Instructor: Juan Medrano-Pizarro, Spanish and Portuguese Department

Overview: This multimedia piece, based on the work of the Chilean poet Enrique Lihn, explores the role that new technologies have in the teaching of literature, the common ground between literature , music, and the visual arts, and the possibility of reaching a wider audience through the use of the World Wide Web.

The project will consist of a bilingual, illustrated presentation of the events of Lihn’s life, a recorded interview, a bilingual anthology of Lihn’s work, a multimedia presentation, and a complete bibliography of his writing and a selected critical bibliography. The multimedia presentation is a production of Lihn’s poem “Penas de extrañamiento” in which text, voice, images, and music will recreate the urban and cinematographic landscape of the imaginary New York constructed by Lihn’s writing. (Des)Encounters is not only a pedagogical tool for the teaching of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry and a prototype for the future development of the Latin-American poets database, but also a space to explore the possibilities of the interaction of literature and digital art.

Instructor: Joan Campbell, German Department

Overview: Concurrently, foreign language pedagogy has stressed the importance of cultural materials and the World Wide Web has allowed immediate access to these materials. Students are no longer limited to information that their instructors provide or authors of their texts choose to include. All sorts of cultural documents are instantly available and student interest in the particular technology is high. By developing Internet exercises which take a functional approach, directly addressing pedagogical issues in foreign language instruction, faculty at Dartmouth can transcend the physical limits of the classroom and provide their students with direct exposure to the culture they are studying. This project will develop World Wide Web exercises for German I, II, and III courses at Dartmouth. While the context for these exercises is German, the models developed are easily applicable to other foreign languages taught at Dartmouth. By making pages available as part of a larger German language teaching database via the German Department home page, the project will provide an important service to German students and the German language teaching profession.