Articles publicats (Llengües i Literatures Estrangeres)

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    Open Access
    Perpetuating Our Secrets: Ageing and Memory in Doris Lessing’s The Grandmothers
    (Ege University Press , 2010) Oró Piqueras, Maricel
    Appearance and secrecy have been recurrent elements in both families and nations. Hidden love affairs, unsaid personal preferences, even illegitimate children have led to important decisions, either for the good or for the bad. In the four short stories that constitute The Grandmothers, Doris Lessing explores the perpetuating secrets that have marked families and nations at different points in history. In the collection, forbidden passion and unofficial love invade the lives of grandmothers who must keep them to themselves in order to be accepted within their communities. In The Grandmothers, trauma is counterbalanced by the memory of the moments in which feeling outlanded social norms and restrictions. At the same time, those memories enlighten the process of ageing that scandalously makes the older person invisible within society. This paper aims to explore the complicated interconnection between emotion and norm, memory and trauma, ageing and society within The Grandmothers; topics which have long inhabited the fictional world of Doris Lessing.
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    Open Access
    Successful female aging for beginners: Carolyn Heilbrun/Amanda Cross and perspectives of gendered aging in The Players Come Again
    (Taylor & Francis, 2014) Domínguez Rué, Emma
    Although Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926–2003) is best known for her best-selling mystery novels, published under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, she also authored remarkable pieces of non-fiction which evidence an intense reflection upon female aging as well as her long-standing commitment to feminism. Works such as Reinventing Womanhood (1979), The Representation of Women in Fiction (1983), Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), and The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997) explore the ways in which women in general and the author in particular experience the changes that maturity involves as an enriching process rather than as a path into decay and loss. This paper contends that these might perhaps shed a new light into her fiction as Amanda Cross, which includes The Players Come Again (1990). Taking her essays in feminism and literary criticism as a basis, my aim was to reveal the extent to which Heilbrun’s commercial mystery novels represented a springboard to the theories she put forward in her essays, which vindicated the difficulties as well as the joys involved in a gendered experience of aging.
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    Open Access
    Conceptualizing the Aesthetic Experience: Using the Influence Matrix to Show Causal Relationships between Basic Concepts in Aesthetics
    (Taylor & Francis, 2014) Domínguez Rué, Emma; Mrotzek, Maximilian
    Previous research has shown that using tools from systems science for teaching and learning in the Humanities offers innovative insights that can prove helpful for both students and lecturers. Our contention here is that a method used in systems science, namely the influence matrix, can be a suitable tool to facilitate the understanding of elementary notions in Aesthetics by means of systematizing this process. As we will demonstrate in the upcoming sections, the influence matrix can help us to understand the nature and function of the basic elements that take part in the aesthetic experience and their evolving relevance in the history of Aesthetics. The implementation of these elements to an influence matrix will contribute to a more detailed understanding of (i) the nature of each element, (ii) the interrelation between them and (iii) the influence each element has on all the others.
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    Open Access
    What Goes Around Comes Back Around: Life Narratives and the Significance of the Past in Donna Leon's Death at La Fenice
    (Elsevier, 2014) Domínguez Rué, Emma
    This paper examines the life narratives of characters in Donna Leon's much-celebrated novel Death at La Fenice (1992). In the first of her Brunetti mystery series, Comissario Guido Brunetti investigates the death of the renowned conductor Helmut Wellauer, poisoned during a performance of La Traviata at La Fenice. As his investigation progresses, Brunetti discovers dark secrets in the past of the acclaimed Maestro, revealing his dishonesty and cruelty, but, most schockingly, his involvement in a horrendous case of child abuse and death by neglect. My analysis will address the role of memory and the significance of the past for the present, as the tragic experiences of the Santina sisters in the 1930s become intertwined with those of Wellauer's present wife Elizabeth and her daughter Alexandra. Using literary theory and cultural gerontology as methodological tools, this paper will explore Leon's portrait of the ageing process: Wellauer's lack of remorse for his past sins and his inability to cope with impending deafness will be contrasted with the painful account by Wellauer's former lover, the once famous soprano Clemenza Santina, whose narrative response to her traumatic experience renders the past more alive than the present. The significance of memory, as well as the crucial role of life arratives in the personal and cultural construction of identity, will be addressed to interrogate the ways in which our perception of ageing can be enriched by literary studies.
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    Open Access
    The Art of Doing Good. Ageing, Creativity and Wisdom in the Isabel Dalhousie Novels by Alexander McCall-Smith
    (Elsevier, 2018) Domínguez Rué, Emma
    Several studies have examined the interaction between the ageing process and literary creativity, either to confirm the stereotype that wisdom and experience do not compensate for the inevitable decline of intellectual (and all) capacities (Lehman 1953; de Beauvoir 1972) or to highlight the empowering possibilities of embracing the knowledge and insight of a lifetime to continue developing creativity in maturity (Wyatt-Brown and Rossen 1993; Cohen-Shalev 2002; Casado-Gual, Domínguez-Rué and Worsfold 2016). Not so much emphasis, however, has been put on how this new creative stage and the wisdom gained in a lifetime can contribute to improving the author’s personal and/or intellectual fulfilment and, by extension, benefit readers by the sharing of that experience. Since wisdom is a quality often associated with old age, it would not be odd to assume that the lessons learned from life and career can not only lead the artist to a period of renewed engagement, but the sharing of that awareness can also inspire readers to get a glimpse of “the good life”. One such example is the Scottishwriter Alexander McCall-Smith (1948-). McCall-Smith is currently one of the bestloved and most prolific authors in English, having written more than a hundred volumes, mostly after the age of fifty. Among such an extensive production, this article concentrates on his Sunday Philosophy Club series, featuring middle-aged philosophern and amateur detective Isabel Dalhousie, whose deep philosophical interrogations and intensely human dimension interrogate fundamental notions about ethical living and life at large.