No abstract

This article aims at showing that extreme situations, such as wars, can reveal a common human vulnerability, which thus leads to a lack of sovereignty affecting all the agents implied in the traumatic episode. In Zina Rohan’s 2010 novel, The Small Book, this shared vulnerability crosses time and space boundaries by connecting coetaneous characters and their subsequent generations through inherited traumatic memories. These connections lead Rohan to blur the boundaries between what we may understand as victims and perpetrators of trauma. Thus, drawing on significant theories within the fields of trauma and memory studies as well as on conceptions about human vulnerability and interconnectedness, the main aim of this study is to analyse the key narrative mechanisms used by this British–Jewish author in order to represent the shared vulnerability and exposure to trauma that reigns during war and post-war times.

Gender stereotypes, understood as those structured sets of beliefs about personal attributes of women and men, have a great influence over self-perspective and the social interaction and organisation. However, their effects are sometimes invisible, and a great effort should be made to develop awareness of their influence in the population. Our main claim is that School has an essential role to teach gender and sexual equality through the curricula, using teaching materials that are free of these stereotypes. The main aim of this study is to examine the presence of gender and sexually oriented stereotypes in various English teaching materials within the context of the Spanish Primary School, focusing on its last stage. This research carries out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of three English textbooks together with the students’ and teachers’ perceptions of gender stereotypes. The analysis is done thanks to the review of key concepts, such as gender awareness and sexual identity, as well as the presentation of various examination tools that have allowed us to evaluate the sexist content in the textbooks selected and offer some guidelines to avoid them in the English classroom.

This article aims to uncover the tensions and connections between Lisa Appignanesi’s autobiographical work Losing the Dead (1999) and her novel The Memory Man (2004) and to point out that, in spite of belonging to different genres, they share several formal, thematic, and structural features. By applying close-reading and narratological tools and drawing on relevant theories within Trauma, Memory, and Holocaust Studies, I would like to demonstrate that both works can be defined as limit-case narratives on the grounds that they blur literary genres, fuse testimonial and narrative layers, include metatextual references to memory and trauma, and represent and perform the transgenerational encounter with traumatic memories. Moreover, Appignanesi’s creations will be contextualised within the trend of hybrid life-writing narratives developed by contemporary British-Jewish women writers. Accordingly, these authors are contributing to the expansion of innovative liminal autobiographical and fictional practices that try to represent what it means to be a Jew, a migrant, and an inheritor of traumatic experiences in the post-Holocaust world. Finally, I launch a further reflection on the generic hybridisation characterising those contemporary narratives based on the negotiation of transgenerational memories, which will be read as a fruitful strategy to problematize the conflicts created when the representation of the self and (family) trauma overlap.

Developing communication and thinking skills in English as a Foreign Language Education...