Anuario de Letras Modernas

23-39

Authors: Diego Mejía Estévez

This article describes various constituent elements of the character Lucien de Rubempré (Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes): the paratexts that allow us to understand his affiliations, his facet as a literary artist, his experience as a dandy and the inter-actions he has with other characters that seal his des-tiny. Through the dialogue with theoretical proposals and specific criticisms from among the many who have commented on Illusions perdues, especially here from the Italian environment, it is shown how different as-pects of the realistic method are closely linked to the construction of this hero and its settings. Comparisons with other fictional creatures of the same system, that is, the Comédie humaine, clearly exposes the author’s obsessions and the invariants he imprinted on some characters who became spokespersons of his poetics and worldview. It concludes by emphasizing, with various examples, the complexity and versatility of a hero that serves to establish metaliterary reflections and, above all, to link the destinies and adventures of other leading characters in the universe of the Comédie.

60-73

Authors: Gabriel Linares

This paper offers a reading of the sonnet “A John Keats (1795-1821),” by Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). This sonnet was written as an homage one hundred and fifty years after the death of the last of the major British Romantics. It was published in 1972 in the book of poems El oro de los tigres. So far, when scholars have studied the relation between Borges and Keats, they have focused obliquely on the essay “El ruiseñor de Keats” by the Latin American author. In that sense, this paper concentrates on a lesser-known text that has not gotten much attention. The present reading deals with several aspects of the sonnet. First, it considers the metrical and argumentative aspects of the poem in relation to its double source—the English and the Spanish sonnet. This perspective allows for a better understanding of the formal complexity of the text. Then, the paper explores the means through which the praise of Keats is articulated. These means concern, first, syntactical and rhetorical aspects of Borges’s composition. Nevertheless, the sonnet weaves a rich net of allusions that refer not only to Keats’s works, but to texts by John Milton, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Matthew Arnold. In this respect, the present paper explores not only the relations between the Argentinean and Keats, but also the relations between Borges and the lyric in English, a topic that still awaits further study.

91-105

Authors: Natin Guzmán Arce, Jimmy Ramírez Acosta, Sonia Rodríguez Salazar

This article shows one specific object of study using Corpus Linguistics: adjectives from a corpus of aca-demic texts from efl students collected between 2017 and 2018 revealing a dissimilar variety compared to native speakers’ corpus in similar types of texts. This nearly half a million corpus comprises students’ academic writings from two English Teaching majors and one English BA from the School of Literature and Language Sciences in Universidad Nacional in Heredia, Costa Rica. What the lexical unit of the study displays and what it reveals is surprisingly interesting because, as efl teachers, we expected a more diverse and profound use of adjectives as they are an important device in academic prose. Written texts seem to reflect a fault in the teaching and learning of this skill, calling for immediate attention to the matter. The use of the concordancer AntConc© as the linguistic analysis software selected to manage the lexical categories that the researchers picked as a starting point was truly significant in the methodological process. A corpus-driven approach was followed in this initial attempt to illustrate word choice in academic writings developed in the composition courses during the time period: English Integrated I, English Integrated II, Composition,and Essay. This study was longitudinal as it involved the same students’ writings during the two years of the corpus collection. General findings show that lexical complexity is deficient and suggest that more didactic efforts should be made to encourage the learning and acquisition of vocabulary, being the use of native speakers’ corpus one example of such strategies.

134-136

Authors: Alma Delia Miranda Aguilar

Lino, Patrícia. (2020). O Kit de Sobrevivência do Descobridor Português no Mundo Anticolonial. Edições Macondo.