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Rafał Szczerbakiewicz’s chapter looks at the intriguing aspects of the subtle utopianism of the main trends in classic Hollywood cinema. During the thirties, forties and fifties of the twentieth-century and at the peak of liberal modernity there was an omnipresent yet transparent capitalist paradigm. This was a time in cinema where the theme of utopia was obscure. Utopia, in cinema, was more a symptom of a frame of mind and the background to a social state of awarenesss. Within the supportive or critical portrayals of capitalism, the utopian/dystopian elements were notable signs as to the filmmaker’s attitude. Amongst films, the utopian impulse is merely an understatement. However, there is one film with an overt utopian stance. This film is based on the novel, "Fountainhead" (1949) by King Vidor. It was tranformed into a memorable screen adaptation by the enthusiast and theorist, Ayn Rand. In this surprising constructionist vision, the socio-architectural utopia is explicitly portrayed giving the utopian impulse the direction towards what would, years later, come to be known as individualistic neoliberalism.
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Monika Rawska’s chapter focuses on two modern movies "Equilibrium" (dir. Kurt Wimmer, USA 2002) and "Inception" (dir. Christopher Nolan, USA—Great Britain 2010) with an analysis of the city spaces depicted in these films. Progress is the basis of the analysis. Progress is the impulse pervasive in utopias and it is an important motivator for human actions presently perceived as negative—imperialism, colonialism, racism. Margaret Mead’s notion that Utopia should be seen as a historical category while revealing an essential ambivalence is well summarized in her work, “One man’s dream is another man’s nightmare”. This is also represented in select films depicting a new society with a visual representation of order. For example, in Libria and architect’s city both of which were created with a positive and beneficial premise, though over time they became a burden for the characters. Change in perception of reality is one of the significant elements in dystopian narratives, that are also present in film adaptations, in what Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim calls a „utopiacrime”. Libria is depicted as the only city in the world in the film, "Equilibrium". Libria is a dystopian cityfortress contrasted with the surrounding Nether and an appropriated enclave space of Offenders. It functions as a simulacrum of the past at a time before the war. The film vision of the future is an intertextual collage of conventional representations of the totalitarian organization of both space and society. Dream city is the creation of an architect couple in the film, "Inception". It is a very different space, imagined and fictional and it perfectly captures the impossibility of utopia as revealed by its very name that means non-space. Reality, which the couple created for themselves, demonstrates an interesting tension between the architectural utopia and the solitary eutopia as well as a conflict of planner vs. wanderer (as described by Michel de Certeau). In both movies the city space becomes a threat in spite of its projected function as a safe and/or familiar space. In "Equilibrium", it imposes on and disciplines its inhabitants as tools of the state. In Inception, the city is the accumulation of the protagonists’ entire world and it turns unto its own ruin, a memory maze swallowed by the sea.
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Maciej Gaździcki’s chapter deconstructs "RoboCop"—the eponymous knightly hero of Paul Verhoeven’s original film and subsequent installments in the franchise—including the world he exists in, through a medievalist perspective. Gaździcki discerns between Robocop’s role as either a futuristic knight or merely caricaturesque animated armour. Relevant and explicit similarities are made and analyzed between Verhoeven’s crime-fighting hero and the characters from Chansons de Geste, Arthurian legends, and hagiographic stories (otherwise known as loricati). The author also includes connections to works based on medieval chivalric epics. Concluding, Gaździcki attempts at finding parallels between the latest incarnation of Robocop and the Middle Ages.
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In this chapter, Krzysztof Uniłowski analyzes the function of historical allusions in Sapkowski’s pentateuch on the adventures of Geralt the Witcher and his companions. The saga is said here to allude to the Second World War, but also to the Germanic invasion of Britain in the fifth and sixth century, including the colonization of North America by Europeans. In addition, the series is viewed as featuring clear literary references to the historical novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz, Arthurian tradition, or texts based on Indian Wars. All these allusions defy Sapkowski’s allotopia and emphasize— just like the creative irony of Romanticism—the dependence of allotopian world on the writer’s creativity. At the same time, history functions like a prop room with plenty of motives, threads, and figures. From this perspective, fantasy literature confirms Fredric Jameson’s thesis that western societies have lost a sense of history. Nevertheless, in the light of peripheral character of the Polish culture, it can also mean freeing from the burden of history, or, to speak more precisely, from phantasmal imaginations. As an author, Sapkowski is conscious that we have lost the historical experience from our perceptive horizon as the most traumatogenic events of the twentieth century did not teach us anything. He further points out that what has been repressed, may always return. And it returns even in the frames of fantastic convention.
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The present study focuses on some usage peculiarities of Spanish causative constructions «hacers(se) + Inf.», «dejar(se) + Inf.» in fiction texts translated into Spanish VS original ones. Though causative constructions do exist in many languages, they may show a wide number of asymmetric features (such as pronominal forms, present in Romanic languages, absent in English, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, etc.). As there are frequently no direct equivalents in the original text for the causative constructions, more subjective factors can influence the translator’s decision whether to use them or not. Particularly, it turned out that translators tend to exaggerate a «favorite» construction or to underuse some stylistic devices. A million-tokens corpus demonstrates it to be a strong tendency in translated fiction text, unlike in the original ones.
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The publication by Tomas Navarro Tomas of two fundamental books pertaning to Spanish phonetics („Manual de pronunciación española” (1918) y „Manual de entonación española” (1944) gave rise to the appearance of more publications dealing with the description and functioning of the Spanish phonetic and phonological systems. All the subsequent publications – which were based on Tomas Navarro Tomas’ books – attempted to develop, define more precisely and verify the theses formulated by the Father of Spanish phonetics. The author of this article presents a new important book which is indubitably an exceptional publication and constitutes a breakthrough in Spanish linguistics. His remarks are confined to the Spanish segmental system and phonetic change. The book came into being as the result of a close cooperation between 22 academies of the Spanish language („Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Fonética y fonologia”, vol. 3, 2011).
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The aim of this article is to present the research apparatus of the cultural linguistics. I understand the cultural linguistics as a multidimensional research system which, depending of the phenomenon under investigation uses various tools. Hence, the research apparatus of cultural linguistics covers both cognitive and pragmatic tools and it can also use the instruments typical for ethnolinguistics. However the most important tool serving in a sense as an authorization of later cognitive and pragmatic studies is an analysis by means of notional decomposition. When a subject of research is language changes created mainly as a result of an encounter of two different visions of the world, a decomposition of notional structure of the expressions into basic elements seems the most reasonable and even a necessary starting point.
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Assuming all teaching activity as a performative act with ethical implications, this article focuses on how traditional points of view about language still appear in handbooks, despite new anthropological as well as semiological theories. Regarding teaching of Spanish as a foreign language, the paper analyses several contemporaries textbooks, in order to conclude that most of them not only show structuralist views, but also a strong link between culture and language, with a biased Hispanocentrism (at least in books printed in Spain). Several of these out-of-date teaching discourses, however, still find their place in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, though some of its key points are communicative competence and the active protagonism of students.
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The aim is to promote the development of the students’ language abilities in multigrade schools, using the constructivist perspective of the modularity or mold-ability of the mind. This is used in order to promote the development of the languages studied. The methodology practice corresponds to the descriptive research. The study group corresponds to 24 multigrade primary students from the school “Manzanar” in Lumaco-Chile. Interviews with teachers, questionnaires in three languages, and classroom observation were used. The results of this first stage allowed the identification of language proficiency of the students in the three languages studied, and the teaching style of the teachers. Mapudungun had low scores on the comprehension test, while Spanish and English had acceptable levels. Although the communicative approach to the language was similar in the three teachers’ practices, it was observed that there were significant differences in the methodology implemented in the three languages.
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The purpose of this article is to present different activities which will aid Polish students who learn Spanish as well as for their teachers who will obtain an efficient tool to test the language abilities of their students. Furthermore, the activities will demonstrate cultural differences based on the student’s ethnographic attitude. All these activities which we offer are focused on the intercultural competence which should be an integral part of the educational process. In addition, the authors of the proposals give consideration to the notion of culture according to Geert Hofstede and his model of dimensions, which they analyse and describe comparing Spanish and Polish languages.
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There are many definitions that recognized authors have elaborated looking for the concept of literary education; nevertheless, the definition of M. Bierwisch will be the model to base this investigation: on the one hand, the literary education includes, not only the aptitude to understand but also, producing texts; on the other hand, the acquisition of the literary education is determined by sociological, historical and aesthetic factors. In this work, we try to think how the way of life and the social and technological changes are increasing the classic concept of reading based on the written text, incorporating the reading competence into a wide space of possibilities that take as suport the image and the mass media – paintings, photography, publicity, video-clips, music. In consequence, if we try to bring the universal texts near to teenagers, we must provide opportunities of learning in those the real communicative experiences must be integrated to educational processes- learning near to the experience of the own reader, his reading competence and his cultural experience.
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The experts have been interested in the process of the second language acquisition for many years. However, the significant changes appeared in the second decade of the twentieth century. The establishment of the Council of Europe, an ogranization which associates 47 countries, provided new common standards of the evaluation of the language proficiency. The most important aim of the work of the Council of Europe was to promote the multilingualism and multiculturalism to create between the European citizens understanding and openness for other cultures. What is more, common norms facilitated people the mobility because the certificates they were receiving started beeing recognisable in ither countries. The creation of the CEFR and European Language Portfolio was the beginning of the new way of understanding the process of the second language acquisition which, nowadays, has to be transparent for students. Furthermore, students have become more conscious and responsible for their own learning. The possibility of monitoring their learning process gives them opportunity to work out their stategies and patterns of work. Therefore, they are not just an audience but they take an active part in the second languages acquisition.
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The aim of this paper is to present the didactic potential of Cognitive Linguistic, and in particular of Cognitive Theory of Metaphor in teaching Spanish as a foreign language. The present article, whose subject matter are idiomatic expressions which belong to the core of phraseology and can be viewed as prototypical phraseological units, not only attempts to demonstrate the reasons why this theoretical framework is extremely beneficial in the foreign language classroom but also focuses on role that the iconic dimension of idioms (mental image) and its metaphorical value (conceptual metaphors) have in the teaching and learning process. In other words, particular attention will be paid to research into the application of the theoretical postulates of Cognitive Linguistics to didactics of phraseology.
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Governed prepositions are defined as prepositions in the relation of strong government with another lexical unit in a syntactic phrase, for example, a verb (believe in, rely on) (Rauh 1993; Hoffmann 2007; Gaszewski 2012). The relation of strong government makes prepositions obligatory complements of verbs and entails a semantic difference between verb senses with or without a preposition (Eng. believe someone – believe in someone; Cro. držati (što u ruci) ‘hold (something in hand)’ – držati do ‘appreciate; lit. hold to’; Fr. porter ‘put, wear’ – porter sur ‘to focus on’). It also entails a change in the meaning of a preposition and results in its extension from the basic spatial meaning, as in be in the box – believe in someone. It is therefore the aim of this study to examine the properties of governed prepositions in three structurally different languages – Croatian, English, and French.
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