This volume contains papers on the Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects and the languages in contact with them. The papers make important contributions to the documentation of the dialects and to the understanding of their development in the context of non-Semitic contact languages.

Poet, social justice advocate, and theologian Thomas Merton (1915--1968) is arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. In his short lifetime, he penned over seventy books and maintained a brisk correspondence with colleagues around the globe. However, many Merton scholars and fans remain unaware of the significant body of letters that were exchanged between the Trappist monk and Victor and Carolyn Hammer. Unable to leave his home at the Abbey of Gethsemani except on special occasions, Merton developed a unique friendship with this couple from nearby Lexington, Kentucky. Carolyn, who supplied Merton with many of the books he required for his writing and teaching, was a founder of the King Library Press at the University of Kentucky. Victor was an accomplished painter, sculptor, printer, and architect. The friendship and collaborations between Merton and the Hammers reveal their shared interest in the convergence of art, literature, and spirituality.In this volume, editors F. Douglas Scutchfield and Paul Evans Holbrook Jr. have collected the trio's complete correspondence for the first time. Their letters, arranged chronologically, vividly demonstrate a blossoming intellectual camaraderie and provide a unique opportunity to understand Merton's evolving philosophies. At times humorous, often profound, the letters in this volume shed light on a rare friendship and offer new insights into the creative intellect of Thomas Merton.

Gertrude Stein is a seminal figure in modern and postmodern literature, yet her work is not easily defined and has had both fierce supporters and equally fierce detractors. In a series of linked essays, How Reading Is Written considers a set of questions associated with reading Gertrude Stein today. In particular, how can we read a body of work that is largely resistant to conventional and interpretation-based models of literary criticism? The book is structurally and conceptually an index to Stein's poetics, and it considers Stein alongside other writers and thinkers, and across discourses of philosophy, science, queer theory, and literary criticism. Like Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael and Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, How Reading Is Written joins a tradition of books by poets about the writers who have intensely figured into their conception of poetry. Astrid Lorange recovers previously overlooked critical work on Stein and aims to construct a new intellectual episteme for Stein's work—one that connects with contemporary contexts as well as repositions Stein in her moment of transnational modernism.

First English translation of this 19th century novel tracing the relationship between traditional Greenlandic life and the interaction with the culture of their Danish colonizers.These first hand accounts of Greenlanders have rarely been recorded. Written in 1887, with exquisite poetic detail, the dynamics driving ritual, domestic affairs and women's place in society are described as never before. Signe Rink (née Miller, 1836–1909) was born and raised in Greenland. Eden of The North was written after Rink returned to Denmark in 1883, and was followed by two more novels in 1886 and 1902. She remains the first female interpreter of Greenlandic culture and maintains a poetic style only achieved by the deepest of empathies developed after many years of living and working among Inuit as a woman and a scientist. L.S. Johanson was born in San Diego,California. L.S. later moved to Scandinavia where she lived on a small farm in western Denmark for 25 years. As an interpreter, translator, and teacher, she studied languages and linguistics at Aalborg University and Aarhus University in Denmark (Cand.Phil., Cand.Mag.) She has been translating fiction and non-fiction professionally in the U.S. and Scandinavia for over two decades. She currently lives, writes, and works in Vermont.

The fourth published colloquia of the International Syriac Language Project (ISLP), presenting papers from an international team of authors working to develop contemporary, interdisciplinary approaches to linguistics and lexicography.

A lexicon of Smyrneika, the Greek dialect that functioned as a lingua franca amongst the Levantine merchant communities of the Mediterranean. Rediscovering Turkey’s Ottoman past, including lost minority cultures… a study by three amateur lexicographers. The vocabulary is followed by a collection of proverbs and a series of dialogues illustrating the language and customs … “ Peter Mackridge www. oxford.academia.edu/PeterMackridge

In Literate Zeal, Janet Carey Eldred examines the rise of women magazine editors during the mid-twentieth century and reveals their unheralded role in creating a literary aesthetic for the American public. Between the sheets of popular magazines, editors offered belles-lettres to the masses and, in particular, middle-class women. Magazines became a place to find culture, humor, and intellectual affirmation alongside haute couture. Eldred mines a variety of literary archives, notably the correspondence of Katharine Sargeant White of the New Yorker, to provide an insiderÆs view of the publisher-editor-author dynamic. Here, among WhiteÆs letters, memos, and markups, we see the deliberate shaping of literature to create a New Yorker ethos. Through her discrete phrasing, authors are coaxed by White to correct or wholly revise their work. Stories or poems by famous writers are rejected for being \u201cdizzying\u201d or \u201ctoo literate.\u201d With a surgeonÆs skill, \u201cdisturbing\u201d issues such as sexuality and race are extracted from manuscripts. Eldred chronicles the work of women (and a few men) editors at the major womenÆs magazines of the day. LadiesÆ Home Journal, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and others enacted an editorial style similar to that of the New Yorker by offering literature, values, and culture to an educated and aspiring middle class. Publishers effectively convinced readers that middlebrow stories (and by association their audience) had much loftier pursuits. And they were right. These publications created and sustained a mass literacy never before seen in American publishing.

The notion of text is perhaps the most used and discussed within social and human sciences. Nevertheless, it is surprisingly one of the worst defined. Philology and Linguistics, Literary Criticism and Aesthetics, Philosophy of Language, Hermeneutics, Ethnology, Psychoanalysis, Sociology, Semiotics: all these disciplines refer in various ways to the "text", to make of it the basic object of their analysis or to measure the distance they keep from it. So what does "text" mean? What genealogy does this concept have? Why is there “no salvation outside the text”? This book shows why the text should be the formal model to explain all human, social, cultural and historic phenomena and, as a consequence, the product of a double invention: first as a sociocultural configuration, secondly as an analytical reconstruction.

The Murray Edwards Duse Collection is the best record of Eleonora Duse’s literary background. So advanced was her artistic and literary emancipation that she was considered one of the foremost Italian aesthetes. The discovery and reconstruction of The Collection change in many ways the reception of her acting and of her intellectual profile, shedding new light on her art. The Murray Edwards Duse Collection includes several books that Eleonora Duse read: a fundamental resource in understanding the roots of her artistic profile. It could now be said there are two aspects to Duse’s acting. She is first and foremost one of the greatest actress in the history of theatre; but she is also an incomparable intellectual of her time. The Murray Edwards Duse Collection may be considered metaphorically as Duse’s gold, previously considered to be lost for ever.This book has been published with the sustain of the Murray Edwards College.

In the contemporary world, the figure of the migrant, moving across spaces, cultures and languages,has acquired unprecedented centrality. Migrants have transformed the ways of representingand narrating the transnational world in which they live, responding in new fashions to one of the oldest impulses of men and women of every place and time: the impulse to tell stories. By engaging with the notions of diaspora, postcoloniality, nomadism, translation, and exile, Di Maio moves across the Anglophone and Italophone spectra offering a compelling definition of migrant literature at the turn of the millennium.

This book investigates the cognitive roots of pronunciation in children and adults and the emergence of accent with adults when learning a second language (L2). Subsequently, any teaching of L2 pronunciation to adults should be premised on a multisensory and multicognitive approach covering a wide selection of teaching and learning strategies consistent with the cognitive roots.

Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist José María Arguedas (1911–1969) was a highly conflicted figure. As a mestizo, both European and Quechua blood ran through his veins and into his cosmology and writing. Arguedas’s Marxist influences and ethnographic work placed him in direct contact with the subalterns he would champion in his stories. His exposés of the conflicts between Indians and creoles, and workers and elites were severely criticized by his contemporaries, who sought homogeneity in the nation-building project of Peru.In Rethinking Community from Peru, Irina Alexandra Feldman examines the deep political connotations and current relevance of Arguedas’s fiction to the Andean region. Looking principally to his most ambitious and controversial work, All the Bloods, Feldman analyzes Arguedas’s conceptions of community, political subjectivity, sovereignty, juridical norm, popular actions, and revolutionary change. She deconstructs his particular use of language, a mix of Quechua and Spanish, as a vehicle to express the political dualities in the Andes. As Feldman shows, Arguedas’s characters become ideological speakers and the narrator’s voice is often absent, allowing for multiple viewpoints and a powerful realism. Feldman examines Arguedas’s other novels to augment her theorizations, and grounds her analysis in a dialogue with political philosophers Walter Benjamin, Jean-Luc Nancy, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Álvaro García-Linera, among others.In the current political climate, Feldman views the promise of Arguedas’s vision in light of Evo Morales’s election and the Bolivian plurality project recognizing indigenous autonomy. She juxtaposes the Bolivian situation with that of Peru, where comparatively limited progress has been made towards constitutional recognition of the indigenous groups. As Feldman demonstrates, the prophetic relevance of Arguedas’s constructs lie in their recognition of the sovereignty of all ethnic groups and their coexistence in the modern democratic nation-state, in a system of heterogeneity through autonomy—not homogeneity through suppression. Tragically for Arguedas, it was a philosophy he could not reconcile with the politics of his day, or from his position within Peruvian society.

Best-sellers are the books that sell well, are read by large numbers of people, and are widely talked about in the media and among readers. Yet there has been little research on the creation, reception, and cultural and social significance of best-sellers. Recognising that popular narratives play an important role in the lives of millions of readers, this book looks closely at the literature so many people read. As global market phenomena, situated in between the power spheres of producers and consumers, best-sellers also highlight the interdependency of culture, market, and the individual. This volume addresses such diverse questions as the creation of hype, the role and the meaning of the author in the present-day media landscape, changes in the book trade, historical perspectives on best-selling literature, and the relationship between best-sellers and literary research.

The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch—"Angouleme" was first published in 1978 to the intense interest of science fiction readers and the growing community of SF scholars. Recalling Nabokov's commentary on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Roland Barthes' commentary on Balzac's Sarazine, and Grabinier's reading of The Heart of Hamlet, this book-length essay helped prove the genre worthy of serious investigation. The American Shore is the third in a series of influential critical works by Samuel R. Delany, beginning with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine, first published in the late seventies and reissued over the last five years by Wesleyan University Press, which helped win Delany a Pilgrim Award for Science Fiction Scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association of America. This edition includes the author's corrected text as well as a new introduction by Delany scholar Matthew Cheney.

Self and Other explores the complex dynamic between the individual and the collectivity, narrative and identity that define the short fiction of Yūsuf al-Shārūnī, pioneer of Arab literary modernism. With a range of translated extracts, Kate V.M. Daniels offers English-speaking readers an invaluable introduction to one of Egypt's greatest short story-writers.

"So wise were our elders!" Thus exclaims Mariano Chicunque, himself an elder, expressing in a single phrase the thrust of the mythic narrative tradition he simultaneously presents and represents in his storytelling.A remarkable body of mythology is documented for the first time in this volume. John Homes McDowell's study revolves around thirty-two mythic narratives of the Kamsá Indians who live in the Sibundoy Valley of the Colombian Andes, collected by the author from several renowned Kamsá storytellers. Each myth is given in the native language with parallel English translations that seek to capture the flavor of the original performances. Textual annotation and commentary assess the grounding of the myths in the language and culture of the Kamsá indigenous community.Introductory chapters describe the process of transcription and translation and highlight important characteristics of the collection. McDowell stresses the collaborative nature of the enterprise, which benefits from the shared vision of the ethnographer and of indigenous consultants who were involved in every step of the process. The narratives are portrayed as a residual mythology in transit toward folktale but still evocative of a traditional cosmos. The myths are much more than inert "literary" objects, and under McDowell's scrupulous analysis they emerge as a storehouse of narrative potential whose performances still have meaning in Kamsá society and culture today."So Wise Were Our Elders" is a companion volume to McDowell's Sayings of the Ancestors: The Spiritual Life of the Subundoy Indians (1989).