Feb 01
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhannouncements
Title: Language and Enlightenment
Subtitle: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century
Publication Year: 2012
Publisher: Oxford University Press
http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL: http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Linguistics/SociolinguisticsAnthropologicalL/?view=usa&ci=9780199661664
Author: Avi Lifschitz
Hardback: ISBN: 9780199661664 Pages: 272 Price: U.S. $ 110.00
Abstract:
What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain
self-consciousness and construct our civilisation without language? Such were
the questions at the basis of eighteenth-century debates on the joint
evolution of language, mind, and culture. Language and Enlightenment
highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and
aesthetics of the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under
Frederick the Great, Avi Lifschitz situates the Berlin debates within a larger
temporal and geographical framework. He argues that awareness of the
historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream
Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called
‘Counter-Enlightenment’.
Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated whether speechless
human beings could have developed their language and society on their own.
Such inquiries usually pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like
cries and gestures to the artificial, articulate words of human language. This
transition from nature to artifice was mirrored in other domains of inquiry,
such as the origins of social relations, inequality, the arts and the
sciences. By examining a wide variety of authors – Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac,
Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others – Language and Enlightenment
emphasises the open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic
of Letters. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture
and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the
genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a
complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize
contests at the Berlin Academy.
Jan 29
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhannouncements
Christopher Collins introduces an exciting new field of research traversing evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and literary study. Paleopoetics maps the selective processes that originally shaped the human genus millions of years ago and prepared the human brain to play, imagine, empathize, and engage in fictive thought as mediated by language. A manifestation of the “cognitive turn” in the humanities, Paleopoetics calls for a broader, more integrated interpretation of the reading experience, one that restores our connection to the ancient methods of thought production still resonating within us.
Speaking with authority on the scientific aspects of cognitive poetics, Collins proposes reading literature using cognitive skills that predate language and writing. These include the brain’s capacity to perceive the visible world, store its images, and retrieve them later to form simulated mental events. Long before humans could share stories through speech, they perceived, remembered, and imagined their own inner narratives. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Collins builds an evolutionary bridge between humans’ development of sensorimotor skills and their achievement of linguistic cognition, bringing current scientific perspective to such issues as the structure of narrative, the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, the relation of rhetoric to poetics, the relevance of performance theory to reading, the difference between orality and writing, and the nature of play and imagination.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-16092-6/paleopoetics
Jan 26
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhannouncements
Title: Agent, Person, Subject, Self
Subtitle: A Theory of Ontology, Interaction, and Infrastructure
Publication Year: 2013
Publisher: Oxford University Press
http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Philosophy/Mind/?view=usa&ci=9780199926985
Author: Paul Kockelman
Hardback: ISBN: 9780199926985 Pages: 256 Price: U.S. $ 74.00
Abstract:
This book offers both a naturalistic and critical theory of signs, minds, and
meaning-in-the-world. It provides a reconstructive rather than deconstructive
theory of the individual, one which both analytically separates and
theoretically synthesizes a range of faculties that are often confused and
conflated: agency (understood as a causal capacity), subjectivity (understood
as a representational capacity), selfhood (understood as a reflexive
capacity), and personhood (understood as a sociopolitical capacity attendant
on being an agent, subject, or self). It argues that these facilities are best
understood from a semiotic stance that supersedes the usual intentional
stance. And, in so doing, it offers a pragmatism-grounded approach to meaning
and mediation that is general enough to account for processes that are as
embodied and embedded as they are articulated and enminded. In particular,
while this theory is focused on human-specific modes of meaning, it also
offers a general theory of meaning, such that the agents, subjects and selves
in question need not always, or even usually, map onto persons. And while this
theory foregrounds agents, persons, subjects and selves, it does this by
theorizing processes that often remain in the background of such (often
erroneously) individuated figures: ontologies (akin to culture, but
generalized across agentive collectivities), interaction (not only between
people, but also between people and things, and anything outside or
in-between), and infrastructure (akin to context, but generalized to include
mediation at any degree of remove).
Jan 26
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhannouncements
Title: Theories and Models of Communication
Series Title: Handbooks of Communication Science
Publication Year: 2013
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
http://www.degruyter.com/mouton
Book URL: http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/44608?format=G
Editor: Paul Cobley
Editor: Peter Schulz
Electronic: ISBN: 9783110240450 Pages: 442 Price: Europe EURO 149.95
Hardback: ISBN: 9783110240443 Pages: 442 Price: Europe EURO 149.95
Abstract:
This unique volume offers an overview of the diversity of perspectives on
communication: including analyses in terms of biology, sociality, economics,
norms and human development. It includes general social science approaches to
communication, such as those found in systems theory and cultural theory, as
well as perspectives more specifically related to communication acts, such as
linguistics and cognition. The volume also features chapters which focus
specifically on approaches to what are generally seen as the five crucial
elements of the communication process: communicator, message, receiver,
channel, effects. The scope of the contributions is global, and the volume is
relevant to both the empirical and the philosophical traditions in social
science. Designed as a stand-alone collection to engage undergraduates as well
as postgraduates and academics, this is also the first book in, and an
introduction to, the de Gruyter Mouton multi-volume ‘Handbooks of
Communication Science’.
Jan 09
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhannouncements
Title: Parliamentary Discourses across Cultures
Subtitle: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Publication Year: 2012
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
http://www.c-s-p.org
Book URL: http://www.c-s-p.org/flyers/Parliamentary-Discourses-across-Cultures–Interdisciplinary-Approaches1-4438-4197-8.htm
Editor: Liliana Ionescu-Ruxăndoiu
Editor: Melania Roibu
Editor: Mihaela-Viorica Constantinescu
Hardback: ISBN: 1443841978 9781443841979 Pages: 320 Price: U.K. £ 49.99
Hardback: ISBN: 1443841978 9781443841979 Pages: 320 Price: U.S. $ 74.99
Abstract:
This volume looks at the growing interest of different specialists in the
problems associated with political discourse, in general, and parliamentary
discourse, as one of its major sub-genres, in particular. Its main goal is to
offer a deeper understanding of the diversity of parliamentary practices
across space and time. The papers aim to highlight the role played by local
social and historical factors, ideologies, collective mentalities, and social
psychology in building up culture-specific traditions of political
institutions.
Approaching the problems from a large variety of theoretical perspectives, the
investigations are based on flexible, interdisciplinary, and multi-layered
methodologies, offering an image of the multifaceted manifestations of
parliamentary debates.
The volume addresses specialists in several fields, such as linguistics,
discourse analysis, history, political science, sociology, (social)
anthropology, (social) psychology, media and communication.
Dec 21
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhannouncements
Title: Music, Text and Translation
Series Title: Bloomsbury Advances in Translation
Publication Year: 2012
Publisher: Bloomsbury Linguistics (formerly Continuum Linguistics)
http://www.continuumbooks.com
Book URL: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/music-text-and-translation-9781441173089/
Editor: Helen Julia Minors
Hardback: ISBN: 1441173080 9781441173089 Pages: 248 Price: U.K. £ 75.00
Abstract:
Explores the roles that translation plays in a musical context, questioning
the transference of sense between music and text.
‘This volume issues a powerful challenge to everyone who uses the word
“translation” in relation to music. The sheer diversity of its essays
demonstrates, as no previous book has, the extraordinary intellectual and
artistic fertility of bringing together the notions of music and translation –
and the dangers of thinking we know what we’re talking about.’ – Peter
Dayan, The University of Edinburgh, UK.
Dec 20
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhannouncements
Title: Semiotics of Religion
Subtitle: Signs of the Sacred in History
Series Title: Advances in Semiotics
Publication Year: 2012
Publisher: Bloomsbury Linguistics (formerly Continuum Linguistics)
http://www.continuumbooks.com
Book URL: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/semiotics-of-religion-9781441104199/
Author: Robert A Yelle
Hardback: ISBN: 1441142827 9781441142825 Pages: 256 Price: U.K. £ 75.00
Paperback: ISBN: 1441104194 9781441104199 Pages: 256 Price: U.K. £ 24.99
Abstract:
Following the heyday of Lévi-Straussian structuralism in the 1970s-80s, little
attention has been paid by scholars of religion to semiotics. Semiotics of
Religion reassesses key semiotic theories in the light of religious data.
Yelle examines the semiotics of religion from structural and historical
perspectives, drawing on Peircean linguistic anthropology, Jakobsonian
poetics, comparative religion and several theological traditions. This book
pays particular attention to the transformation of religious symbolism under
modernization and the rise of a culture of the printed book.
Building from the legacy of structuralism while interrogating several key
doctrines of that movement, Semiotics of Religion both introduces the field to
a new generation and charts a course for future research.
‘This book is vast in scope, deep in implications, and admirably clear and
forthright in exposition.The study of religion has needed a work of this kind,
which brings together several research traditions and pushes the resulting
synthesis in new directions.The result is an agenda-setting project of huge
ambition.’ – Webb Keane, University of Michigan, USA.
Older Entries Newer Entries
RSS
Recent Comments