popular culture

In the recent years, foreign language teaching has advocated for an increasingly intermedial and interdisciplinary approach, one that enables instructors to expand course materials and integrate a wide array of popular and current cultural products. Advanced courses in Italian literature and culture can develop curricula that more liberally incorporate popular culture into teaching. Yet intermediate courses must combine cultural components with the introduction or the review of grammar structures. This session seeks contributions that address the following: What are the challenges of transitioning from grammar-based to culture-based instruction in intermediate language classes?

This panel is focused on the employment of fashion by female-identifying authors to discuss issues of inequity, specifically surrounding the themes of gender, sexuality, race, and class in their writing. In this panel, the relationship between text and the sartorial and the capitalization on this relationship by female-identifying authors will be explored. Given the focus of this panel on centering voices across cultures, we especially welcome papers discussing global texts, authors writing in all languages, and analyzing works written from non-Western perspectives.

This panel explores the interconnection of avant-garde humor with forms of political action that defied conventional art and lifestyles. Literally meaning “advance guard” in French, the term holds a military sense that applies to artists and works characterized by their combative nature and their tendency to question the acceptability of norms and traditional aesthetic genres. Avant-garde artists made use of humor as a political weapon that destabilized the status quo by challenging moral values and promoting radical reforms on a sociocultural level.

http://fift.ugal.ro/30years/

A joint project of the Faculty of History, Philosophy and Theology, the Faculty of Letters, and the Cross-border Faculty of “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galati, the conference is intended as a cultural forum for imparting knowledge and research on the textuality and representation of recent, lived history, from different yet interrelated angles:

In the 1960s, long before there was Julie & Julia, an aspiring writer named Nora Ephron cooked her way through the holy trinity of cookbooks: Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Michael Field’s Cooking School, and Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cook Book. In a New Yorker column from 2006, titled “Serial Monogamy: My Cookbook Crushes,” Ephron describes her relationship with the authors of these books: “as I cooked, I had imaginary conversation with them both [Claiborne fell out of favor early on]. Julia was nicer and more forgiving. … Field was sterner and more meticulous; he was almost fascistic.