols and patterns that endow these texts with certain thematic coherence and can help to disentangle the implicit meaning of other food allusions.
Borders, Networks, Escape Lines: Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space, 2017
By means of their rupture with mimetic realism through expressionistic techniques and devices, so... more By means of their rupture with mimetic realism through expressionistic techniques and devices, some of Tennessee Williams’s plays are able to convey the interdependent relationship that exists between subjectivity and space. Before this experimentation on the stage, it was present in Williams’s prose writings, in particular those of his short stories rooted in the tradition of the Southern Gothic, where his characters’ crises of identity had been allegorized through the use of spatial tropes such as gothic houses or doors, the dynamics of the inside/outside boundary, and the presence of the ambiguous, liminal abject. An analysis of these elements in Williams’s short fiction will reveal how the spatial subtext problematizes the borders of subjectivity and in what terms Williams uses it in order to advocate for their/the latter’s flexibility.
Tennessee Williams in Europe: Intercultural Encounters, Transatlantic Exchanges, 2014
“Spain stinks” was Tennessee Williams’s entry in his Notebooks on 16 August 1954 as a wrap-up of ... more “Spain stinks” was Tennessee Williams’s entry in his Notebooks on 16 August 1954 as a wrap-up of his trip to this country. Yet that was but a fleeting feeling of dislike, because throughout the 1950s he would always find the time for a short trip to Spain while he was spending the summer in Italy. These trips to Spain were Williams’s strategy to take a break from the tedious familiarity that had begun to imbue his customary Roman vacations. They also provided an escape from his increasingly strained relationship with Frank Merlo, who would stay in Rome as Williams traveled alone and arranged for other friends such as Maria Britneva and Paul Bowles to meet him in Madrid or Barcelona. In this latter city Williams enjoyed pleasant days on the beach and meet new friends but also experienced certain encounters that would leave an indelible trace in his posterior work. This paper will look into the vestiges that Williams’s visits to Barcelona left in plays such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and Suddenly Last Summer (1957), as well as propose that Williams’s presence in Spain did also effect a change in the perception of his persona and his plays in this country.
Gender and Short Fiction: Women’s Tales in Contemporary Britain, 2018
This chapter explores why and in what terms Helen Simpson’s literary work has become inevitably a... more This chapter explores why and in what terms Helen Simpson’s literary work has become inevitably associated with two aspects: her determined adhesion to the short story genre and her bittersweet depiction of the experiences and tribulations of contemporary women. Both aspects seem to go hand in hand, in fact, because her short story production follows the diverse rhythms of women’s life: it shares its cyclical nature – with one compilation appearing punctually every five years – and it simultaneously traces a linear progression through the different (st)ages and dilemmas of those lives. Simpson’s protagonists have grown up from the girls and young childless women of Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990), into the mothers or mothers-to-be in volumes, such as Dear George (1995) and Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), which reveal an array of perspectives on the difficulties and rewards of motherhood whose effects some have labeled as “contraceptive” (McInerney 2001). Finally, Simpson’s women have entered the new millennium giving voice to preoccupations that belong to a more mature age but still tackle other taboo topics such as illness and menopause, as collections such as Constitutional (2005), In-Flight Entertainment (2010) and the recent Cockfosters (2015) show. In order to delineate these at time humorous yet also critical portrayals of feminine experience, Simpson has chosen exclusively the short story form, proving her resistance to the pressure of the “big bully” novel (Simpson 2006). Through a revision of the author’s own comments in interviews, an examination of the interspersed narratorial remarks in her texts, and the analysis of some of the features of her stories, this paper will attempt to show how this genre has allowed Simpson to subtly dismantle the ideological tenets that sustain our contemporary gender relations and why it has suited so well her purpose of “telling the truth” about women throughout all these years (Simpson, quoted in Crown 2015).
The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 2014
In October 1936 Tom Williams received a letter from the magazine American Prefaces suggesting som... more In October 1936 Tom Williams received a letter from the magazine American Prefaces suggesting some ideas for the revision of his short story “Ten Minute Stop.” As the young writer considered the changes “preposterous” (Williams, Notebooks 61), the story remained unrevised and unpublished until 1985, when it was included in the Collected Stories of the by-then-renowned Tennessee Williams. Unlike other stories such as “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” (1942) that have attracted critical attention owing to their autobiographical content and influence on Williams’s plays, “Ten Minute Stop” remains all but unexplored. In his 1988 study of Williams’s short fiction, Dennis Vannatta unenthusiastically deems this story “not entirely successful” in its treatment of the “theme of the downtrodden masses” and discards any possible autobiographical component (16). However, the subsequent publication of enlightening materials such as Williams’s letters and journals calls for a reconsideration of this story’s significance. “Stop” heralds many aspects of Williams’s recurrent symbolism while also exemplifying the autofiction techniques that the southern writer would employ throughout his career.
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Conference Presentations by Laura Torres-Zuniga
Papers by Laura Torres-Zuniga