Klarina Priborkin | Bar-Ilan University (original) (raw)

Papers by Klarina Priborkin

Image and narrative, Jun 1, 2010

Common to all human cultures, art serves as a vehicle of human thought and emotion; it crosses bo... more Common to all human cultures, art serves as a vehicle of human thought and emotion; it crosses both personal and cultural boundaries, appealing to our common cognitive makeup and enabling humans to understand each other both within and across cultures. Since the cognitive accessibility of the visual media appeals to all human beings regardless of their cultural affiliation, it is more apt to convey cross-cultural messages than other media. Eitan Anner's Half Russian Story evokes common emotional and sensory responses to dancing and romantic plots in order to bridge between the Israeli mainstream culture and the Russian immigrant minority in Israel. Abstract (F): Dans la mesure où il est commun à toutes les cultures du monde, l"art fonctionne comme un support de pensée et d"émotion humaines. Il permet de franchir des limites à la fois personnelles et culturelles, faisant appel à nos structures cognitives communes et permettant aux hommes de se comprendre tant à l"intérieur d"une culture qu"à travers leurs différences. Puisque l"accessibilité cognitive des médias visuels les ouvre à tous les êtres humains quelle que soit leur appartenance culturelle, ces médias sont plus aptes à communiquer des messages interculturels que d"autres médias. Le film d"Eitan Anner, Half Russian Story, décrit comment des personnes très différentes peuvent répondre physiquement et émotionnellement aux mêmes sujets (en l"occurrence la danse et les sujets mélodramatiques) afin de jeter des ponts entre la culture israélienne dominante et la culture dominée des immigrants russes en Israël.

University of Texas Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2010

Educating and Reimagining the Daughter: Ethnicity and Relational Self-Construction through Writing., 2022

Nozipo Maraire’s epistolary novel Zenzele, describes the complex relationship between the mother,... more Nozipo Maraire’s epistolary novel Zenzele, describes the complex relationship between the mother, who was born and raised in Zimbabwe, and her daughter who moved to United States to study in Harvard. The mother writes a long letter to her daughter to overcome the cross-cultural and cross-generational clashes between them as her daughter is attracted to the Western culture and gradually loses her connection to the African heritage. Although at first glance it might appear that the mother’s choice to write her life story is an attempt to engage in a safer, more controlled (monological) narration of her story, this paper will show that the texts the mother produces can be interpreted as dialogical writings due to the mother’s attempts to imagine her daughter’s perspective with empathy and compassion. The article discusses the cognitive processes that enable the writing mother to imagine the daughter’s point of view while creating an ethnic identity that the daughter can identify with despite the cultural gaps.

Theory of Mind and Literature

Image and narrative, 2010

(E): Common to all human cultures, art serves as a vehicle of human thought and emotion; it cross... more (E): Common to all human cultures, art serves as a vehicle of human thought and emotion; it crosses both personal and cultural boundaries, appealing to our common cognitive makeup and enabling humans to understand each other both within and across cultures. Since the cognitive accessibility of the visual media appeals to all human beings regardless of their cultural affiliation, it is more apt to convey cross-cultural messages than other media. Eitan Anner's Half Russian Story evokes common emotional and sensory responses to dancing and romantic plots in order to bridge between the Israeli mainstream culture and the Russian immigrant minority in Israel. Abstract (F): Dans la mesure ou il est commun a toutes les cultures du monde, l’art fonctionne comme un support de pensee et d’emotion humaines. Il permet de franchir des limites a la fois personnelles et culturelles, faisant appel a nos structures cognitives communes et permettant aux hommes de se comprendre tant a l’interieur d...

Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts

Image Narrative, 2010

Reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the context of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter it is difficult ... more Reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the context of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter it is difficult to ignore that the two texts are engaged in a dialogue that remains viable throughout time, space and generations of American readers and authors. Beloved can be interpreted both as a response and a tribute to The Scarlet Letter, since, on the one hand, it redefines and rewrites the canonical representation of the Africans in America, and yet on the other hand, alludes to the canonical text of The Scarlet Letter both on thematic and textual levels. In Playing in the Dark, Morrison engages with the classics of American literature arguing that the African persona that was created in American canonical literature is actually a “powerful exploration of the fears and desires” that resided in American national conscious (17). Moreover, by defining their identity and sense of freedom in opposition to what they perceived as raw and savage Africanism, Americans, in fact, made the “Africanism … inextricable from the definition of Americanness” (65). The fateful and inevitable connection between the enslaved African population and American self-perception explains both Hawthorne’s almost obsessive, yet repressed engagement with the issues and discourses of slavery, as well as Morrison’s allusions to The Scarlet Letter in Beloved. Just as Hawthorne’s canonical text cannot ignore the African presence, so Morrison’s postmodern construction of the African American self cannot escape the influence of such a profoundly American text as The Scarlet Letter.

The continuous power struggles between the three generations of Jewish American mothers and daugh... more The continuous power struggles between the three generations of Jewish American mothers and daughters in Rebecca Goldstein's Mazel and Kim Chernin's In My Mother's House shape the protagonists' personal and ethnic self-definitions. The cultural differences between the generations of mothers and grandmothers that immigrated from Eastern Europe and their American born daughters or granddaughters generate multiple confrontations and misunderstandings, but also enable the women to reconstruct their identities. The article discusses the different types of rebellion and its representation in Goldstein and Chernin's texts. The narrative techniques these writers employ in order to describe the characters' thoughts demonstrate that the solution of inter-generational conflicts occurs through both verbal and paralinguistic communication. While in Chernin's text, the paralinguistic communication materializes into verbal ?

The goal of this article is to show how the mother/daughter characters in Marsha Norman’s ‘Night ... more The goal of this article is to show how the mother/daughter characters in Marsha Norman’s ‘Night Mother and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls fail to construct the bond of mutual support that is necessary for the development of their healthy independent selves. The daughters perceive their mothers as victims and refuse to identify with them. Instead, they identify with the patriarchal, masculine values, which they associate with authority and self-sufficiency. The mothers and daughters in both plays operate according to the patriarchal premises that associate the feminine with weakness and submission. Although the patriarchal culture enables these women to construct an illusion of personal empowerment through identification with masculinity, it prevents them from defining their own authority by means of femininity and familial relationships.
Key words: feminism, patriarchy, theater, mother/daughter relationships, identity construction.

This dissertation examines the problems of communication between ethnic/immigrant mothers and the... more This dissertation examines the problems of communication between ethnic/immigrant mothers and their Westernized or American born daughters as they appear in contemporary novels by ethnic American women writers. The mother/daughter bond is of particular interest since it serves as the pathway of cultural transmission between generations and shapes the gender, ethnic and personal identities of both mothers and daughters. In each of the novels that I consider, ethnic mothers attempt to pass on their cultural heritage to their daughters by means of storytelling and the preservation of traditional customs. This process, however, is complicated by the daughters' assimilation and/or the mothers' difficulties to adapt their stories to the daughters' changing cultural experiences. In order to understand their mothers' heritage the daughters must undergo cognitive processes in which they recreate their sense of their mothers through the retelling of their stories: biographical or fictional. When it is the mother, rather than the daughter, who narrates the story, the mother must successfully imagine her daughter's perspective through the act of storytelling. These processes of mutual understanding enable cross-cultural communication and revive the mother/daughter bond. By analyzing the narrative techniques

Image & Narrative, 2010

E): Common to all human cultures, art serves as a vehicle of human thought and emotion; it crosse... more E): Common to all human cultures, art serves as a vehicle of human thought and emotion; it crosses both personal and cultural boundaries, appealing to our common cognitive makeup and enabling humans to understand each other both within and across cultures. Since the cognitive accessibility of the visual media appeals to all human beings regardless of their cultural affiliation, it is more apt to convey cross-cultural messages than other media. Eitan Anner's Half Russian Story evokes common emotional and sensory responses to dancing and romantic plots in order to bridge between the Israeli mainstream culture and the Russian immigrant minority in Israel.

Talks by Klarina Priborkin

Readers Theater (RT) is a reading activity that employs theatrical techniques to improve students... more Readers Theater (RT) is a reading activity that employs theatrical techniques to improve students’ reading fluency and comprehension, self-efficacy and motivation. Instead of memorizing lines, students read from scripts, using expressive reading, facial expressions and body language to convey meaning. While, this method has been traditionally used in remedial teaching for elementary school students, recent research shows effective application of RT in higher education (Chi-ting Chou, 2013; Moran, 2006). The purpose of this paper is to show how the techniques of RT can be adapted to the academic framework developing not only reading comprehension, but also our students’ writing and oral proficiency.

Tsou (2011) presents RT as an effective method to encourage writing in a foreign language by bridging EFL reading and writing skills. From my experience, when students are asked to write dramatic scripts based on the ideas that they encounter in the academic articles, they take the complex and sometimes dry concepts and theories and transform them into memorable, real-life dialogues. Moreover, collaborative script writing promotes vigorous discussion of phrasing, word choice and sentence structure thus developing students’ writing skills and enabling deeper understanding of the concepts discussed in the academic articles. The paper will present practical examples of using RT both as an EFL method and an effective tool to explore academic texts through dramatic writing.