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Vsevolod Garshin's "Four Days" is the story of a wounded soldier left for dead on a deserted battlefield: During four days of physical and mental agony, he reassesses his formerly idealistic attitude towards war and ends up condemning it as something far from glorious and noble. However, the importance of Garshin's short story in literary history is not so much its anti-war message as the innovative nature of the form used to convey that message. Garshin was the first to explore the potential of direct interior monologue (hereinafter: DIM): a technique which seeks to create the artistic illusion that the reader is eavesdropping on a character's inner discourse without any mediation on the part of a narrator [...]. Because Garshin's text anticipated many of the devices later used by such masters of the genre as James Joyce and William Faulkner, the form of "Four Days" merits close analysis.
The argument proceeds from the documentary hypothesis in modern biblical studies. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that the 1st 5 books of the Old Testament were written by four different authors at different times. These authors are known as J, P, E and D. Their writing was joined in the 5th c. B.C.E. into what became the Pentateuch and the first part of the Old Testament. The result of this joining was a series of contradictions and redundancies in the final text as we have it today. Readers of the Bible who seek to read it as one coherent text try to naturalize these contradictions by what I call "stitching." Stitching involves putting coherence back into the Pentateuch by accounting for the contradictions and redundancies in terms of plausibility and common logic. Modern authors who write versions of Old Testament stories, such as Thomas Mann in his "Joseph and his brothers", also engage in stitching. I demonstrate how Mann stitches a number of important episodes from the Patriarch saga. I discuss the effect of this process on the story line. I compare that to two other recent instances of biblical stitching in modern fiction. And I conclude with the argument that stitching in modern biblical hypertexts stems from the need for coherence in the modern realistic novel. This post-enlightenment coherence impulse is contrasted with myth and the latter's tolerance for loose ends and less than coherent narrative.
Usings songs to teach aural comprehension in the intermediate-advanced foreign language classroom
(2000)
In this article, we will present an aural comprehension development technique for intermediate-advanced students of Russian which aims at expanding comprehensible input through the use of song-poems. We will argue that learning can be enhanced by expanding Krashen's notion of i+1 to i+1,2,3,4... We will discuss how the prosodic and poetic structures of song lyrics make this type of input particularly effective in the second or foreign language classroom. We will also examine the merits of this approach from the standpoint of motivating students, reducing their classroom anxiety, and encouraging the use of effective language learning strategies. Finally, we illustrate in detail the application of this method in the first author's Russian language textbook based on the songs of Bulat Okudzhava.