A Language Spoken in Tongues: Essays in the Transcultural Gothic

A Language Spoken in Tongues: Essays in the Transcultural Gothic PDF Author: Gord Barentsen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004399410
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description

A Language Spoken in Tongues: Essays in the Transcultural Gothic

A Language Spoken in Tongues: Essays in the Transcultural Gothic PDF Author: Gord Barentsen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004399410
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description


The Vampire in Folklore, History, Literature, Film and Television

The Vampire in Folklore, History, Literature, Film and Television PDF Author:
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786499362
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
This comprehensive bibliography covers writings about vampires and related creatures from the 19th century to the present. More than 6,000 entries document the vampire's penetration of Western culture, from scholarly discourse, to popular culture, politics and cook books. Sections by topic list works covering various aspects, including general sources, folklore and history, vampires in literature, music and art, metaphorical vampires and the contemporary vampire community. Vampires from film and television--from Bela Lugosi's Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood and the Twilight Saga--are well represented.

Through the Language Glass

Through the Language Glass PDF Author: Guy Deutscher
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1429970111
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how—and whether—culture shapes language and language, culture Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language—and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"? Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is—yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water—a "she"—becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery.

Traditional Chinese Fiction in the English-Speaking World

Traditional Chinese Fiction in the English-Speaking World PDF Author: Junjie Luo
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031056868
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This book develops interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to analyzing the cross-cultural travels of traditional Chinese fiction. It ties this genre to issues such as translation, world literature, digital humanities, book culture, and images of China. Each chapter offers a case study of the historical and cultural conditions under which traditional Chinese fiction has traveled to the English-speaking world, proposing a critical lens that can be used to explain these cross-cultural encounters. The book seeks to identify connections between traditional Chinese fiction and other cultures that create new meanings and add to the significance of reading, teaching, and studying these classical novels and stories in the English-speaking world. Scholars, students, and general readers who are interested in traditional Chinese fiction, translation studies, and comparative and world literature will find this book useful.

Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

Reflections on Exile and Other Essays PDF Author: Edward W. Said
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674003026
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 664

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Book Description
With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays offers evidence of how much the fully engaged critical mind can contribute to the reservoir of value, thought, and action essential to our lives and culture.

Cultural Techniques

Cultural Techniques PDF Author: Bernhard Siegert
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823263770
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium’s individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as “in-betweens,” shifting from firstorder to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the production of the sign-signaldistinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic. Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.

Linguistics in a Colonial World

Linguistics in a Colonial World PDF Author: Joseph Errington
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444329057
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Drawing on both original texts and critical literature, Linguistics in a Colonial World surveys the methods, meanings, and uses of early linguistic projects around the world. Explores how early endeavours in linguistics were used to aid in overcoming practical and ideological difficulties of colonial rule Traces the uses and effects of colonial linguistic projects in the shaping of identities and communities that were under, or in opposition to, imperial regimes Examines enduring influences of colonial linguistics in contemporary thinking about language and cultural difference Brings new insight into post-colonial controversies including endangered languages and language rights in the globalized twenty-first century

The Handbook of Language Contact

The Handbook of Language Contact PDF Author: Raymond Hickey
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119485061
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 800

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Book Description
The second edition of the definitive reference on contact studies and linguistic change—provides extensive new research and original case studies Language contact is a dynamic area of contemporary linguistic research that studies how language changes when speakers of different languages interact. Accessibly structured into three sections, The Handbook of Language Contact explores the role of contact studies within the field of linguistics, the value of contact studies for language change research, and the relevance of language contact for sociolinguistics. This authoritative volume presents original findings and fresh research directions from an international team of prominent experts. Thirty-seven specially-commissioned chapters cover a broad range of topics and case studies of contact from around the world. Now in its second edition, this valuable reference has been extensively updated with new chapters on topics including globalization, language acquisition, creolization, code-switching, and genetic classification. Fresh case studies examine Romance, Indo-European, African, Mayan, and many other languages in both the past and the present. Addressing the major issues in the field of language contact studies, this volume: Includes a representative sample of individual studies which re-evaluate the role of language contact in the broader context of language and society Offers 23 new chapters written by leading scholars Examines language contact in different societies, including many in Africa and Asia Provides a cross-section of case studies drawing on languages across the world The Handbook of Language Contact, Second Edition is an indispensable resource for researchers, scholars, and students involved in language contact, language variation and change, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and language theory.

When in French

When in French PDF Author: Lauren Collins
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 014311073X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
A language barrier is no match for love. Lauren Collins discovered this firsthand when, in her early thirties, she moved to London and fell for a Frenchman named Olivier—a surprising turn of events for someone who didn’t have a passport until she was in college. But what does it mean to love someone in a second language? Collins wonders, as her relationship with Olivier continues to grow entirely in English. Are there things she doesn’t understand about Olivier, having never spoken to him in his native tongue? Does “I love you” even mean the same thing as “je t’aime”? When the couple, newly married, relocates to Francophone Geneva, Collins—fearful of one day becoming "a Borat of a mother" who doesn’t understand her own kids—decides to answer her questions for herself by learning French. When in French is a laugh-out-loud funny and surprising memoir about the lengths we go to for love, as well as an exploration across culture and history into how we learn languages—and what they say about who we are. Collins grapples with the complexities of the French language, enduring excruciating role-playing games with her classmates at a Swiss language school and accidently telling her mother-in-law that she’s given birth to a coffee machine. In learning French, Collins must wrestle with the very nature of French identity and society—which, it turns out, is a far cry from life back home in North Carolina. Plumbing the mysterious depths of humanity’s many forms of language, Collins describes with great style and wicked humor the frustrations, embarrassments, surprises, and, finally, joys of learning—and living in—French.

The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain

The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain PDF Author: Terrence W. Deacon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393343022
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
"A work of enormous breadth, likely to pleasantly surprise both general readers and experts."—New York Times Book Review This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions. Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.