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Boundaries, borderlines, limits on the one hand and rites of passage, contact zones, in-between spaces on the other have attracted renewed interest in a broad variety of cultural discourses after a long period of decenterings and delimitations in numerous fields of social, psychological, and intellectual life. Anthropological dimensions of the subject and its multifarious ways of world-making represent the central challenge among the concerns of the humanities. The role of literature and the arts in the formation of cultural and personal identities, theoretical and political approaches to the relation between self and other, the familiar and the foreign, have become key issues in literary an...
Cognitive Sociolinguistics draws on the rich theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and focuses on the social factors that underlie the variability of meaning and conceptualization. In the last decade, the field has expanded in various way. The current volume takes stock of current and emerging advances in the field in short academic contributions. The studies collected in this book have a usage-based approach to language variation and change, drawing on the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and are sensitive to social variation, be it cross-linguistic or language-internal. Three types of contributions are collected in this book. First, it contains theoretical overview papers on the domains that have witnessed expansion in recent years. Second, it presents novel research ideas in proof-of-concept contributions, aimed at blue-sky research and out-of-the-box linguistic analyses. Third, it showcases recent empirical studies within the field. By combining these three types of contributions, the book provides an encompassing overview of novel developments in the field of Cognitive Sociolinguistics.
This collection ranges far and wide, as befits the personality and accomplishments of the dedicatee, Geoffrey V. Davis, German studies and exile literature scholar, postcolonialist (if there are ‘specialties’, then Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, Black Britain), journal and book series editor.... Themes covered include publishing in Africa, charisma in African drama, the rediscovery of apartheid-era South African literature, Truth and Reconciliation commissions, South African cinema, children’s theatre in England and Eritrea, and the Third Chimurenga in literary anthologies. Surveyed are texts from Botswana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Writers discussed (or i...
What would love be if heterosexual couples were no longer assigned gender and sexual norms? Maxime Foerster examines the Òheterosexual troubleÓ between men and women in nineteenth-century French Romantic and Decadent literature. Key works by authors ranging from George Sand to Charles Baudelaire persistently demonstrate that heterosexuality did not work: these authors, and many others, investigated the struggle that men and women alike waged against patriarchal norms. Whereas Romantic fiction dedicated itself to the reinvention of love, Decadence promoted sexual and gender deviance. In expertly evaluating the discord afflicting fictional heterosexual couples, male and female dandies, and doctors and their female patients, Foerster shows the crucial role that literature played in the fashioning of alternative identities. A concluding look at ProustÕs Ë la recherche du temps perdu traces the legacy of heterosexual trouble in the twentieth century.
Anglophone Israeli Literature comprises a loose community of more than 500 authors and it has co-existed with the Hebrew writing tradition in Israel since the 1970s. Consisting mainly of immigrants from Anglophone countries, Anglophone Israeli Literature is characterized by a search for personal and poetic identity in a highly transcultural environment, challenging settled identities and opting instead for flexibility, flux and inclusion. The present volume considers Anglophone Israeli Literature a a phenomenon in its critical, social and historical aspects on the one hand and explores the specific mechanisms of constructing and representing poetic identity on the other hand. The book analyzes three pivotal elements of identity: language, geography and place, and political and emotional self-positioning towards the Other.
The study of grammatical variation in language mixing has been at the core of research into bilingual language practices. Although various motivations have been proposed in the literature to account for possible mixing patterns, some of them are either controversial, or remain untested. Little is still known about whether and how frequency of use of linguistic elements can contribute to the patterning of bilingual talk. This book is the first to systematically explore the factor usage frequency in a corpus of bilingual speech. The two aims are (i) to describe and analyze the variation in mixing patterns in the speech of Russia German adolescents and young adults in Germany, and (ii) to propo...
The Internet has had a huge impact on channels of communication and information, reaching across time and space to connect the world through globalisation. In this Internet-led world, story links to story, windows open on new stories and no overall authority establishes priority. This sense of globalisation has raised many questions for contemporary American Novelists, primarily the usefulness or redundancy of narrative and its potentially adaptive function. What are the right stories for such a broadband world? How do contemporary American novelists respond to issues such as the influence of the multinational corporation and its predecessors, human rights Imperialism, the literary work as a...
Frequency has been identified as one of the most influential factors in language processing, and plays a major role in usage-based models of language learning and language change. The research presented in this volume challenges established models of linguistic representation. Instead of learning and processing language compositionally, larger units and co-occurence relations are at work. The main point taken by the authors is that by studying the effect of distributional patterns and changes in such patterns we can establish a unified framework that explains the dynamics of language systems with a limited set of processing factors.
Names weave the texture of our daily lives in ways that are self-evident. However, behind their taken-for-granted threads, they conceal a considerable meaning potential that may turn them into malleable vehicles of human goals and agendas. The novelty of this volume lies in the special focus it places on the intersections of naming, identity and tourism, pointing to how names may play a role in the multifaceted process of identity-formation by shaping and promoting tourist attractions, be they topographical or metaphorical locations. The volume collects original contributions on this emerging field of enquiry that foster an eclectic approach to the study of names. The thematic focus and the several approaches adopted here will make the text appealing to postgraduate students and researchers from several disciplinary fields ranging across onomastics, linguistics, cultural and social geography, history, archaeology, heritage, literature, postcolonial studies, and media studies.
Verbal imagery and visual images as well as the intricate relationships between verbal and visual representations have long shaped the imagination and the practice of intercultural relationships. The contributions to this volume take a fresh look at the ideology of form, especially the gendered and racial implications of the gaze and the voice in various media and intermedial transformations. Analyses of how culturally specific forms of visual and verbal expression are individually understood and manipulated complement reflections on the potential and limitations of representation. The juxtaposition of visual and verbal signifiers explores the gap between them as a space beyond cultural boun...