Re-visioning Medea

The Euripidean Medea has been canonized as the de facto standard of all characterizations found within the Medea tradition. The image of Euripides\u27s infanticidal murderess has persisted for nearly two millennia due to interpretations that have furthered the impression that the infanticide is her most salient character trait. However, Pindar, Apollonios, and even Euripides did not make infanticide the central concern of their texts. Pindar privileges Medea\u27s divinity and skills as a prophetess, while Apollonios focuses on the ways in which she was manipulated by gods and mortals. Euripides, who may have originated the infanticidal twist, uses the children\u27s deaths to indict Jason and Creon\u27s willful disregard of the hereditary blood curse on the House of Aeolus, to which both were connected. Roman texts such as Ovid\u27s Heroides 12 and Metamorphoses 7, Gaius Valerius Flaccus\u27s Argonautica, and Seneca\u27s Medea reveal the complexity of the Medea tradition by explicitly and implicitly indicting the brutality and arrogance of patriarchal authority. Ovid creates an abandoned wife in Heroides 12 and a wife who would do anything for her husband, including transforming herself into an amoral supernatural being, in Metamorphoses 12. Valerius chooses to subvert Medea\u27s purpose in the quest for the Golden Fleece by portraying the Argonauts as a band of pirates bent on destruction. Seneca\u27s Medea displays the attributes of imperial rulers, which suggests that Seneca was crafting a veiled critique of the depravity and corruption found in the first century C. E. of Rome. Contemporary texts including Ludmila Ulitskaya\u27s Medea and Her Children and Toni Morrison\u27s Beloved privilege a post-modem self-consciousness, which further displaces reductive interpretations of Medea as a static figure of murder and mayhem. Ulitskaya chooses to create a Medea who more closely resembles the earliest strands of the Medea myth where she was privileged as an herbalist and a priestess; Medea Sinoply has never left her homeland and is portrayed as the nurturer and stability of her large extended family, which directly contradicts any interpretations of Medea that choose to see her as the bringer of chaos and destruction. Morrison\u27s Sethe has the most explicit characteristics of Euripides\u27s Medea, but Morrison uses these traits to challenge any simple notions of Sethe\u27s killing of her daughter in a severe indictment of the institution of slavery. Morrison offers no easy answers since her Medea-like creation not only loses her daughter and her connection to her community, but also her sanity. Close examinations of these texts will reveal the complexity and sophisticated nature not only of the myth, but also of these authors’ creations

Beyond school-related learning : parent-child homework talk as a morality building activity

Family interactions constitute an arena for children's moral development: it is indeed through ordinary talk, and shared, task-oriented activities that children are socialized into moral orders and culturally informed ways of thinking and acting. Drawing on a video-based study on the everyday life of 19 middle-class families and adopting a discourse analytic approach, the paper sheds light on the socializing function of a domestic activity: homework. We illustrate that, when it unfolds as a family activity, the issues at stake go far beyond its school-oriented goals: homework provides ‘ethical affordances’ that make relevant moral talk whereby parents introduce children to some unquestioned principles such as homework must be done neatly and it is part of the child's duties. We contend that, by participating in morally loaded homework interactions, children are socialized not only into a school-aligned cultural list concerning what is right and what is wrong about homework, but moreover into a constitutive, taken-for-granted pillar of human sociality: the moral assessability of human conduct, i.e., its being subject to evaluations informed by the ‘right vs. wrong’ category. Implications for teacher training and parent education programs are discussed in the conclusion

Stereotypes and prejudices in the Italian L2 class : a conversation analysis of their emergence in teachers’ talk

The paper explores teachers’ interactional uses of stereotypes and prejudices in the Italian L2 classroom. Drawing from video-ethnographic research in a voluntary association, this study adopts a discursive approach to stereotypes and prejudices, analyzing their pragmatic uses during classroom activities. Even though previous literature has mostly argued against these social devices, the analysis illustrates that teachers make use of stereotypes and prejudices to pursue their local aims in the classroom. Specifically, teachers mobilize stereotyped talk to achieve specific social and didactic aims (e.g., to explain a lexical items or to prompt laughter). In the discussion, we critically consider the risks and opportunities of this kind of practice and advance few implications for teachers’ professional practice, arguing for the relevance of video-based teacher training

"Je m'en mets toute seule". Séquences d'étayage dans les repas de famille

The article analyses examples of scaffolding activities occuring between parents and children of middle-class Italian families during dinner-time. The analysis highlights the ways through which participants engage in a scaffolding sequence, transforming the activities in the service of the consumption of the meal into occasions of childrens' socialization to appropriate behaviours and rules. The analysis is meant to describe the structure and the internal organization of the scaffolding sequences as a specific and boundary-marked activity, and to account for the methods that participants use for building and developing them as coordinated and joint activities. The analysis shows that the scaffolding sequences develop through progressive expansions of initial minimal exchanges (e. g. adjacency pairs). Particularly, the expansion of the second pair part beyond the conforming response appears to be the crucial moment for the developing of the scaffolding actitvity

Diossido di titanio e alcune sue applicazioni. Spunti didattici

Il diossido di titanio, TiO2, ampiamente utilizzato come pigmento di colore bianco, \ue8 uno dei materiali pi\uf9 studiati nell\u2019ambito della ricerca per le sue propriet\ue0 fotocatalitiche. Esso, infatti, contribuisce alla fotodegradazione di sostanze inquinanti, motivo per cui \ue8 utilizzato nel settore della purificazione dell\u2019aria e dell\u2019acqua e per la realizzazione di vetri autopulenti, disponibili commercialmente. Nel presente lavoro viene suggerito un percorso didattico con l\u2019obiettivo di mettere in evidenza le propriet\ue0 fotocatalitiche del diossido di titanio oltre che pu\uf2 essere utilizzato per affrontare concetti fondamentali quali la struttura a bande dei solidi e la fotocatalisi. Il percorso si articola in pi\uf9 fasi che ricalcano quelle suggerite nei metodi didattici basati sull\u2019indagine come il protocollo delle 5E dell\u2019approccio IBSE. Dopo aver assistito a una dimostrazione che illustra le propriet\ue0 fotocatalitiche del diossido di titanio con l\u2019ausilio di un opportuno pigmento, gli studenti sono guidati nell\u2019indagine dei diversi fattori che influenzano il processo

The use of video-assisted thoracic surgery in the management of Pancoast tumors

We describe our experience using video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) as an adjunct to the surgical management of Pancoast tumors. Between March 2004 and November 2009, 13 patients with Pancoast tumors were included in this study. Surgery was performed by positioning the patient to allow either an anterior or a posterior thoracotomy. VATS was employed to explore the pleural cavity, to optimize the surgical access and as an assistance during surgical resection. Three patients with pleural carcinosis at thoracoscopy did not undergo further surgery. Seven lobectomies and three wedge resections were performed with an en bloc chest-wall resection and mediastinal lymphadenectomy. The surgical approaches were a transmanubrial L-shaped incision (ns1), a posterior thoracotomy (ns8), and a combined transmanubrial and posterior thoracotomy (ns1) which were dictated by the thoracoscopic findings. The average operative time was 200 min (range: 185–280 min); the average blood loss was 325 ml (range: 250–1200 ml). The average hospitalization was nine days (range: 8–30 days). Our study indicates that VATS may be an effective and safe adjunct to standard surgical resection in patients with Pancoast tumors. It reduces the magnitude of surgery, either by sparing the patient a useless thoracotomy or, by optimizing the site of the thoracotomy. It may also have a significant educational role