Cachet

Abstract: Contents: This book examines the nature, purpose, and implementation of lettres de cachet by the King, police, penal officials, and families to control delinquency, inansity, prostitution, and other offenses by means of detentions in Paris institutions.

Abstract: Quelque part entre les pervers peperes, le culte de la culture populaire, les images sensationnalistes des medias et la politique canadienne en matiere d'immigration, la danseuse nue roumaine est devenue une sorte d'archetype. Attrayante, sensuelle, avec son accent etranger excitant et sa peau blanche, elle est la parfaite danseuse exotique. Les danseuses nues representent le genre, la sensualite ou la sexualite, l'emotion et souvent, l'ethnicite. L'ethnicite peut avoir un cachet dans l'industrie du sexe, et comme le genre, les travailleuses usent consciemment de leur ethnicite pour tirer profit de ce cachet. Les danseuses nues roumaines sont bien placees pour ce faire, car elles sont, au contraire des femmes de couleur, « differentes », mais pas trop. En consequence, la preference des clients et de la direction des clubs pour les danseuses roumaines a entraine la creation d'un archetype et la fabrication d'une penurie de danseuses nues pour repondre a cette demande preferentielle. A l'aide d'une analyse ...

Abstract: This article examines the contentious proposition that poetry has for the past few decades been experiencing a crisis, especially when it comes to student engagement. By means of the results of a study conducted in an English as a second language context, it explores teachers’ and students’ beliefs, attitudes and practices in relation to poetry. This article shows that the very discourse used to talk about poetry is a direct reflection of how much cachet it is ascribed in the classroom. It questions whether this inflation of cachet is responsible for the fact that poetry is not perceived as a genre that teachers and students opt to read for personal pleasure. Students’ engagement with a literary text seems to be one of the most desirable objectives of literature teaching. In fact, it is claimed that “The key to active, involved reading of literature is engagement with a text” (Beach, Appleman, Hynds, and Wilhelm 170). However, a number of writers on literary education have deemed young people’s engagement with literature in general and poetry in particular to be in trouble. Despite the fact that this situation has been a cause for concern for a number of decades, it currently seems to be even more pronounced and is considered to be symptomatic of the downtrend that is being experienced by the humanities in education as well as in contemporary society as a whole. This is especially pertinent for the small Mediterranean island of Malta, where the present study is set. It is also relevant to other contexts where teachers’ pedagogy might not make use of active approaches to poems nor expose students to engaging forms of poetry like spoken word poetry and multimodal poetry (Xerri, “Poetry Teaching”). By reviewing the literature in relation to crisis discourse and the concomitant value of poetry in education, the groundwork is laid for an investigation of what teachers and students think about poetry’s status in the educational system. These views were gathered by means of research whose main purpose was that of shedding light on teachers’ and students’ beliefs, attitudes and practices in relation to poetry and the study of poetry at Advanced Level in a post-16 college in Malta. On the basis of the findings that emerged from this study, this article questions whether