School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts

This essay explores the intentio operis in the use of transatlantic bridges that are sometimes real, other times rhetorical, and others imaginary that Alberto Ruy Sánchez draws between his country and Morocco. It also looks at the representation of Moroccan space and women, arguing that Ruy Sánchez falls into exoticizing Orientalism with tints of colonial nostalgia, particularly when portraying Moroccan women. Finally, it explores how the author creates his own precursors through the quotes and literary references in his five novels. Presenting himself as a reader of Arab erotic literature and Sufi sacred texts, Ruy Sánchez suggests that he is rewriting classic literary texts, thus creating his own literary lineage and diachronically situating his work within a literary tradition that remains on the margins of Mexican national coordinates to approach, instead, the canon of Arabic literature. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

This essay traces the genealogy and evolution of the category of the subject as it developed in the thought of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Alain Badiou. As will be seen, within the fruitful and complementary dialogue about the subject and subjectivity formation among these three French thinkers, there are major discrepancies in their approaches, from Althusser’s seemingly passive view of the subject as a victim of state oppression, to Foucault’s one, embedded in power but with the capacity of resistance, and, finally, to Badiou’s understanding, in his book Théorie du sujet (Theory of the Subject, 1982), of the subject as the one who courageously takes risks to put into practice the truth brought about by the event in order to radically transform the present situation.

Reseña 

Abstract: Writers’ use of modality, an interpersonal linguistic resource commonly used for expressing probability, reveals key information about their claims. Most research on modality addresses L2 English learners, leaving a gap in research in advanced language development in other languages. This paper addresses this gap by studying how heritage language (HL) speakers of Spanish express doubt and probability in Spanish and how the lexicogrammatical features they use across genres reveal how they express these meanings. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics and pragmatics, this study examines modality in 125 texts written in Spanish by HL students in the U.S., including narratives, expositions, article reviews, personal responses, and research papers. The results reveal that students use the most modality resources in personal responses and the least in reviews. This work offers insights about the interpersonal resources writers choose to express their argumentative stance and the socio-pragmatic competence in writing among HL students.