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A timely, provocative, necessary look at how identity politics has come to dominate college campuses and higher education in America at the expense of a more essential commitment to equality. Thirty years after the culture wars, identity politics is now the norm on college campuses-and it hasn't been an unalloyed good for our education system or the country. Though the civil rights movement, feminism, and gay pride led to profoundly positive social changes, William Egginton argues that our culture's increasingly narrow focus on individual rights puts us in a dangerous place. The goal of our education system, and particularly the liberal arts, was originally to strengthen community; but the e...
William Egginton laments the current debate over religion in America, in which religious fundamentalists have set the tone of political discourse--no one can get elected without advertising a personal relation to God, for example--and prominent atheists treat religious belief as the root of all evil. Neither of these positions, Egginton argues, adequately represents the attitudes of a majority of Americans who, while identifying as Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, do not find fault with those who support different faiths and philosophies. In fact, Egginton goes so far as to question whether fundamentalists and atheists truly oppose each other, united as they are in their commitment to a "code o...
This work on language policy covers such topics as: language policy agendas; language policy-making in Britain in the 1990s; language policy in the USA; the case of Australia; developments in Canada; and social justice in the work of ESL teachers.
What is special, distinct, modern about modernity? In How the World Became a Stage, William Egginton argues that the experience of modernity is fundamentally spatial rather than subjective and proposes replacing the vocabulary of subjectivity with the concepts of presence and theatricality. Following a Heideggerian injunctive to search for the roots of epochal change not in philosophies so much as in basic skills and practices, he describes the spatiality of modernity on the basis of a close historical analysis of the practices of spectacle from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, paying particular attention to stage practices in France and Spain. He recounts how the space in which the world is disclosed changed from the full, magically charged space of presence to the empty, fungible, and theatrical space of the stage.
'In 1605 a crippled, greying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. That book, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the most widely read author in human history. Cervantes did more than just publish a bestseller, though. He invented a way of writing.' In Cervantes' time, 'fiction' was synonymous with a lie. Books were either history, and true, or 'poetry' which might be invented, but had to conform to strict principles. Don Quixote tells the story of a poor nobleman, addled from reading too many books on chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and...
The sociopolitical dimensions of English language teaching are central to the English language professional. These dimensions include language policies, cultural expectations, and the societal roles of languages. This book aims to present these issues to practicing and aspiring teachers in order to raise awareness of the sociopolitical nature of English language teaching.
The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 was a tragic illustration of the existential threat that the viral spread of disinformation poses in the age of social media and twenty-four-hour news. From climate change denialism to the frenzied conspiracy theories and racist mythologies that fuel antidemocratic white nationalist movements in the United States and abroad, What Would Cervantes Do? is a lucid meditation on the key role the humanities must play in dissecting and combatting all forms of disinformation. David Castillo and William Egginton travel back to the early modern period, the first age of inflationary media, in search of historically tested strategies to overcome disinformat...
ESL Readers and Writers in Higher Education describes the challenges ESL students in U.S. postsecondary institutions face when studying in a second language, and offers suggestions for how teachers, advisors, tutors, and institutions might provide support that meets the reading and writing needs of this very important student population. Because the ESL profession as a whole, including what professionals are doing in the classroom, sits under the umbrella of an institutional response to a language-related challenge, some solutions aimed at helping students achieve optimal proficiency lie outside of the classroom. As such, this book is based on the assertion that language development support is not the sole responsibility of language teachers. Everyone on campuses that hosts ESL students bears some responsibility for these students' language development. Chapters are therefore, intentionally adapted to appeal to a wide variety of readers from classroom teachers, and teachers in training, to admissions officers, academic advisors, and international student advisors.
The rapid development of communications technology is transforming the manner in which people communicate across time and space. In this book, the authors examine the ways in which the English language has adapted to new media.
The essays and research papers in this collection explore current issues in Language Education, English for Academic Purposes, Contrastive Discourse Analysis, and Language Policy and Planning, and outline promising directions for theory and practice in applied linguistics. The collection also honours the life-long contribution of Robert B. Kaplan to the field.