Search results for ""Verlag Peter Lang""

This book was shortlisted for the ESSE Junior Scholars book award for Cultural Studies in English, 2012 Since its inception cinema has served as a powerful medium that both articulates and intervenes in visions of identity. The experiences of British colonialism in Ireland and India are marked by many commonalities, not least in terms of colonial and indigenous imaginings of the relationships between colony or former colony and imperial metropolis. Cinematic representations of Ireland and India display several parallels in their expressions and contestations of visions of Empire and national identity. This book offers a critical approach to the study of Ireland’s colonial and postcolonial heritage through a comparative exploration of such filmic visions, yielding insights into the operations of colonial, nationalist and postcolonial discourse. Drawing on postcolonial and cultural theory and employing Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, the author engages in close readings of a broad range of metropolitan and indigenous films spanning an approximately fifty-year period, exploring the complex relationships between cinema, colonialism, nationalism and postcolonialism and examining their role in the (re)construction of Irish and Indian identities.

Read more less

Horace’s Satires have a distinctly dialogic quality – not for nothing does Horace himself choose to call these poems sermones, ‘conversations’. Even when formally presented as monologues, the Satires seem to be speeches actively addressed to their recipients, cognisant of their audiences, and full of the ‘voices’ of others. This book applies theories on dialogue by the twentieth-century Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin to Horace’s Satires. Bakhtinian key concepts such as polyphony, heteroglossia, addressivity and authoritative discourse are investigated and found to be useful in understanding Horace’s work. Far from getting bogged down in theory, however, this is a book which uses some of Bakhtin’s ideas to tease out fresh insights into Horace’s Satires. The author reads Horace’s poems as ‘little dramas’ – interactions between speakers, interlocutors, addressees, and audiences. What is Horace’s real motive for lecturing on miserly greed in his first satire? Who is the modern Hollywood star whom Horace most closely resembled? What is Horace doing while Damasippus rattles on, recounting the words of his guru Stertinius, in Satires 2.3? The answers to these and other questions are suggested in this book.

Read more less

What does ‘autonomy’ mean from a Christian perspective? What could a Christian environmental ethics bring to the debate about genetically modified food? This book investigates conflicting claims in the public realm about food biotechnology. It critically evaluates the contribution such technologies make to sustainable agricultural production and environmental stewardship. Challenging the received wisdom in popular environmental theology, the book defends the role of the human person as steward of creation and presents a human-centred Christian environmental ethics rooted in the Kantian tradition of moral philosophy. From this vantage point the author critiques the partiality of many contemporary environmental theologies, which argue for a return to the technological simplicity of an idealised past, or emphasise virtue while taking little account of the role that institutional issues play in framing and defining policy and good practice. In this context the author examines whether or not, under current conditions, transgenic food can contribute to sustainable agricultural production.

Read more less

The studies presented in this volume concentrate on different aspects of the medical, scientific and technical varieties of early English used in a wide range of medieval manuscripts. As the growing body of research published in recent years has shown, analysing the language of specialised texts is an opportunity to obtain access to the early history and vernacularisation of learned writing styles. It is an area of study in which all the contributors have considerable expertise, which affords them to present data findings while discussing important methodological issues. In addition, in most cases data derive from specially-designed ‘second-generation’ corpora, reflecting state-of-the-art approaches to historical linguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics. Theoretical issues concerning the digital edition of medical and scientific texts, their role in social network analysis, and their value in the identification of dialectal specific traits are highlighted by the authors.

Read more less

The composition of aesthetic beauty and its necessary correlation with the counterparts of ugliness and monstrosity have been the primary concerns of artists and philosophers through the ages. This collection of articles, selected from the proceedings of a conference on the theme of The Beautiful and the Monstrous that took place at Cambridge University in April 2008, seeks to reassess conceptualizations and representations of beauty and monstrosity and offers a timely critical evaluation of the relationship between the two. By means of a variety of theoretical approaches and methodologies, the authors provide rigorous analyses of philosophical and artistic expression from medieval to contemporary literature, thought and culture from France and across the French-speaking world. Throughout, they seek to challenge traditional approaches by addressing a diverse range of questions that relate to the beautiful and the monstrous: from formal, metaphysical and ethical considerations of aesthetics, to the threat of the monstrous in realms of psychoanalysis and politics; from figures of beauty and monstrosity as prescriptive social and identitarian categories, to transformations and metamorphoses which challenge the boundaries between human and monstrous other. Engaging with discourses on aesthetics, metaphysics, ethics, politics, psychoanalysis, feminism and postcolonialism, and discussing a spectrum of figures from angels to zombies, this collection offers a fresh range of perspectives on a fundamental transgeneric and transdisciplinary topic.

Read more less

The last five years have proven to be quite tumultuous for Ukraine. The Orange Revolution, as witnessed around the world, sought to overthrow the ancien régime and to replace it with younger, more democratic leaders. At the same time it was a declaration that Ukraine was truly a European nation that duly embraced the democratic values of the west. However, disappointment soon replaced the euphoria of the victory. This volume attempts to show the elements of change and conflict that have arisen since the Orange Revolution and to explain some of Ukraine’s challenges today on its meandering path between East and West.

Read more less

This collection of original essays is concerned with one of the most important writers of the twentieth century: Vladimir Nabokov. The book features contributions from both well-established and new scholars, and represents the latest developments in research. The essays all address the possibility of reading Nabokov’s works as operating between categories of various kinds – whether linguistic, formal, historical or national. In doing so, they explore exciting new paradigms for approaching Nabokov’s oeuvre. The volume brings together a diverse range of critical voices from around the world, to respond to some of the most urgent questions raised about Nabokov’s work. Topics covered include the relationship between his artistic and scientific work, his influences on contemporary fiction, and the development of his aesthetics over his career. Drawing variously on archive research, alternative readings of key texts, and fresh theoretical approaches, this book injects new impetus into Nabokov studies as it continues to evolve as a discipline.

Read more less

Le volume réunit les Actes du colloque de Bucarest ayant eu pour thème la notion de Tradition dans le judaïsme (27-28 octobre 2006). Ce choix fédérateur a été également lesté d’un défi théorique marquant l’originalité de ce colloque : la valorisation des outils de l’anthropologie culturelle à la française et, plus particulièrement, la mise à l’épreuve du concept de bricolage par rapport à celui d’herméneutique. Dans cette perspective, l’acception du terme Tradition est empruntée à l’anthropologie sociale. Cette acception touche à la définition de l’identité, tout en mettant l’accent sur les aspects d’héritage, d’habitus et de mémoire. Les contributions réunies ici traitent entre autres de la distinction entre trou de mémoire et oubli ou entre ré/invention et bricolage de la Tradition. De même, on s’interroge sur le corps comme support de la mémoire collective dans une Tradition dite « du livre ». Enfin, nombre d’auteurs examinent les rapports du judaïsme à la modernité, à la sécularisation et à l’Etat, réalités qui sont autant de « matières à bricoler ». L’ouvrage rassemble 10 contributions en français et 6 en anglais.

Read more less

This book examines frugality as an ideal and an ‘art de vivre’ which implies a low level of material consumption and a simple lifestyle, to open the mind for spiritual goods as inner freedom, social peace and justice or the quest for God or ‘ultimate reality’. By rational choice we can develop a more frugal and sufficient way of life, but material temptations can always overwrite our ecological, social and ethical considerations. But the spiritual case for frugality is strong enough. Spiritually based frugal practices may lead to rational outcomes such as reducing ecological destruction, social disintegration and the exploitation of future generations.

Read more less

Shakespeare’s plays present the dynamics of personal relationships in a way that is direct and unambiguous, and with unparalleled forcefulness. This book concentrates on three of Shakespeare’s last plays, King Lear, Pericles and The Tempest, allowing them to demonstrate the underlying dynamic of theatre as it is embodied within the work of a master craftsman. The three plays are widely dissimilar from one another at the surface level, yet they all concentrate on a particular relationship – that between fathers and daughters – working outwards from the centre of human experience and using the fundamental relational paradigm as it is enshrined in theatre, especially Shakespeare’s. As a professional actor as well as an academic, the author combines an actor’s understanding with psychodynamics and literary criticism.

Read more less

This volume is made up of 17 chapters which have developed out of papers and workshop sessions presented at the event entitled «Corpora: Seminar and Workshops», held at the University of Padua, March 29-31, 2007. It maintains the straightforward, practical approach which characterized that event, meant as an introduction to the use of corpora even for novices. At the same time it goes into a wide range of different applications for corpora in language teaching and language research in higher education. One of these involves the creation and use of learner corpora. Another application involves corpus-assisted research into political discourse in the media. Language for special purposes is also focussed on as a research topic, an academic discipline, and language to be translated. Multimodal corpora are also considered. Proposals are made for corpus-based research into the language of films, and into translation (and mediation) universals. A corpus-based study of text complexity in reading tests is also presented. Large-scale corpora commercially available are also discussed. An online module for translator training is presented, as is an Internet-accessible corpus of Old English poetry.

Read more less

Following on from Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta’s The Anthology in Portugal: A New Approach to the History of Portuguese Literature (2007), these new essays explore further the issues of reception, translation and canonicity. The three authors have produced complementary studies that focus on the role of anthologies in promoting international literary exchange, evaluate the relationship between the literary canon and literature at the margins, and flag up the importance of cover art in conditioning reader expectations. The first part of the book examines both collections of translated short stories considered suitable for children, even if originally written for an adult readership, and, in contrast, high-quality anthologies for older readers, produced in the context of a transnational publishing franchise. The second section offers a thorough analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s reception in Portugal, including where, how and by whom he was disseminated. The history of Poe in Portuguese also sheds valuable light on the broader history of translation and translation anthologies in Portugal. The final part of the volume charts mystery and detective stories selected and translated for Portuguese anthologies and magazines by the leading cultural mediators of the 1940s and 1950s, with an assessment of their contribution to literature in Portugal.

Read more less

The author sets out to examine migration movements to Australia and the role of successive immigration legislation: from the notorious White Australia Policy through to the contemporary multicultural agenda. Her detailed case study sheds new light on the experiences of Polish migrants of the 1980s and their children in Melbourne. The story of successive waves of migration – particularly following the Second World War – and the influence of these on multicultural Australia provide the context of this study. Of particular interest is the relationship between the policy of multiculturalism and language maintenance among first generation Polish migrants and their children (the second generation). In her empirical study of language maintenance, the author analyses ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors for migration from Poland to Australia. She examines the costs of migration; Polish migrants’ experiences of Australia’s multicultural policy; an evaluation of parents’ migration by their children; re-migration to Poland; interaction between Polish migrants and Australian-born people; and the influence of domains such as the home, institutions of learning, the Polish Catholic Church, the media and other organisations and spheres of Polish cultural activity.

Read more less

Michel Houellebecq is a French author whose profile in the English-speaking world is unusually high. He is an author who has put the humour back into the Absurd, without losing any of the awareness of the bleakness of the human condition. Undoubtedly one of the most trenchant satirists of our time, he deflates the projected utopias that we imagine protect us from the ills that beset us. More than many other novelists, his work is a reflection of the social and economic reality of life in a post-industrial society. Houellebecq shows a world of violence and tension, a world where people find it hard to be at ease, so that life becomes a process of disease. This book foregrounds Houellebecq’s scrutiny of our various attempts to confront and transcend the fundamental reality of the human condition, in particular the horror of death.

Read more less