Modern Languages and Literature

During the fall of 1992, we were engaged in a project at Lehigh Universitj Bethlehem, PA, to develop interactive video materials for use in upper-level Russian language counes. Over the come of the semester; we worked together; as language teacher and instructionaldesigner; on a pilot computer sohware program that uses Russian film clips on video laser disc to improve writing and speaking skills and stimulate students' critical thinking. The program encourages collaborative effort by allowing students to access and comment upon the written responses of their peers. The program also provides for the creation of listening exercises, and students may record, review, and file their oral responses as voice files. The program, entitled "The Critic 5 Corner;" was used with a small group of students during the spring of 1993. This report o f our development efforts includes examples and discussion of student critiques.

Moscow conceptualism was the most important Russian art movement of the late twentieth century, and Dmitrii Prigov is usually identified as one of its major proponents. Yet the most significant aspect of Russian conceptualism – its verbal
texts – has received less attention from critics than merited. This is particularly noticeable in critical approaches to the work of Prigov, who objected to the term conceptualism, criticized the dominant literary model for unofficial pictorial art, and insisted on the equivalence of his visual and verbal works. Such assertions make clear the need for a cross-disciplinary approach to encompass both the visuality of
Prigov’s verbal creations and the textuality of his pictorial works. A critical approach that discusses Prigov’s work in the more congenial context of postmodern art helps avoid the outdated model of the poet as a lonely artist defending an unassailable truth that Prigov himself rejected. Prigov emphasized the importance of the pictorial arts in his transition away from the reigning “archaic, frozen cultural
atmosphere” that produced an artistic ideal more “typical of Russian literature from the 19th century” than appropriate to late-Soviet reality. To honour Prigov’s recognition of that dilemma and to account for his assertion that in his work the visual and the verbal are “odna kasha”, we must focus first on his multivalent word and its collusion in an on-going conversation about art.

The author offers a point-by-point rebuttal of Douglas J. Keenan's criticism of the use of astronomical records in dating the earliest Chinese dynasties in the 2 nd millennium BCE. Detailed references are provided to the abundant historiographical and archaeological evidence bearing on the early chronology which Keenan ignored in his critique.

The East Asian records of the 'guest star' of 1054 that produced the Crab Nebula have been re-evaluated more than once during the past decade. Although some of the apparent inconsistencies in the records have now been addressed, doubts about the reported position of the supernova still persist. The published translations of the records, moreover, are still unsatisfactory in certain respects. Here I offer corrections to the translations of several records, present a previously-unreported contemporaneous account of the guest star, and suggest an explanation of why the Song Dynasty astronomers erroneously placed SN1054 southeast of ! Tau.