Continuum Publishing Group
Linguistic minorities and modernity; a sociolinguistic ethnography, 2d ed.
Heller (sociology and equity studies in education, U. of Toronto, Canada) reports findings from an ethnographic study of a French minority language high school in Toronto, conducted in the early 1990s. The research explores issues such as nationalism, language policy, bilingualism, identity, power, ideology, race, class, gender and sexuality, and their role in the commodification of identity and language. Nearly a decade later, the issues raised in the first edition (1999, Longman/Pearson) remain current today — in fact, have become increasingly relevant in urban settlements of francophones throughout Canada. The text has been revised and updated throughout for the second edition and contains a new preface by the author. For scholars and students, researchers, policy-makers, teachers, and parents. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Literary theory; a guide for the perplexed.
Klages (English, U. of Colorado) explains the concepts of literary theory for beginners and students. Theories covered are humanist literary theory, structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, ideology and discourse, race and postcolonialism, and postmodernism, with information on key thinkers in each area. The book comes out of an introductory class Klages teaches. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Meaningful texts; the extraction of semantic information from monolingual and multilingual corpora. (reprint, 2005)
Linguists explore a rather novel concept in the profession: analyzing the meaning of a text and the techniques by which it conveys it, rather than focusing solely on the form of the text. Among their topics are electronic tools used by translators in industry, the Hungarian possibility suffix -hat/-het as a dictionary entry, abstract noun collocations in a parallel English-Czech corpus, and studies of English-Latvian legal texts for machine translation. Most of the 21 essays are from two seminars in Ljubljana, Slovenia and Bansko. Bulgaria. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Napoleon and Russia.
London-based independent scholar Adams is the author of several published historical articles. In this text, he offers the first full story of Napoleon and his critical relationship with Russia, from the 1790s and Bonaparte's rise to power, through the period of Austerlitz, Tilsit and the Russian invasion, to the Emperor's fall and its aftermath, offering a fresh insight into the Napoleonic period as a whole. Illustrated with ten b&w plates and 28 b&w maps and diagrams. Distributed in the U.S. by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
A new philosophy of society; assemblage theory and social complexity.
DeLanda (architecture, planning, and preservation Columbia U.) offers a realist social ontology, acknowledging right at the start that he must thereby assert the autonomy of social entities from the conceptions people have of them, even the very people without whose minds the entities would not exist. The theory of assemblages created by Gilles Deleuze in the waning decades of the 20th century provides an anchor. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Peirce's pragmatic theory of inquiry; fallibilism and indeterminacy.
On one level, Cooke (Creighton U., Nebraska) examines American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce's (1839-1914) theory of inquiry in order to spell out his position on fallibilism — the view that one's beliefs might be wrong — his reasons for holding it, and the other positions that grew out of it. But on another level, she is more concerned with articulating a coherent theory and its implications than with tracing his own evolving views. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Post-continental philosophy; an outline.
Post-continentalism has not yet arrived, admits Mullarkey (philosophy, U. of Dundee), and rather than describing past events, he proposes an intervention into the contemporary reception of European thought in the Anglophone world. Drawing inspiration partly from the dissenting work of Deleuze, Badiou, Michel Henry, and Laurelle, he anticipates an embrace of absolute immanence over transcendence, thus overturning the Franco-German apple cart. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Shakespeare in China. (reprint, 2004)
Levith (English, Skidmore College, New York) writes mainly for Western scholars interested in Shakespeare's history and reception in China during the 20th century. After reviewing the early history, he examines Shakespeare under Mao, during and after the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong and Taiwan, Shakespeare and Confucius, and the paradox of Shakespeare in the new China. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Shakespeare in Japan. (reprint, 2005)
This is a paperbound edition of a 2005 book. What happened when Shakespeare's works, which belong to a long and sophisticated tradition, met another long and sophisticated tradition which was completely different? Trying to sort out this complicated question would seem to take on the tragic overtones of one of the Bard's works, but the authors concentrate on the adaptations and translations of Shakespeare's works, and Japanese productions and creative critiques. In the case of adaptation and translation, they focus on the work of Tsubouchi, Fukada and Kinoshita in bringing Shakespeare's work into Japanese culture and language, making it accessible at the very least at the specialist level. The authors then describe how the Japanese stage, literary, and film tradition took on Shakespeare's works, not so much as a foreign artifact but as a cross-cultural narrative. Particularly interesting is their commentary on Kurosawa's adaptations and interpretations. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The shorter Leibniz texts; a collection of new translations.
Leibniz earned a doctorate at 20, developed infinitesimal calculus at 29, and in his 60 years managed to write around 200,000 pages. However, he preferred to work piecemeal, and very little of his impressive output saw print before he died. He made the leap from the early modern to the full-blooded Enlightenment, but was his fate to develop the philosophical school of optimism; Voltaire put Liebniz's credo that this is the best of all possible worlds on horseback and rode it all over Candide. Here Strickland (philosophy, Lancaster U.) ably translates and annotates over 65 of Liebniz's short essays and pieces of correspondence relating to metaphysics, free will and necessity, science, law and ethics, theology and the interplay among mind, body and soul, creating the best of all possible reads for students on the ride toward Leibniz's difficult longer works. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Teacher cognition and language education; research and practice.
In the past 15 years there has been an increasing interest in the study of language teacher cognition — what language teachers think, know and believe — and of its relationship to teachers' classroom practices. Borg (TESOL, U. of Leeds, UK) offers an account of the body of research that exists in this domain so far, particularly work on the cognitions of pre-service and practicing teachers in teaching grammar, reading, and writing. He then examines the research methods used thus far and provides a framework for continuing research on language teacher cognition. The text will be of interest to researchers, teacher educators, policy makers and program and curriculum managers working in first, second, and foreign language contexts. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Who's afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?
As brilliant as Deleuze and Guattari are, sometimes they are overshadowed by critical agendas and interpretations that have accumulated in waves. Lambert (English, Syracuse U.) argues that despite their comments the commentators have underappreciated the project or hastily dismissed it while simultaneously assimilated the objectives into their own projects in multi-culturalism or American identity politics. He builds upon the question of why the revolution of desire did not take place according to its expression, its elements of psychoanalysis, its touch upon politics and its relation to power. The result should be required reading for those who are afraid but will not admit it publicly. The bibliography for this title is accessible only at www.continuumbooks.com. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Wittgenstein and Gadamer; towards a post-analytic philosophy of language.
Lawn (philosophy, U. of Limerick) links Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work on language with Hans-Georg Gadamer's work on the history of philosophy to construct the germ of a philosophy of language that is free from what he finds to be the excessive claims by analytic philosophy on Wittgenstein. The study began as his doctoral dissertation for University College, Dublin, and was published in a cloth edition in 2004. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Wittgenstein and the theory of perception.
A philosopher-artist and environmental activist in Connecticut, Good confesses that he does not in fact talk about Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory of perception, mostly because he neither had one nor ever showed any interest in developing one. But the Austrian-turned- British philosopher was interested in the conceptual meaning of sight and a grammar of sight, and a close reading of passages relating to that in Part Two of Philosophical Investigations provides a foundation for this study of the concept of sight, theories of visual meaning, the experience and expression of sight, causality and visual form and aesthetic experience. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Word grammar; new perspectives on a theory of language structure.
Eight international academics and independent scholars contribute nine chapters to an introductory text on Word Grammar (WG), a theory of language structure founded and developed by Dick Hudson (linguistics, University College London). The text is the result of an April 2002-March 2005 research project on WG supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Several chapters explore recent developments in WG and its capabilities for analyzing linguistic phenomena in various languages; they deal with formal, lexical, morphologial, syntactic and semantic matters. The final chapters examine two theoretical key concepts in WG, head and dependency, and suggest possible avenues for revising and improving the current WG. For academics encountering WG for the first time and those familiar with the theory who are interested in learning the background and potential future of the theory. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The Yorkists; the history of a dynasty.
The archivist to Wells Cathedral, Crawford chronicles the shortest dynasty to occupy the English throne since the Norman Conquest, reigning between 1461 and 1485. To make any sense of events, she must also discuss at some length the Lancastrians, the Yorkist rivals in what is now known as the War of the Roses. Distributed in North America by Palgrave Macmillan. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
