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Browsing Research and publications by Author "Krasny, Karen"
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Item Open Access Between art and testimony: Transforming oral histories of Holocaust survivors into young adult fiction and creative non-fiction.(Oral History Forum/Forum d’histoire oral, 2012) Krasny, KarenWorks of historical fiction and creative non-fiction written about the Holocaust continue to occupy an important place in both the literary and history curricula in K to 12 schools. In discussion with author Kathy Kacer, I describe the particular challenges of transforming oral testimonies of Holocaust survivors into young adult (YA) narratives including the ways in which these narratives are mitigated by the adult desire to educate and protect and by the undeniable influence of the publication of the diary of Anne Frank. By taking up the problem of bearing literary witness as a mode of pedagogical address through Spargo’s notion of vigilant memory and his reformulation of Levinasian ethics into terms of mourning, I demonstrate how oral histories directly or indirectly embedded in YA Holocaust narratives, might address the epistemological consequences of the Holocaust, specifically for invoking an ethical and social responsibility for the other through a resistance to consolation as a conventional form of commemoration.Item Open Access Mental Imagery and Affect in English/French Bilingual Readers: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective(Canadian Modern Language Review, University of Toronto, Mar-08) Krasny, Karen; Sadoski, MarkWe investigated the evocation of mental imagery and affect in English/French bilinguals to determine whether the linguistic demands of reading in a second language (L2) limit readers’ ability to form non-verbal text representations of literary stories. The participants were 26 Grade 11 French immersion students enrolled in a Canadian high school. Each student read two literary stories, one in English and another in French. Next they rated story paragraphs for the degree of either mental imagery or emotional response evoked. Later, students reread the same texts and completed a writing task in which they reported their imagery or emotions in response to the two highest-rated paragraphs. Moderate to high correlations were found between ratings of imagery and emotional response for each story, for two French stories combined, for two English stories combined, and for all stories in both languages combined. Reading times were somewhat longer for the French versions. The patterns of response for both the ratings and the written reports replicate and extend earlier research and suggest that as bilingual readers progress in their ability to read in their L2, reports of imagery and affect become closer in kind and number to those reported in response to reading the same text in their first language.