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From the tentative beginnings of European settlement to today’s flourishing writing scene, Adelaide has always been a literary city. Novelists, poets and playwrights have lived here; readers have pored over books, sharing them and discussing them; literary celebrities have visited and sometimes stayed; writers have encouraged each other and fought with each other. Adelaide is literary, too, in the sense of having been written about—sometimes with love, sometimes with scorn. Literature has been important not only to the city’s cultural life but to its identity, to the way it has been seen and, most importantly, to the way it has seen itself. Today, literary Adelaide is thriving. The ‘printers, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, booksellers, authors, publishers, and even reviewers’ that Wakefield imagined more than 180 years ago have been augmented by other infrastructure such as the South Australian Writers’ Centre, the University of Adelaide’s creative writing program, by ArtsSA, by an online literary culture that connects the city to the rest of the world, and by countless reading groups and public readings. Adelaide is home to a vast array of interesting writers, such as Peter Goldsworthy, Sean Williams, Dylan Coleman, Vikki Wakefield, Jan Owen, Roseanne Hawke, Stephen Orr, Fiona McIntosh, Brian Castro, and many others. This flourishing literary life continues to be an important component of one of Adelaide’s most significant identities—as a city of creativity and culture. Adelaide: a literary city hopes to broaden and deepen our understanding of that long component of the city’s life.
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Roots of language was originally published in 1981 by Karoma Press (Ann Arbor). It was the first work to systematically develop a theory first suggested by Coelho in the late nineteenth century: that the creation of creole languages somehow reflected universal properties of language. The book also proposed that the same set of properties would be found to emerge in normal first-language acquisition and must have emerged in the original evolution of language. These proposals, some of which were elaborated in an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1984), were immediately controversial and gave rise to a great deal of subsequent research in creoles, much of it aimed at rebutting the theory. The book also served to legitimize and stimulate research in language evolution, a topic regarded as off-limits by linguists for over a century. The present edition contains a foreword by the author bringing the theory up to date; a fuller exposition of many of its aspects can be found in the author’s most recent work, More than nature needs (Harvard University Press, 2014).
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Abu ‘Abdollâh’ Jafar ibn Mohammad Rudaki (c. 880 CE-941 CE) was a poet to the Samanid court which ruled much of Khorâsân (northeastern Persia) from its seat in Bukhara. He is widely regarded as the father of Persian poetry, for he was the first major poet to write in New Persian language, following the Arab conquest in the seventh and eighth centuries, which established Islam as the official religion, and made Arabic the predominant literary language in Persian-speaking lands for some two centuries. This book presents Rudaki as the founder of a new poetic aesthetic, which was adopted by subsequent generations of Persian poets. Rudaki is credited with being the first to write in the rubâi form; and many of the images we first encounter in Rudaki’s lines have become staples of Persian poetry.
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How does language work? How does language produce truth and beauty? Eleventh-century Arabic scholarship has detailed answers to these universal questions. Language Between God and the Poets reads the theory of four major scholars and asks how the conceptual vocabulary they shared enabled them to create theory in lexicography, theology, logic, and poetics. Their ideas engaged God and poetry at the nexus of language, mind, and reality. Their core conceptual vocabulary carved reality at the joints in a manner quite different from Anglophone and European thought in any period. This vocabulary centered around the words maʿnā (“mental content”) and ḥaqīqah (“accuracy”), two concepts for which Alexander Key develops a translation methodology with the help of Wittgenstein and Kuhn. Language Between God and the Poets helps us see how fundamental the lexicon and lexicography can be to all kinds of theory, how theology can be a science of naming, how logic interacts with language, and how poetic affect can be built on grammar and logic. The four scholars are ar-Rāġib al-Iṣfahānī, Ibn Fūrak, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), and ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Ǧurǧānī.
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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Dutch diplomats, scholars and travellers assembled unique collections in Jeddah, Mecca and Medina. The Dutch presence in Arabia, where they established a consulate in Jeddah, was intimately connected with the supervision of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca from the Netherlands East Indies, present-day Indonesia. Notable guests at this consulate included the formidable Dutch Islamicist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, visiting Arabia in 1884-1885. With the invaluable help of local Muslims, Dutch collectors tried to capture the essence of what they regarded as an ‘authentic’ Oriental culture in a period when Arabia was already looking towards modernity. These extensive collections are now preserved at the Leiden Museum of Ethnology and Leiden University Libaries. Together, they allow a glimpse into a colourful and vibrant society.
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From the first attempts at including sign language in deaf education until today, the status of sign language in deaf education has been marked by changing perspectives on deafness and the needs and abilities of deaf students. The perception of deaf individuals using a sign language and a spoken/written language as bilinguals is a relatively new phenomenon, and so is a bimodal bilingual conception of deaf education. The present work elaborates on the status of sign language in deaf education from a historical perspective with a view to tracing the current diversity of approaches to the education of deaf students. It portrays the developments leading to the establishment of sign bilingual education programmes in diverse social contexts, and discusses the major components and objectives of sign bilingual education based on a comparison of bilingual programmes implemented in Europe and North America. Commonly, the primary promotion of sign language is a characteristic of sign bilingual education conceptions at the programmatic level. Yet, how is this demand put into practice? Are the sign bilingual education programmes established in the last decades based on a common didactic conception? If they are not, what are the main dimensions of variation? And what does the variation observed reveal about the objectives pursued? The systematic analysis of the information gathered about the conception, establishment and evaluation of sign bilingual education reveals the advances that have been made and the challenges that remain regarding the promotion of sign bilingualism in deaf education in the areas of research, policy and practice.
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This study undertakes to examine the problem of the tenses in Classical Arabic. While aware of the long tradition which shaped the discussion of this subject, and building, in fact, on some important insights offered by medieval and modern grammarians, this study attempts to redefine the discussion and propose a new analysis of the tenses, based on a functional text-oriented investigation of a large corpus of Classical Arabic prose. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.
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This book presents current discussions on the concept of genre. It introduces innovative, multidisciplinary approaches to contemporary and historical genres, their roles in cultural discourse, how they change, and their relations to each other.
The reader is guided into the discussion surrounding this key concept and its history through a general introduction, followed by eighteen chapters that represent a variety of discursive practices as well as analytic methods from several scholarly traditions.
This volume will have wide appeal to several academic audiences within the humanities, both in Finland and abroad, and will especially be of interest to scholars of folklore, language and cultural expression.
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This study examines the narrative tools, techniques, and structures that Marja-Liisa Vartio, a classic of Finnish post-war modernism, used in presenting fictional minds in her narrative prose. The study contributes to the academic discussion on formal and thematic conventions of modernism by addressing the ways in which fictional minds work in interaction, and in relation to the enfolding fictional world. The epistemic problem of how accurately the world, the self, and the other can be known is approached by analyzing two co-operating ways of portraying fictional minds, both from external and internal perspectives. The external perspective relies on detachment and emotional restraint dominating in Vartio’s early novels Se on sitten kevät and Mies kuin mies, tyttö kuin tyttö. The internal perspective pertains to the mental processes of self-reflection, speculation, and excessive imagining that gain more importance in her later novels Kaikki naiset näkevät unia, Tunteet, and Hänen olivat linnut. In the theoretical chapter of this study, fictional minds are discussed in the context of the acclaimed “inward turn” of modernist fiction, by suggesting alternative methods for reading modernist minds as embodied, emotional, and social entities. In respect to fictional minds’ interaction, this study elaborates on the ideas of “mind-reading,” “intersubjectivity,” and the “social mind” established within post-classical cognitive narratology. Furthermore, it employs possible world poetics when addressing the complexity, incompleteness, and (in)accessibility of Vartio’s epistemic worlds, including the characters’ private worlds of knowledge, beliefs, emotions, hallucinations, and dreams. In regards to the emotional emplotment of fictional worlds, this study also benefits from affective narratology as well as the plot theory being influenced by possible world semantics, narrative dynamics, and cognitive narratology. As the five analysis chapters of this study show, fictional minds in Vartio’s fiction are not only introspective, solipsist, and streaming, but also embodied and social entities. In the readings of the primary texts, the concept of embodiedness is used to examine the situated presence of an experiencing mind within the time and space of the storyworld. Fictional minds’ (inter)actions are also demonstrated as evolving from local experientiality to long-term calculations that turn emotional incidents into episodes, and episodes into stories. In Vartio’s novels, the emotional story structure of certain conventional story patterns, such as the narratives of female development and the romance plot, the sentimental novel, and epistolary fiction, are modified and causally altered in the portrayal of the embodied interactions between the self, the other, and the world. The trajectories of female self-discovery in Vartio’s novels are analyzed through the emotional responses of characters: their experiences of randomness, their ways of counterfactualizing their traumatic past, their procrastinatory or akratic reactions or indecisiveness. The gradual move away from the percepts of the external world to the excessive imaginings and (mis)readings of other minds (triggered by the interaction of worlds and minds), challenges the contemporary and more recent accounts of modernism both in Finnish and international contexts.
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Language can be this incredibly forceful material—there’s something about it where if you can strip away its history, get to the materiality of it, it can rip into you like claws” (Hill in Vischer 1995, 11). This arresting image by media artist Gary Hill evokes the nearly physical force of language to hold recipients in its grip. That power seems to lie in the material of language itself, which, with a certain rawness, may captivate or touch, pounce on, or even harm its addressee. Hill’s choice of words is revealing: ‘rip into’ suggests not only a metaphorical emotional pull but also the literal physicality of linguistic attack. It is no coincidence that the statement comes from a media artist, since media artworks often use language to produce a strong sensorial stimulus. Media artworks not only manipulate language as a material in itself, but they also manipulate the viewer’s perceptual channels. The guises and effects of language as artistic material are the topic of this book, The Literariness of Media Art.
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This book analyses and discusses the recent developments for assessing research quality in the humanities and related fields in the social sciences. Research assessments in the humanities are highly controversial and the evaluation of humanities research is delicate. While citation-based research performance indicators are widely used in the natural and life sciences, quantitative measures for research performance meet strong opposition in the humanities. This volume combines the presentation of state-of-the-art projects on research assessments in the humanities by humanities scholars themselves with a description of the evaluation of humanities research in practice presented by research funders. Bibliometric issues concerning humanities research complete the exhaustive analysis of humanities research assessment. The selection of authors is well-balanced between humanities scholars, research funders, and researchers on higher education. Hence, the edited volume succeeds in painting a comprehensive picture of research evaluation in the humanities. This book is valuable to university and science policy makers, university administrators, research evaluators, bibliometricians as well as humanities scholars who seek expert knowledge in research evaluation in the humanities.
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This book introduces readers to modern Thai literature through the themes of modernity, nationalism, identity and gender. In the cultural, political and social transformations that occurred in Thailand during the first half of the twentieth century, Thai literature was one of the vehicles that moved the changes. Taking seriously ‘read till it shatters’, a Thai phrase that instructs readers to take apart the text, to break it down, to deconstruct it, Thak Chaloemtiarana challenges the Thai literary canon from the margins and suggests ways of expanding and enriching it.
Thai literature is scarce in translation and requires the skills of a scholar fluent in Thai to comprehend it. Thak is a political scientist turned literary scholar who is bilingual in Thai and English and an avid reader of Thai fiction by authors up and down the social scale. Here he offers lively insights into his favourite literary genres with fresh readings of early Thai novels, Sino-Thai biographies and memoirs of the rich and famous.
‘Thak Chaloemtiarana is an inquisitive man. Late in his career he switched from politics to literature. In these chapters, he draws on a lifetime of reading about writers and writing in Thailand over the past century. He nods towards the usual big names—King Vajiravudh, Luang Wichit, Kulap Saipradit, Kukrit Pramoj—but spends more time on those found in the lesser visited stacks of the libraries, the secondhand bookstalls, and the shelf by the supermarket checkout. His themes are familiar—Thailand and the West, Thai nationalism, the Thai-Chinese, and women under patriarchy—but the angles of vision are original. With a cast ranging from motor-racing princes through sexy Egyptian mummies and a feminist serial murderer to starlets touting breast-enhancement techniques, this book educates, enlightens, and entertains.’
— Dr Chris Baker, Bangkok-based author with Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya (Cambridge 2017)
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Offering key insights into critical debates on the construction, management and destruction of heritage in Muslim contexts, this volume considers how Islamic heritages are constructed through texts and practices which award heritage value. It examines how the monolithic representation of Islamic heritage (as a singular construct) can be enriched by the true diversity of Islamic heritages and how endangerment and vulnerability in this type of heritage construct can be re-conceptualized. Assessing these questions through an interdisciplinary lens including heritage studies, anthropology, history, conservation, religious studies and archaeology, this pivot covers global and local examples including heritage case studies from Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan, and Pakistan.
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