Richard Jackson Harris (ed): Cognitive Processing in Bilinguals

Generally there are three reasons to read a research anthology of this sort:

1. Because there is a single article that is seminal in its field, and unavailable elsewhere.  In this case, the article in question was Kroll and Shull: Lexical and Conceptual Memory in Fluent and Nonfluent Bilinguals. Although I spent a good portion of my thesis tearing it up, there is no doubt that this work on the so-called "translation asymmetry" is a crucial and influential piece of research.
2. To get a nice set of references for your bibliography and give weight to what you want to say, since you are a lowly master's candidate and you are making some rather bold claims.  Hypothetically, of course.
3. To figure out what you want to read next.  In this case, I was most taken by Brian MacWhinney's discussion of the Competition Model, and Jacqueline Thomas' treatment of explicit and implicit knowledge (via Bialystok).  The bite-sized morsels offered here were enough to tempt me in those directions without having to slog through dreary textbooks on cerebral lateralization or phonological processing.

All three goals were met successfully, and I don't regret slogging through this volume in its entirety, although I can't say that I would recommend it save to a very select few.   What I did not expect to find was a link between linguistics and my other, more literary pursuits.  I often say that you will not likely find someone who knows more about English than I do.  There are people whose knowledge of English from a theoretical linguistic viewpoint eclipses my own, to be sure.  By the same token, any honest assessment of my knowledge of English literature would find me a dabbler.  It is rather rare, however, to find someone who knows both sides of the language: the grammar, syntax, and semantics of the theoretical side; and the literature, style, and culture of the applied side.  Most experts are one or the other, and they rarely overlap.

Nick Ellis of the University of North Wales seems to be an exception.  In his article on Linguistic Relativity, a subject in which I have little innate interest, I found a quote from Joyce sticking out like a sore thumb.  What was Ulysses doing in this starchy tome?  Although the quote in question was simply about doing mental calculations, and was altogether unnecessary in this volume, it reminded me of my own take on that monstrous novel.  To say that Ulysses is a stream of consciousness work is only partially correct.  There are parts of it that treat the serial circuit of human thought, but it is equally devoted to the parallel process of human experience.  Joyce gives us a typically obtuse way of thinking about this in section 3:

"Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably."

It is the interaction of the nacheinander and the nebeneinander that make up life.  Those things we experience, perceive, and feel happen all at once, and those things we think and remember happen one after the other.  Insofar as this holds for all human activity, it is no surprise that it applies equally to the field of language acquisition. Krashen's "monitor" and Chomsky's "language acquisition device" work together simultaneously, and this dichotomy is observable everywhere in the literature on the subject: the aforementioned implicit and explicit knowledge, learning and acquisition, form and meaning, all these are simply names for the two ways in which the mind works with language--and not incidentally, the left and the right hemispheres.  If I can get my students to use both, and consciously so, I should probably write a paper on it.  Perhaps Mr. Harris will be interested including it in his next anthology.

Emile Zola: Germinal

Up until the last chapter, I was prepared to write about how masterfully Zola ropes the readers in, enticing her or him with the prospect that things might just turn out--even though he clearly has no such intention.  This was my take on L'assommoir, and combined with his thoroughly believable, though not necessarily relatable, characters I saw a pattern developing.  Even the ostensible villains of the novel react in perfectly human ways to representatively human circumstances.  The mine collapse in Part VI seemed the perfect resolution to this vector, and this gutsy and unexpected turn reminded me of The Mill on the Floss or Empire Falls.  Had he stopped there, I would have put him right up there with Balzac, ahead of Flaubert and Stendahl, as the very best of French writers.

But he didn't stop.  He went on for another hundred or so pages, and that last chapter undid everything.  Whereas L'assommoir sacrificed nothing to Zola's social ideas, and in fact worked with them nicely, it would seem that he simply could not help himself in Germinal.  What was an inspiring narrative that needed no help to make its point, turned into a manifesto.  I don't like being told what to think; it insults my pride of readership and chafes against my rather typically American rebelliousness.  It is for this reason that Germinal, though it could have been even better than L'assommoir, wound up being merely The Jungle.