17 Filles (2011), the first feature film of French directing sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin, draws inspiration from a 2008 incident in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in which 18 high-school girls committed to a “pregnancy pact”, with the aim of conceiving almost simultaneously. The Coulins transpose these events to Lorient in northern France, and the film follows a group of lycéennes who agree to get pregnant at the same time, in a bid to reclaim control over their bodies and their futures. This article examines the ways in which the pregnancy plot of 17 Filles seeks to interrupt and transgress the trajectory towards “successful” womanhood prescribed by society for young girls. The article further interrogates the positioning of motherhood in the film as an act of corporeal empowerment and female emancipation. In so doing, the authors problematise the feminist undertones of the film by exposing the extent to which the plot, at times, becomes entangled in the norms of the very institution that it seeks to subvert: namely, patriarchal motherhood.

This essay brings Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” into dialogue with Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a fourteenth-century Italian text. Though different in scale, both texts start with an experience of plague and follow a group of people who withdraw into a restricted community to survive the disease through art. The outcomes are wildly different, however: death, for Poe’s characters; a return to their homes, for Boccaccio’s. Firstly, I consider Boccaccio’s text for its justification of the characters’ decision to escape the city, their manner of living together, and their stories’ content. Crucial here is that the Decameron is, in its fuller title, “cognominato Prencipe Galeotto” [surnamed Prince Galehaut], an Arthurian and Dantean reference that highlights art’s potential to be morally dangerous. Secondly, I examine Poe’s story as a kind of tragic, deviant Decameron, lacking the reason, order, and constraints that Boccaccio stresses in the construction of his ideal community. I read Poe’s Prince as another Galehaut: a seductive intermediary who leads his followers via art to death. Thirdly, I reflect on our experience of a student–staff book club at SELCS in UCL, to consider what sort of story-telling community we created in the time of Covid-19, in the wake of this Boccaccian tradition. Ultimately, I see our activities as having been most similar to a third text, Marguerite de Navarre’s Boccaccio-inspired Heptaméron, given Marguerite’s reflections on the role of art in a crisis and the unfinished nature of her text.

The Argentine journalist and writer José Mármol (1817–71), famously known as “el verdugo poético de Rosas”, offers one of the most effective literary exposures of the Rosas regime in his novel Amalia (1851). Written during Mármol’s exile in Montevideo (1846–52), it is set in 1840 during the French blockade and covers the months leading up to Lavalle’s anticipated but failed invasion and subsequent withdrawal in September of that year. Amalia is considered one of the most prominent anti-Rosas texts as it depicts the dictator as a force of evil and emphasises the plight of the people living under his rule: “with Amalia, Mármol consciously attempts to initiate a canon of representation of the Rosas era as ‘la tiranía’ as he directs his novels at a future public” (Rea 29). Amalia was considered “the novel of triumphant liberalism” (Sommer 111) and is celebrated to such an extent that it is considered to be the first Argentine novel to seek to unite a divided country. This article offers an original analysis of how Amalia is considered a more progressive novel in comparison with other works such as Esteban Echeverría’s divisive El matadero (1871), in that it seeks to encourage national reconciliation between the Unitarians and Federalists and end a tumultuous political conflict, which Mármol argues was exacerbated by Rosas. I explore the way in which Amalia aims to promote political unity, addressing Mármol’s positive and compassionate, but likely inaccurate representation of Manuela Rosas, while shedding light on his – and other Unitarians’ – problematic depictions of race and gender, which disempower and dehumanise Federalist women, thus proving detrimental to the pursuit of national harmony.

Em Cabo Verde não existe tradição de ensino formal da língua cabo-verdiana (CVL), língua materna de praticamente todos os habitantes das ilhas. Em vez disso, a língua da educação é exclusivamente a portuguesa. Neste artigo analiso este contexto sociolinguístico e examino especificamente três modelos inovadores de educação bilingue (dois com a diáspora cabo‑-verdiana em Portugal e um em Cabo Verde) que introduzem o CVL como língua de instrução nas escolas. São os projetos <em>Vamos conversar na escola – nu ben papia na skóla</em> (2002–2005) e o projeto <em>Turma Bilingue</em> (2007–2012) ambos realizados em Portugal, e o projeto cabo-verdiano <em>Si ka fila tudu ta fila un pónta</em> (Se não concretizar a totalidade, concretiza-se uma parte) <em>Uma experiência de Educação Bilingue</em> (2013–2019). Participei dos dois primeiros projetos e dirigi o último. Este artigo reflete sobre as minhas experiências no contexto do meu trabalho como educadora, vincula essa experiência a discussões teóricas no meio académico e também destaca os desafios e oportunidades práticas inerentes à implementação de programas de educação bilingue. Defendo os benefícios do uso de línguas maternas e minoritárias nas salas de aula, uma vez que isso maximiza a experiência e o potencial de aprendizagem dos alunos, promovendo oportunidades para o desenvolvimento do seu bilinguismo e da biliteracia. Com referência específica à situação em Cabo Verde, apelo a um maior investimento na formação de professores e na criação de materiais didáticos adequados, o que, como defendo, exigirá uma maior coragem política para priorizar a questão da língua nas escolas. For the English version, click on the download button on the right.

This article examines Sky Atlantic’s <em>Babylon Berlin</em> (Tom Tykwer, Henk Handloegten, Achim von Borries, 2017–), exploring national and transnational constructions in order to understand the series’ international appeal from the British perspective, in what Tim Bergfelder identifies as an “imaginary idea of the foreign”. This article analyses the series by applying Lawrence Venuti’s hermeneutic approach, adapted from translation studies. It treats the novels by Volker Kutscher on which the series is based as a source text, and the TV series as a target text, examining the discrepancies and interspaces between them, revealing an interplay between the national and the transnational. However, this is not immediately apparent to the viewer as notions of the transnational are buried and reframed in constructions of the national. It is this approach which enables the series to travel. <em>Babylon Berlin</em> both plays into and profits from the universal appeal of the national.

Article: Little Precossi, Stunted Becky: A Comparative Analysis of Child Hunger and National Body Health Discourses in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature in Italian and English

Ricardo Darín has become the somewhat unlikely middle-aged poster boy of Argentine cinema of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. In the Argentine context, this same period is marked by the economic crisis of 2001 and the celebrations of the country’s bicentenary in 2010, both of which raise important questions about national identity. This article will examine the films Darín made with Juan José Campanella and Pablo Trapero in order to consider the ways in which his star status is used as a way to reflect or comment upon certain questions that seem to occupy the national psyche and to engage with forms of masculinity, whether that be to represent them, reify them, or indeed do both simultaneously. In the four films he made with Campanella, Darín plays an affable middle-class man who is somehow an outsider. The fact that by the end of the films all four characters have found some closure and experience a sense of a new beginning attests to the strength of middle-class masculinity as an identity category. Both his characters die at the end of the two films with Trapero. These characters are also outsiders, but Trapero uses Darín’s star status to draw attention to broader social issues within Argentine society. Ultimately, both directors rely upon Darín’s off-screen persona to aid characterization and link their protagonists to national issues and questions of national identities.

This introduction to the Digital Modern Languages Launch Issue outlines our aims for the Section to bring together and expand research that engages with digital culture, media and technologies in relation to languages other than English. With the Issue encompassing literary and cultural studies, linguistics, pedagogical and computational research, we highlight how a heterogeneity of approaches contributes to a generous and productive transdisciplinary culture that ideally defines both Modern Languages and the Digital Humanities. We further emphasise how the contributors to this Issue demonstrate the value and necessity of the specific linguistic and cultural expertise that Modern Languages researchers and students bring in terms of how we make sense of our place in increasingly digital worlds. Tweetable abstract: @politonaiz and @NASWells introduce the @digmodlang launch issue that aims to inspire #ModernLanguages researchers to expand the ways we research and teach through and about digital media and technologies.

We present in survey form a typology of a new sub-genre we term the English ‘Modern Languages Novel’, identifying four overlapping categories in a large sample of fiction, most of it by authors whose work has been submitted to the Booker or Man-Booker Prize over fifty years between 1969 and 2018. The four types are: novels featuring a cultural intermediary, such as a language teacher or spy, as narrative focaliser in a foreign setting (Travel); novels written after a period of exposure to linguistic and cultural difference but which do not directly thematise the experience (Alienation); novels with snippets of untranslated dialogue or other quotations from other languages (The Non-Translated); and finally novels set in a new language environment without an Anglophone focaliser (Assimilation). We comment on examples of each type and present an explanation for the invisibility of the sub-genre up to now.

Police Inspector Laura Lebrel, divorced mother of twins, with a disorganised personal and professional life is an unlikely heroine for a police procedural. Yet not only does she solve every murder mystery with uncanny ease, she is one of Television Española’s (Spanish State Television) poster girls of success. As an extreme example of genre hybridization (police procedural, murder mystery, sitcom, workplace and family drama), there is something for everybody in the identification process and entertainment value, thus maximising the target audience, bringing the whole family to reunite in front of the TV set. This article explores if and how female identities are still embedded in a phallocentric imaginary and to what extent this series breaks the conventions of crime drama. To this end I discuss Cawelti’s now classic notions on the social function of formula culture such as murder mysteries and combine them in a fruitful discussion with Plantinga’s concepts of character engagement and concern-based construals. Plantinga’s analysis of the emotional viewing experience allows us to take seriously a popular TV show that might otherwise be decried for its cheap emotionalism. This article fills a significant critical gap in the field of Spanish visual culture. Positioned at the intersection between Hispanic Studies, gender studies and TV studies, it gives space to a productive cross-fertilisation of theories of spectatorship, comedy, and formula culture. It thus fulfils a dual purpose of contributing to both Hispanic Studies and the international body of gender and TV Studies. Central to my discussion will be the issue of women in the workplace and the perennial question of how professional women negotiate the public/private divide.