Heather Willis Allen, Toward a Design Approach to Foreign Language Writing Instruction
Reconceptualization of the notion of literacy and its relevance to foreign language instruction in the U.S. has gained ground over the past two decades as many educators have embraced the idea that curricula should move beyond communicative approaches toward the goal of preparing students to be effective producers and consumers of texts. However, collegiate foreign language programs and, in particular, writing instructional practices have been slow to align with this literacy turn. This presentation argues for an integrated Design approach to foreign language writing instruction and elaborates key conceptual underpinnings of this approach. The presentation concludes with pedagogical considerations for implementation of a Design approach in collegiate foreign language programs.
Ullrich Langer, How to Admonish a King
We will look at a successful remonstrance to Louis XIII, by a representative of his “presidial judges”: what do you need to say? how do you need to say it? Understanding the cohesion of a society involves understanding its rhetorical conventions, perhaps more so than focusing on what resists or transgresses them.
Eric Wistrom, The Labyrinth of National (In)Difference in Rachid Boudjedra’s Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée
In a 1975 interview following the publication of Topographie, Rachid Boudjedra described the underground labyrinth of the Parisian Metro as a metonymic symbol for the French migrant condition—a metaphysical space representing the passage of migrancy and social integration before the threshold of national (in)difference. Socially coded in the wake of post-WWII immigration, the politics of decolonization and the 1973 ratonnades in Grasse and PACA, the novel addresses not only the physical spatiality of transnational movement, but also the ambiguous state of errancy “brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality-historicality-sociality (Soja 1996, 57)” that challenge “the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force (Bhabha 1994, 54)”. Given that the political implications of migratory integration often transgress the imagined limits of nationalist cohesion and communal identity, I propose the follow study: how is the third space of postcolonial migration affected by the politics of national (in)difference in Topographie, and to what extent do postcolonial contact zones encourage a rebalancing of the spatial, historical and social paradigms of cultural exchange?
