This publication presents the transcription and translation of eight Syriac inscriptions from the Persian region of Salamas found in ancient cemeteries and church buildings. The inscriptions are accompanied by brief commentary and helpful introduction.

This study presents a modern linguistic approach to the function of the Syriac et-verbal prefix. Based on a detailed analysis of a number of early Syriac texts, it proposes a unified account of the different values traditionally attributed to the Syriac et- stems. Farina views the data within a typologically comparative framework derived from a cross-linguistic study of middle conjugations.

An early study of the Babylonian kudurru (boundary stone) inscriptions of what is now known as the Kassite Era, this booklet presents a self-contained exploration of two of the markers. Focusing on Kudurru Inscriptions III R. 43 and III R. 41, Belser gives transcriptions and translations of both texts. A detailed commentary follows the presentation of the actual texts, and this is accompanied by notes from the original drawings of the text. Carefully reproduced full text hand-drawn copies are also included.

Nemrod Simono’s intermediate grammar for Modern Assyrian that serves as a follow up to his beginner’s grammar. The volume includes exercises for self-guided study.

This new book by eminent scholar Michael Davidson gathers his essays concerning formally innovative poetry from modernists such as Mina Loy, George Oppen, and Wallace Stevens to current practitioners such as Cristina Rivera-Garza, Heriberto Yépez, Lisa Robertson, and Mark Nowak. The book considers poems that challenge traditional poetic forms and in doing so trouble normative boundaries of sexuality, subjectivity, gender, and citizenship. At the heart of each essay is a concern with the "politics of form," the ways that poetry has been enlisted in the constitution-and critique-of community. Davidson speculates on the importance of developing cultural poetics as an antidote to the personalist and expressivist treatment of postwar poetry. A comprehensive and versatile collection, On the Outskirts of Form places modern and contemporary poetics in a cultural context to reconsider the role of cultural studies and globalization in poetry.

In the late 1960s, colleges and universities became deeply embroiled in issues of racial equality. To combat this, hundreds of new programs were introduced to address the needs of \u201chigh-risk\u201d minority and low-income students. In the years since, university policies have flip-flopped between calls to address minority needs and arguments to maintain \u201cStandard English. \u201d Today, anti-affirmative action and anti-access sentiments have put many of these high-risk programs at risk. In Interests and Opportunities, Steve Lamos chronicles debates over high-risk writing programs on the national level, and locally, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Using critical race theorist Derrick BellÆs concept of \u201cinterest convergence,\u201d Lamos shows that these programs were promoted or derailed according to how and when they fit the interests of underrepresented minorities and mainstream whites (administrators and academics). He relates struggles over curriculum, pedagogy, and budget, and views their impact on policy changes and course offerings. Lamos finds that during periods of convergence, disciplinary and institutional changes do occur, albeit to suit mainstream standards. In divergent times, changes are thwarted or undone, often using the same standards. To Lamos, understanding the past dynamics of convergence and divergence is key to formulating new strategies of local action and \u201cstory-changing\u201d that can preserve and expand race-consciousness and high-risk writing instruction, even in adverse political climates.

From before the Civil War until his death in 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson was renowned -- and renounced -- as one of the United States' most prominent abolitionists and as a leading visionary of the nation's liberal democratic future. Following his death, however, both Emerson's political activism and his political thought faded from public memory, replaced by the myth of the genteel man of letters and the detached sage of individualism. In the 1990s, scholars rediscovered Emerson's antislavery writings and began reviving his legacy as a political activist. A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is the first collection to evaluate Emerson's political thought in light of his recently rediscovered political activism.What were Emerson's politics? A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson authoritatively answers this question with seminal essays by some of the most prominent thinkers ever to write about Emerson -- Stanley Cavell, George Kateb, Judith N. Shklar, and Wilson Carey McWilliams -- as well as many of today's leading Emerson scholars. With an introduction that effectively destroys the "pernicious myth about Emerson's apolitical individualism" by editors Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk, this volume reassesses Emerson's famous theory of self-reliance in light of his antislavery politics, demonstrates the importance of transcendentalism to his politics, and explores the enduring significance of his thought for liberal democracy.Including a substantial bibliography of work on Emerson's politics over the last century, A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is an indispensable resource for students of Emerson, American literature, and American political thought, as well as for those who wrestle with the fundamental challenges of democracy and liberalism.

This volume introduces the letters of the Syriac alphabet a few at the time, and each set of letters is accompanied by guides to pronunciation and the correct way to write the letters, including helpful charts and illustrations. Practice exercises at the end of each section provide the user with copious opportunities for review to facilitate rapid acquisition. This volume will be helpful to all who want to learn the basics of Syriac pronunciation and orthography without being inundated with technical linguistic jargon.

Isaac Taylor (1829-1901) is best known for his archaeological and philological works, especially his detailed study of the alphabets published in 1883. This book on the Semitic alphabets comprises the first volume of Taylor’s 1883 study. Taylor begins with a discussion on the invention of writing and the origin of the alphabet, then gives a discussion of three alphabetic families, what he calls the Phoenician alphabet, the Aramean alphabets (covering Palmyra, Hebrew, Syriac, Mongolian, and Arabic), and the south Semitic alphabets (covering Sabean and Ethiopic).

This volume studies the strophic patterns used by Ephrem the Syrian, which the author divides into five types. An appendix deals with possible relationships between Byzantine (esp. Romanos) and Syriac poetic forms.

The present work, Michel Feghali’s doctoral dissertation, is the first large scale investigation of the survival of Syriac linguistic features in Arabic dialects; he examines in particular, the Lebanese dialects.

Mark Lidzbarski (1868-1928) here presents annotated German translations of Neo-Aramaic stories, tales, and songs, including a version of the Ahiqar legend.

Semitist Friedrich Schulthess (d. 1922) here presents a study of forty-nine homonyms in Syriac considered in light of comparative Semitics. Language indices conclude the study.

This brief Syriac grammar for students, along with a prolegomena showing how Syriac fits in among other Aramaic dialects, includes the standard grammatical items. The paradigms are unique for including Jewish Aramaic forms side by side with the Syriac.

Cowper, having reasoned that English students of Syriac deserve an affordable and complete, yet not too cumbersome and detailed, guide to the language, here offers an abridged and edited English version of Hoffmann’s grammar, originally published in Latin in 1827.

Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed) is Aimé Césaire's most explosive collection of poetry. Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with an African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. A Césaire poem is an intersection at which metaphoric traceries create historically aware nexuses of thought and experience, jagged solidarity, apocalyptic surgery, and solar dynamite. The original 1948 French edition of Soleil cou coupé has a dense magico-religious frame of reference. In the late 1950s, Césaire was increasingly politically focused and seeking a wider audience, when he, in effect, gelded the 1948 text-eliminating 31 of the 72 poems, and editing another 29. Until now, only the revised 1961 edition, called Cadastre, has been translated. The revised text lacks the radical originality of Soleil cou coupé. This Wesleyan edition presents all the original poems en face with the new English translations. Includes an introduction by A. James Arnold and notes by Clayton Eshleman.