Other Contact Zones

Jason Ensor, Iva Polak and Peter Van Der Merwe (eds). Other Contact Zones, NT21C 7, Australia Research Institute, Curtin University of Technology, Perth: Network Books, 2007.

In the construction and acknowledgment of responsibility towards the Other, this edition of New Talents challenges the contradiction of a lucky country, Australia, sustained by processes of forgetting and, more critically, the processes of silencing. Beginning with Levinasian ethics applied to a scenario where the immediate physical presence of another human asks us to account for our enjoyment of life, Other Contact Zones explores mechanisms of responsibility and avoidance, including: the politics of gender representation, signs of sexual deviances written on the convict body, the invention of the white woman as an object of fantasy in captivity narratives of early colonial Australia, the creation of multicultural senses of belonging, and the complexities of identity construction in the face of mechanisms of silence and misrecognition.

Teaching Modern Languages to Young Learners

Marianne Nikolov, Jelena Mihaljević Djigunović, Gun Lundberg, Tanya Flanagan, and Marina Matheoudaki (eds). Teaching Modern Languages to Young Learners . Graz: ECML, 2007.

This book is targeted at modern languages teachers of primary school children and focuses on curricula and syllabi, as well as on teaching materials and methodology. The teaching of modern languages to young learners is widespread practice in Europe and beyond today. Although consensus has been achieved on the advantages, on the basic principles of teaching modern languages at an early age, and on the types of materials, tasks and assessment practices recommended, little attempt has been made to explore how effectively these findings are integrated into teacher training programmes and implemented in actual classroom practice.

The aim of this volume is therefore to provide insights into good practice, innovation and quality research selected by the authors from recent language pedagogy. The ten papers look into issues related to both pre- and in-service teacher education, innovative curriculum and syllabus design in tertiary education and lower primary schools, and how new ideas can be implemented at national and classroom levels.
The chapters in this volume are the edited versions of ten selected papers presented at the TeMoLaYoLe conference “Research into Teaching Modern Languages to Young Learners”, held in Pécs, Hungary, in February 2007, organised jointly by the European Centre for Modern Languages of the Council of Europe and the University of Pécs. The first six papers focus on teacher education curricula and teacher development in pre-service and in-service programmes, whereas the last four papers examine curricula, teaching materials and projects in primary schools.

Syntax workbook for university students of English

Snježana Veselica-Majhut, Ivana Bašić i Marina Zubak. Syntax Workbook for University Students of English, Sveučilišni Priručnik. Zagreb: FF press, 2007.

Syntax workbook for university students of English
is designed for university students of English, as core or additional material for the courses in syntax. Divided into nine sections, the workbook covers the following topics: sentences and clauses, the simple and complex sentence, coordination and subordination, syntactic functions of subordinate clauses and postmodification in the noun phrase. The material used in the workbook has been selected from mainstream newspapers and magazines as well as contemporary literary texts and tailored to cover the points that native speakers of Croatian find most problematic.

From Shadow to Presence

Jelena Šesnić. From Shadow to Presence: Representations of Ethnicity in Contemporary American Literature. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2007.

This volume departs from a more static concept of identity politics to engage the varied and entangled processes of ethnic/racial, national, and gender identifications in a range of contemporary US ethnic texts (from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s). Recognizing the growing salience of variously named ethnic, multicultural, and minority literatures as they are produced and circulated in the USA and worldwide nowadays, this work charts four broadly defined models of approaching such texts: cultural nationalism, ethnic feminism, borderlands and contact zones, and finally, the diasporic model. Drawing extensively on psychoanalytic theory, feminist/gender studies, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and its revision of ethnography, the book offers a fresh, engaged, theoretically, and analytically well-rehearsed overview of the distinctive and determining features of a rapidly expanding domain of contemporary US literary production, namely, ethnic literatures. Of potential interest to scholars of American/US literature, but also minority and postcolonial literatures, and to students of American literature, the book attempts an interethnic comparative approach to well- and lesser-known texts. Among the authors represented are Shawn Wong, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sherman Alexie, Denise Chávez, Rolando Hinojosa, Roberto Fernández and Edwidge Danticat.

Siting America/Sighting Modernity

Jelena Šesnić (ed). Siting America/Sighting Modernity: Essays in Honor of Sonja Bašić. Zagreb: FF Press, 2010.

The collection of essays by an array of international and Croatian contributors concerns itself with a set of topics such as different theoretical and methodological aspects of American studies, the institutionalization of American studies in Croatia, while, in its last section, it focuses on certain aspects of modernism (mainly in the works of James Joyce) and narratology.