Scholarly Works, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures

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    Regional Variation in Mood Use in Spanish: A Comparison Among Three Spanish-Speaking Regions
    Tort-Ranson, Silvia; Gudmestad, Aarnes (MDPI, 2026-03-20)
    The current investigation, couched within variationist sociolinguistics, has the purpose of advancing knowledge of regional variation in mood use (the subjunctive and indicative contrast) in Spanish. Prior cross-dialectal research has reported that mood use in Spanish varies geographically. To contribute to the understanding of mood variation in Spanish, this study explored a range of sociolinguistic independent variables across three Spanish-speaking regions. The participant pool (N = 107) consisted of Spanish speakers residing in three metropolitan areas (Rosario, Argentina; Barcelona, Spain; and Seville, Spain). The analysis substantiated evidence of geographical variation in the frequency of use of verbal moods, the governors (e.g., preferir que ‘to prefer that’) that exhibited categorical and variable use, and the influence of time reference on mood use. These results provide additional insights into the presence of regional variation in mood use and reinforce the value of cross-dialectal analyses with the same type of data and mood-use contexts.
  • Saying NO! to Rape: Narratives of Trauma, Healing and Resistance in 19th- and 21st-century France
    Johnson, Sharon P. (2025-07)
    I am the first scholar to analyze a new corpus of 115 broad sheets and pamphlets on rape from the 19th c. Not well known, they were called canards sanglants, sensationalized news stories not published in any daily or weekly paper. Community trauma recurs as a theme because mostly girls in small towns were murdered and sexually violated. Two accounts will be analyzed. Following Judith Herman’s lead, I suggest a novel premise: Perhaps canards sanglants performed an important healing function by memorializing in print the shock and mourning of a community. The fact rapes were not silenced and justice was served, I contend, is how the news source said NO! to rape. In the 21st c., Gisèle Pélicot and Vanessa Springora shape their own traumatic narratives of rape and atteinte sexuelle sur mineur. Both cases involve consent. Can their activism and resistance to silence bring healing? Also discussed are France’s mixed reception to each case and the judicial and social ramifications of both.
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    Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921-1938 [Book review]
    Minkova, Yuliya (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
    A book review of: Cassio de Oliveira. Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921-1938. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023.
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    Lived Islam in Films: Faith-Based Resilient Responses of Syrian Refugees
    Al-Ahmad, Jumana S. (University of Nebraska Consortium of Libraries, 2025-10)
    This article provides educators in fields such as Middle Eastern studies, refugee studies, cultural and Islamic studies with a framework from documentaries to challenge stereotypes about Muslim refugees and migrants. Using the framework of lived Islam, the article explores how Syrian Muslim migrants, as seen in documentaries, draw on their faith to build resilience that enables them to continue striving for better lives. Resilience is defined as the ability to overcome challenges and catastrophes, envision solutions, and lead a purposeful life. This article conceptualizes resilience not only as a personal trait but also as a collective tool for survival and empowerment. Drawing on the three documentaries as primary sources: We Walk Together (2015), Meet the Syrians (2018), and Dalya’s Other Country (2017) the study analyzes how lived religion provides coping strategies that are relevant to contemporary crises such as epidemics, natural disasters, and war. The cultural insights gained through analyzing films from a strength-based model contribute to understanding, empathy, and humane thinking and emphasize agency and resilience. The article makes two significant contributions. First, it enriches the underexplored field of lived religion among Muslims, particularly in Western countries, by demonstrating how religion is embodied beyond places of worship and serves as a vital aspect of private life. Second, it offers a constructive teaching approach that uses films to highlight Muslim lived experiences in the diaspora while countering Islamophobia.
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    The interpretation of verbal moods in Spanish: A close replication of Kanwit and Geeslin (2014)
    Gudmestad, Aarnes; Edmonds, Amanda; Henderson, Carlos; Lindqvist, Christina (Cambridge University Press, 2024-12-01)
    This study is a close replication of Kanwit and Geeslin (2014), a variationist investigation of the interpretation of verbal moods in adverbial clauses in Spanish. Whereas the first language (L1) of the second-language participants in the initial study was English, we explore whether Kanwit and Geeslin's results extend to other L1 populations-Swedish and French learners of Spanish. Participants in the replication study completed the same interpretation task and grammar test as those in the initial study. Results showed, for example, that multiple factors influenced their variable interpretation of verbal moods, there was evidence of change between course levels, and there were certain differences in interpretation between the French and Swedish groups. This study contributes to knowledge about the interpretation of a variable structure by enhancing the confirmatory power of some of the initial study's findings, while also suggesting that the learners' L1 leads to diverging findings.
  • Introduction au "Conte de l'or et du silence" de Gustave Kahn
    Shryock, Richard L.; Kunkel, Samuel (Du Lérot, 2025)
  • "Le Conte de l'or et du silence" de Gustave Kahn
    Shryock, Richard L.; Kunkel, Samuel (Du Lérot, 2025)
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    Reconsidering the Social in Language Learning: A State of the Science and an Agenda for Future Research in Variationist SLA
    Gudmestad, Aarnes; Kanwit, Matthew (MDPI, 2025-03-28)
    The current paper offers a critical reflection on the role of the social dimension of the second language (L2) development of sociolinguistic competence. We center our discussion of L2 sociolinguistic competence on variationist approaches to second language acquisition (SLA) and the study of variable structures. We first introduce the framework of variationist SLA and offer a brief overview of some of the social, and more broadly extralinguistic, factors that have been investigated in this line of inquiry. We then discuss the three waves of variationist sociolinguistics and various social factors that have been examined in other socially oriented approaches to SLA. By reflecting on these bodies of research, our goal is to identify how the insights from this work (i.e., research couched in the second and third waves of variationist sociolinguistics and in other socially oriented approaches to SLA) could be extended to the study of L2 sociolinguistic competence. We argue that greater attention to the social nature of language in variationist SLA is needed in order to more fully understand the L2 development of variable structures.
  • Le Roman mythique et lyrique : Le Conte de l’or et du silence de Gustave Kahn
    Shryock, Richard L.; Kunkel, Samuel (Presses Universitaires de Nanterre)
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    Critical Pedagogy and Teaching Russian Folklore
    Stauffer, Rachel (The University of Kansas, 2024-11-20)
    This article describes rationales and methods for critical pedagogical approaches to teaching Russian folklore. Critical pedagogy and folklore are interrelated in their grassroots orientations, which critically counternarrate the top-down dominant and high cultural themes that are commonly taught in humanities survey courses on Russian literature and culture in postsecondary institutions. This article argues that critical approaches have the potential to more effectively affirm culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse identities for liberation, rather than indoctrination. The article discusses decolonization, excavating the field’s past to interrogate historical and ideological influences on the study of Russia and the Soviet Union in the United States. For practical application, the article provides examples of teaching commonly taught topics in Russian folklore classes in the United States. The author describes methods for teaching Russian laments [prichitanija], epics [byliny], and for teaching spiritual, verbal, and material culture pertaining to apiculture in Russian folklore, or “bee”lief.
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    The Contrafatto Affair: Law, Judicial Risk, and Consent
    Johnson, Sharon P. (Sage, 2024-04-11)
    In Paris, France on October 15, 1827, 28-year old Sicilian priest Joseph Contrafatto was sentenced for raping 5-year old Hortense Le Bon. This article frames the rhetorical strategies of the prosecution and defense using Robert Cover’s notion of judicial innovation, developed in his Justice Accused. Both sides based their arguments on articles 331 and 332 of the Criminal code. The Contrafatto Affair was an extraordinary case for rape legislation; it was among the first if not the first trial in France when a perpetrator of attentat à la pudeur avec violence (violent, indecent assault), was sentenced and found guilty when the prosecution used the argument of la violence morale (a type of coercion or abuse of an individual’s trust or naivety) when the victim suffered no physical signs of violence. Later, la violence morale and the requirement of consent became constitutive parts of the rape statutes by 1853 (for children) and 1857 (for adults), which this article develops through contextualizing law, rhetoric, and interpretation. The background of the trial provides an overview of certain procedures and protocols of 19th-century France. An examination of the jurisprudence related to attentat à la pudeur sans violence (non-violent, indecent assault, art. 331), attentat à la pudeur avec violence and la violence morale will highlight how forward-looking and risky the prosecution’s arguments were in his interpretation of article 332.
  • Academy of Teaching Excellence CTE/Wine/Alumni Award dossier workshop
    Johnson, Sharon P. (2021-10-26)
    Workshop that presents best practices for the candidate and preparer of the dossier
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    Lettres de Juan Gris à Maurice Raynal
    Shryock, Richard L. (2023-12-27)
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    Jules Laforgue à Gustave Kahn en passant par Charles Henry
    Shryock, Richard L. (2023-11-29)
  • Louise Michel and "Le Symbole"
    Shryock, Richard L. (2022-11-03)
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    A Failure of Vision: Diachronic Failure and the Rhetoric of Rupture in the Taiheiki
    Sather, Jeremy A. (University Library System, University of Pittsburgh, 2022-04)
    Japan reached an epistemological crossroad during the fourteenth century. The Wars of the Northern and Southern Courts (1336-1392) were fought between two power enters with vastly different visions for the future: The Southern Court aimed to restore the sacerdotal monarchy of the past and its epistemic framework, what this article calls the ōbō-buppō episteme; the Ashikaga-led Northern Court, conversely, represented a shift toward the secular and the sublimation of royal authority heralding the advent of a new episteme, or the jitsuri episteme. The war chronicle Taiheiki is in large part responsible for our understanding of the conflict far beyond its official end in 1392. This paper argues that Taiheiki is unique among war chronicles in concluding without the restoration of royal authority or the ōbō-buppō episteme, and this failure made it a signifier of epistemic change as well as a source of inspiration for samurai of subsequent generations who wished to affect such change themselves.
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    Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and Principle in Japan's Medieval Mirror Genre [Book review]
    Sather, Jeremy A. (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022)
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    Moving Beyond the Native-Speaker Bias in the Analysis of Variable Gender Marking
    Gudmestad, Aarnes; Edmonds, Amanda; Metzger, Thomas (2021-08-09)
    In the current study, we respond to calls for reform in second language acquisition that center on the field's preoccupation with native-speaker and prescriptive targets as a benchmark for additional-language learning. In order to address these concerns, we examine the use and development of grammatical gender marking in additional-language Spanish in a prescriptive-independent manner. Specifically, we depart from previous analyses that have centered on accuracy and targetlikeness and we shift the object of analysis to the linguistic forms (i.e., feminine and masculine modifiers) that additional-language participants use. We adopt a variationist approach to explain how participants vary their use of modifier gender and how this use changes longitudinally. We argue that such an approach to studying additional languages allows us to offer new insights about the acquisition of grammatical gender marking in additional-language Spanish. We end by critically reflecting on some of the challenges that we encountered in trying to integrate this paradigm shift into the examination of a well-studied grammatical structure.