English and Foreign Languages

Please scroll down to see the English translation of the story. Since it was published in mainland China, the Chinese text appears first and is followed by the English translation.
Professor Du Lixia and I translated the following story in 2015 in Translators' Digest, a publication sponsored by the Shaanxi Translators Association. 
Talking Bull
Author: Hong Ke
Hong Ke (1962- ) was born in a village in the central plains of Shaanxi Province. After completing his university education in 1985, he first moved to Kuitun, Xinjiang and then to Baoji, Shaanxi. Currently, he is teaching at Shaanxi Normal University. The ten years Hong Ke spent in Xinjiang roaming across the Tianshan Mountains has inspired him to write The Tianshan Series, including novels, novelettes, and short stories. He has been granted a variety of literary awards.

This is an updated version of the translation that I edited with Professor 杜立霞 in the English department at Xi'an Jiaotong University in the spring of 2015. It was published in a book and is a short story by the Chinese writer 紅柯 from Shaanxi province. For further information about the journal where this translation was published, see the following link: https://apps.wanfangdata.com.cn/perios/qcode:yiy/2012/2/
and the Shaanxi Translators Association: http://www.chsta.org.cn/

This session's goal is to establish a critical ground from which to reassess the ballad in 20th and 21st century poetry. Though the modern and contemporary ballad has received far less critical attention than in earlier periods, recent scholarship—Evie Shockley's analysis of racialized boundary conditions in African American Poetry (Renegade Poetics 2011), Stephen Newman's study of disciplinary boundary conditions in the New Critics' approach to the ballad (Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon 2007), Daniel Tiffany's work on the ballad and kitsch (My Silver Planet 2014), and Mike Chasar's examination of what we might call the corporate boundary conditions of the roadside ballad (Everyday Reading 2012), among others—suggests the time is ripe for such a reassessment. This scholarship not only lays out a comparative groundwork for rethinking the conditions and uses of the ballad, but also gestures to a remarkably diverse body of modern and contemporary experimental poems through which what Newman calls the " radioactive dye " of balladry runs. At the center of this session is the question of why this is so: why, of all forms, has the ballad been revived in this period? To answer this question, the prospective panelists also seek to answer others: What is the cultural work that the ballad performs? What interpretive frameworks best address this work? How should the ballad form be understood in relation to contemporary and historical poetics? These are some of the questions this session aims to address and open up for discussion. Rachel Blau Duplessis will begin the session with the premise that form and is versions are central to the poetic function of the ballad, particularly as it expresses psycho-social formation and engages historically specific debates (or burdens). She will consider work by African-American writers Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and by modern and contemporary women writers such as Helen Adam, Judy Grahn, Susan Howe, LeeAnn Brown, to speak to the ways in which modern and contemporary ballads draw on formal and rhetorical traditions. Her analysis will include properties of repetition, the ballad's speaking subjectivities, and its characteristic numerical play; she will also trace a genealogy of critical arguments about the strikingly lurid content of many ballads. By way of conclusion, Blau Duplessis will revisit Coleridge's hybrid work in order to turn briefly to her own practice in her own poetic work, Draft 108: Ballad and Gloss (2012). For Blau Duplessis, the question of what the ballad is good for—the work it specifically performs—seems to be answered at specific historical moments when "boundary-ness" is acutely felt as an insoluble cultural condition. Scott Challener will turn to how the ballads of contemporary black writers respond to institutional racism as one such insoluble cultural condition. Drawing on work by Harryette Mullen, Kevin Young, Nathaniel Mackey, and Terrance Hayes, Challener shows how these writers press the ballad into the project of rearticulating a vigorous hermeneutics of collective identity in institutional spaces where identification and personhood become possible—or are taken away. Challener also finds in this work a concomitant, self-reflexive questioning of in-and out-school racialized identities. He argues that these ballads imagine the institutional conditions for poetry as spatially extensive (moving outward) and fugitive (as flight), and at the same time situate the practice of balladry as a reckoning with how real institutional constraints on the present shape future meaning. Their use of the ballad stresses a poetics of limit—not only the

This talk has two main take-aways: first, the contemporary ballad functions as a distinctive kind of "document/monument"-a term John Guillory (2016) recuperates from the art historian Erwin Panofsky to talk about the object of humanistic study-and second, many contemporary black writers engage the ballad discrepantly, in the slash or "break" between documentality and monumentality. Guillory summarizes Panofky's terms this way: By "monuments," Panofsky refers to all of those human artifacts, actions, or ideas that have urgent meaning for us in the present. By "document," he refers to all of those traces or records by means of which we recover monuments.

This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the last two decades. We will concentrate our attention on how contemporary art works represent and participate in the upheavals of the twenty-first century—9/11, global economic and ecological crisis, mass migration and mass deportation, political and social mobilization, state repression, neoliberalization, border conflict, and the transformation of mass media. We will examine specific literary and cultural objects—novels, poems, plays, shows, performance art, painting, music—and the historical antagonisms that animate them. We will investigate the cultural work these objects and their authors perform. How do they project, embrace, and constitute the conflicting meanings of Latinx life today? How do they contravene, suppress, or refuse certain fantasies of the "Latin"? We will address questions about race and racialization, gender and sexuality, and assimilation and transculturation, as well as about t...

This course is a study of the literature of the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1980s to the present. We begin with Gloria Anzaldúa's foundational texts, Borderlands / La Frontera, and her landmark feminist anthology, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color. We then consider the legacies and afterlives of this body of work in more recent literature, including Moraga's "Mexican Medea," The Hungry Woman, and Sara Uribe's Antígona González, as well as several novels--Carmen Boullosa's Texas: The Great Theft, Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World, and Valeria Luiselli's The Lost Children Archive. We'll also spend significant time with contemporary poets, including Daniel Borzutzky, Juan Felipe Herrera, Valerie Martínez, Wendy Trevino, and Javier Zamora. How does this literature understand the changing dynamics of what scholar John Alba Cutler calls "the new border," a zone def...

This essay examines the reception and reinvention of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ. It argues that Hughes reconstitutes “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in “Blues in Stereo”—the fifth section or “mood” of ASK YOUR MAMA—for the era of global decolonization. He does so by embracing jazz as the primary communicative context and mode of address. Hughes's effort illuminates the uneasy tensions that animate the book's differential address to black and white US readerships as well as to readers outside of the U.S. and the Anglophone world. The tensions internal to Hughes's final book-length poem owe their existence to contradictions that Hughes and his contemporaries wrestled with in the period; namely, that the articulation of the possibilities for black internationalist solidarity made them vulnerable to technological “capture” by the culture industry and the State Department. By reflecting on its status as a text mediated both by jazz and by te...

Here I am with an excellent job, writing rarely-(handling the rare books in a library. .. in (Harvard). .. in Boston. . .)-lonely as a kangaroo in an aquarium, and then you have to write about how on the other side of the country people are really alive, thinking significantly, getting drunk significantly, fucking significantly. You've upset my cold New England dream world.. .. In the words of Faust, you'll never read to me, "Weh! Weh! / Du hast sie zerstört, / Die schöne Welt". .. So, Mr John Allen Ryan, if you love me and have any friends that love me, start them searching for a place in San Francisco where I could be employed, anything from night-watchman in a museum to towel-boy in a Turkish bath.. .. This is a manifesto as well as a personal letter, broadcast its terms.

After an introduction to Sor Juana, the father Vieira and the historical context, the aim of the article is to make a formal analysis and show the ability of Sor Juana to deal with a theological text, comparing her skill to the Vieira sermon criticized by Sor Juana.

This paper describes and comments four critical factors to explain and analyze the literature: the author, the audience, the society and the language. Analyzing the function of each one, we propose a brief didactic model as a guide to initiate in the literary criticism.

Antonella Sannino, Il De mirabilibus mundi tra tradizione magica e filosofia naturale, Florencia, Sismel, Edizioni del Galluzzo, Micrologus' Library 41. 2011, xi, 179 pp. La profesora Sannino, investigadora de la Universidad de Nápoles «L'Orientale», presenta una edición crítica de uno de los dos principales tratados del Liber Aggregationis, tradicionalmente atribuido a Alberto Magno. El contenido de este Liber Aggregationis y, concretamente, el De mirabilibus mundi (D. M.), se encuadra en el género de literatura de secretos, tal y como lo define Montero Cartelle en «Tipología de la literatura médica latina», esto es, una literatura pseudocientífica y semiculta, que se sitúa a medio camino entre los recetarios, la literatura técnica y los textos herméticos y que tiene una gran difusión a partir del siglo Xii. La editorial Sismel ya publicó en 2007, en la misma colección (Micrologus 22), una completa edición crítica con valiosos comentarios y traducción francesa del otro tratado: Le Liber de virtutibus herbarum, lapidum et animalium. Un texte à succès attribué à Alert le Grand, elaborada por Isabelle Draelants, que sirve a Sannino como punto de partida y referencia principal para desarrollar, a partir de él, su análisis del D. M.

The aims of this paper are the analysis of 20 loanwords in the Latin language taken from Semitic languages –principally Arabic-, which are used in "De Mirabilibus Mundi", a book of secrets composed in 13th century attributed to Albertus Magnus, and to find the reasons why this vocabulary has been used, and what is its effect over the Medieval Latin.