Lazuri: An Endangered Language from the Black Sea

Edited by Züleyha Ünlü, Tokat Gaziosmanpasa University, Turkey and Brian George Hewitt, Emeritus Professor of Caucasian Languages (SOAS, London); Fellow of the British Academy; International Circassian Academy of Sciences, Jordan; Abkhazian Academy of Sciences

'Lazuri: An Endangered Language of the Black Sea' is a unique source in terms of presenting a close examination of the Laz language from multiple perspectives. This volume, edited by Züleyha Ünlü, and Brian George Hewitt, examines the current status of the Laz language, Laz speakers’ perceptions of ethnolinguistic vitality, the significance of the Laz language for theoretical research in linguistics, the examination of Laz lexical data from historical documents, the linguistic variation of the Laz language, the use of a Laz alphabet in literary genres, contemporary responses to preserve the Laz language, and reflections from applied linguistics for the future of the Laz language. Focusing on the main features of the Laz language and its present situation in Turkey and in other regions as well as the attempts to revitalize Laz and Laz culture, this book will be the first scholarly publication on Laz as a South Caucasian language in terms of being a road-map for future studies.

TASTE: Why You Like What You Like

A Cultural Studies Analysis

Arthur Asa Berger, San Francisco State University

Taste is an enigmatic topic. We recognize that taste plays an important role in our life in that everything we buy and many things we do are governed by our sense of taste. But what exactly is taste? How do we get our sense of taste and how does it affect our everyday lives? Does it evolve as we grow older or is it a constant in our lives? Is it affected by all the “influencers” to whom we are exposed as we watch TikTok and commercials, or do influencers merely spark some kind of inner sense of taste that was with us all the time? Is our taste based on our social and economic status or something else? What role do income and cost have in determining what we choose to buy? What role do the qualities of what we buy and the choices we make shape our decisions? Is taste based on logical thinking about things we wish to do or buy upon emotions we have generated by things like identification, status, or cultural imperatives? Taste always involves some element of choice, because if there is no choice, taste is irrelevant or moot. But what are the determinants when we compare things to buy or get or do when we have choices to make? This book takes its point of departure from the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose book 'Distinction' is considered a classic work of sociological analysis. The topics dealt with are shown in the table of contents below. The book is distinctive in that it offers discussions of four methodologies/theories used in discussing taste: semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, sociological theory and Marxist theory and then applies these theories in the second part of the book to a variety of topics involving taste, such as yogurt, dogs, the singer Celine Dion, ocean cruises, brands, smartphones, men’s facial hair, and so on. Readers of the book will learn four methodologies they can use in analyzing taste and see how these methodologies were applied.

Advances in Brand Semiotics & Discourse Analysis

Edited by George Rossolatos

This volume addresses some of the most important conceptual, methodological, and empirical challenges and opportunities with which the sister disciplines of semiotics and discourse analysis are mutually confronted in the context of considering new avenues of cross-disciplinary application to distinctive branding research streams. In continuation of the collective volume 'Handbook of Brand Semiotics' (Kassel University Press, 2015), which sought to consolidate relevant scholarship and to identify the main territories that have been established at the cross-roads between branding and semiotic research, the current 'Advances in Brand Semiotics & Discourse Analysis' aims at accomplishing further strides in critical areas, such as the exigency for reconsidering the aptness of existing semiotic theories in the face of the radically shifting co-creative landscape of digital branding, the benefits of systematically micro-analyzing brand communities’ discourses by drawing on CAQDAS programs, the combination of big data analytics with discourse theory in corpus analysis, and the epistemological issues that emerge while combining discourse analysis with time-hallowed marketing qualitative and quantitative research methods. At the same time, the volume hosts a resourceful blend of empirical studies and novel conceptual frameworks in burgeoning streams, such as place, heritage, culinary, personal, and political branding.

In Search of the Lost World: The Modernist Quest for the Thing, Matter, and Body

Tsaiyi Wu, Shanghai Normal University

From a historical perspective, the book studies how modernist artists, as the first generation who began to rethink intensively the legacy of German Idealism, sought to recreate the self so as to recreate their relationships with the material world. Theoretically, the book converses with the topical de-anthropocentric interests in the 21st century and proposes that the artist may escape human-centeredness through the transformation of the self. Part One, “Artificiality,” begins the discussion with the fin-de-siècle cult of artificiality, where artists such as Theophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, J.K. Huysmans, and Gustave Moreau dedicate themselves to love stony sphinxes, marble statues, and inorganic appearances. The cult of artificiality is a mischievous subversion to Hegel’s maxim that inwardness is superior to matter. In the cult of artificiality, art is superior to nature, though art is no longer defined as immaterial imagination but rather reconfigured as mysterious appearances that defy signification and subjugate the feeling heart. Part Two, “Auto-philosophical Fiction,” discusses the genre where the artists (Marcel Proust, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf) set philosophical ideas in the laboratory of their lives and therefore translate their aesthetic ideals—the way they wish to relate to the world—into a journey of self-examination and self-cultivation. In Pater’s novel 'Marius the Epicurean', the hero explores how a philosophical percept may be translated into sentiments and actions, demonstrating that literature is a unique approach to truth as it renders theory into a transformative experience. Exploring the latest findings of empiricist psychology, the artists seek to escape the Kantian trap by cultivating their powers of reception and to register passing thoughts and sensations. Together, the book argues that de-anthropocentrism cannot be predicated upon a metaphysics that presumes universal subjectivity but must be a form of aesthetic inquiry that recreates the self in order to recreate our relationships with the world.

Voices From the Wreckage: Young Adult Voices in the #MeToo Movement

Edited by Kimberly Karshner, Lorain County Community College

'Voices From the Wreckage: Young Adult Voices in the #MeToo Movement' is an edited collection by Kimberly Greenfield Karshner (Lorain County Community College). This collection focuses on situating young adult voices in the #MeToo movement, and into American culture and identity. Children’s and young adult literature is an area of study that has rapidly evolved in the past ten years, bringing previously silenced voices to light. This is especially true for YA LGBTQ+ voices, and also for young narrators who are not only discovering, celebrating, and coming to terms with their identities, but also dealing with assaults on their identities. This collection will build on what writers like Laurie Halse Anderson have begun, first with her groundbreaking book on sexual assault, 'Speak', published in 1999, and more currently, her follow-up book, 'Shout' (2019). These authors continue what Anderson started, exploring texts from the perspectives of YA male and female voices, Native American and international perspectives, and LGBTQ+ character representation. Chapters investigate various literary forms such as graphic novels, memoirs, and novels, and cover topics such as sexual desire, consent, trauma, and survivorship. The literature featured in this volume will assure young people that they can tell their stories and that they will be heard. 'Voices From the Wreckage' will be a valuable tool for anyone who teaches Young Adult Literature, or for those who are avid readers and fans of the genre. The authors in this collection are starting and continuing very important conversations on the topic of sexual abuse and trauma, a conversation necessary for the intended audiences of these books, and for adult readers and teachers who are facilitating the emotions connected to these topics.

Language, Land and Belonging: Poetic Inquiries

Edited by Natalie Honein, American University of Sharjah, UAE and Margaret McKeon, St. Mary’s University, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

This volume takes up themes emergent from the 7th International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry (ISPI) which invited participants to reflect on the United Nations Declaration of 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. In this refereed collection, Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors use poetic inquiry to explore the importance of their ancestral languages and lands, and consider the Indigenous languages and peoples of the lands where they live. Situated in diverse global contexts, poet-researchers examine the intersectionality of their languages, their lands, and their sense of belonging. They offer relational understandings of, and articulate obligations for, their environment and communities. Through stories of shared generational pain and renewal, each author brings the reader into their world of learning and growth. They do this through discourses of belonging and relational responsibilities that tie them to a place, a genealogy. As a method of study that incorporates poetry into academic research, poetic inquiry is concerned with particularity, complexity, and transformations. Making research more visceral and evocative, it invites researchers to examine and engage with the knowledge they seek through a continual process of questioning, welcoming, and awareness. In this volume, poetic inquiry helps to honor languages and histories taken for granted; it allows looking back in order to reexamine, redefine, and make sense of the present and its shortcomings while reimagining a different future. This work seeks to reclaim, through poetic inquiry, wisdom of language, land, and belonging.

Voicing Memories, Unearthing Identities: Studies in the Twenty-First-Century Literatures of Eastern and East-Central Europe

Edited by Aleksandra Konarzewska, University of Tübingen, Germany and Anna Nakai, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan

In the region known as Eastern and East-Central Europe, the framework provided by memory studies became highly valuable for understanding the overload of interpretations and conflicting perspectives on events during the twentieth century. The trauma of two world wars, the development of collective consciousness according to national and ethnic categories, stories of the trampled lands and lives of people, and resistance to the rule of authoritarian and totalitarian terrors—these trajectories left complex layers of identities to unfold. The following volume addresses the issue of identity as a pivot in studies of memory and literature. In this context, it addresses the question of cultural negotiation as it took shape between memory and literature, history and literature, and memory and history, with the help of contemporary authors and their works. The authors take the literature of countries such as Estonia, Poland, Serbia, Ukraine, and Russia as the point of departure, and explain its significance in terms of geographical, theoretical, and thematic perspectives.

Weaving Words into Worlds

Edited by Margot Lauwers, CRESEM, University of Perpignan, France and Caroline Durand-Rous, CRESEM, University of Perpignan, France

'Weaving Words into Worlds' comes as the third spinoff of the international ecopoetics conference organized in Perpignan in 2016. Reflecting upon how the many stories we tell directly influence the world we live in, each of the contributions in this international volume directs our attention to the constant, ecopoetic weaving of word to the world at work via the many entanglements between mind, matter, and meaning, whether on a local or a global scale. It encapsulates how the words, stories, and concepts we humans articulate as we try to make sense of the world we inhabit give part of its shape to the web of ecological relations that we depend on for survival. It seeks to cast light on the disenchanting and reenchanting powers of stories and poiesis in general—as stories retain the power to make us either become oblivious to and destroy or to feel and honor the many, complex ties between the multitudinous nature cultures intertwined within the fabric of a multispecies world always in the making. This book offers a total of fourteen articles written by international scholars in ecocriticism and ecopoetics who, by their analyses of literature and/or films and the political subtext they thus render visible, aim at showing how the study of environmentally minded media may renew our attention to the entangled agencies of the human and the more-than-human realm. Thus, this work offers to counter a reproach ecocriticism has often been met with, namely the over-presence of US scholars and the lack of diversity in subjects in the field, since the articles presented provide a wide variety of approaches and topics with examples of UK and Native American literature, Polynesian myth, graphic novels, or haiku. In doing so, the book expands on the fields of ecocriticism and ecopoetics, adding to this branch of study and enriching it with high-quality academic studies.

Seeking to Understand the World: Literary Journalism of Vincent Sheean

Anish Dave, Stephen F. Austin State University

Vincent Sheean, a groundbreaking American foreign correspondent and author, is known for reporting from Europe, North Africa, and Asia, writing news reports, articles, and books. A few books and articles have described Vincent Sheean’s life, and briefly discussed his major nonfiction books. However, no book-length study or article has closely examined his nonfiction books. 'Seeking to Understand the World: Literary Journalism of Vincent Sheean', textually analyzes his five nonfiction, journalistic books to examine them for characteristics of literary journalism. Spanning nearly the entirety of his journalistic career, these books include 'Personal History' (1935), 'Not Peace but a Sword' (1939), 'Between the Thunder and the Sun' (1943), 'Lead, Kindly Light' (1949), and 'Nehru: The Years of Power' (1960). Set in different world areas, the books illuminate events as disparate as the Riffian war, the Spanish Civil War, the infamous Munich pact, the Nazi bombing of London, and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Sheean’s books provide an in-depth, personal look at these and related events. This book includes analysis of Sheean’s works, finding that they have several prominent characteristics of literary journalism: stories and scenes, cohesive structure, lifelike characters, vivid description, well-crafted sentences, immersive reporting, among others.

Literary Representations of Japan: At the Intersection of David Mitchell and Haruki Murakami’s Worlds

Eugenia Prasol

This book will focus on analyzing the different aspects of Japan's representation in the novels of Haruki Murakami and David Mitchell. It is proven that Murakami creates and recreates Japan without implementing any orientalist features or exotic imagery. In the works of both authors, the intent to depict a new world of Japan stripped of traditional stereotypical traits becomes clear. The difference between Murakami and Mitchell's representation of Japan lies in the difference between Japan as seen by the Japanese and Japan as seen by modern Westerners, but both are 'correct' images of Japan. It is a recreation of the global image of Japan. In that sense, the texts of Murakami and Mitchell are complementary representations of Japan through East-West cultural dialogue. Studying the representations of Japan and Japanese national character helps to understand the role of Murakami and Mitchell in the formation of a new image of Japan, the de-stereotyping of anachronistic ideas about Japanese national exclusivity, enriching by doing so the world literature with new visions of the country and its culture. The purpose of the comparative analysis of English and Japanese literary works performed in this work is to reveal both deep analogies and differences in the representation of the image of Japan, actualizing the national specificity of the texts. This research advances the understanding of how both general and specific components of literary representations of Japan and Japaneseness are manifested in the East-West cultural dialogue.

Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer (1850-1919): Cartas, cuentos cortos y artículos periodísticos

Ana Isabel Simón Alegre, Adelphi University

Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer (Alcañiz, 1850-Buenos Aires, 1919) fue una periodista y editora española que dedicó su vida al mundo de las letras. Fue, además de escritora, una apasionada viajera en una época en la que cruzar el Atlántico no era una tarea fácil. En sus viajes transanlánticos puso en marcha y participó en numerosas tertulias y se dedicó a dirigir periódicos, escribir novelas, cuentos cortos, cartas, ensayos, críticas de teatro, artículos de opinión y columnas de sociedad en diferentes periódicos. En este libro se explora cómo en la trayectoria vital y profesional de Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer quedó entrelazado su proyecto político literario en el que el activismo feminista jugaría un importante papel. Esta edición anotada contribuye a las investigaciones previas sobre Gimeno de Flaquer analizando una colección de textos que no se han estudiado aún en detalle. ‘Concepción Gimeno De Flaquer (1850-1919): Cartas, cuentos cortos y artículos periodísticos’ incluye diez cartas que Concepción Gimeno escribió al actor y empresario teatral Manuel Catalina y Rodriguez (1820-1886), siete cuentos y una selección de diecisiete de sus artículos periodísticos más representativos.

Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer (1850-1919): Her Personal Letters, Short Stories, and Journalism

Ana Isabel Simón Alegre, Adelphi University

This book explores how Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer’s evolution as a writer was closely linked to the development of her political-literary project, in which a feminist activist agenda plays an important role. This critical edition contributes to existing research on Gimeno de Flaquer by examining a collection of texts that have not been studied in-depth. This monograph-length publication is the first one to feature a translation of significant portions of Gimeno de Flaquer’s work. 'Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer (1850-1919): Her Personal Letters, Short Stories, and Journalism' includes ten letters that Concepción Gimeno wrote to the Spanish actor and theatre entrepreneur Manuel Catalina y Rodríguez (1820-1886), seven short stories, and a selection of her seventeen most representative newspaper articles.

Italian as a foreign language: Teaching and acquisition in higher education

Edited by Alberto Regagliolo, UKSW University

This manual focuses on teaching Italian as a foreign language in the academic field, taking into consideration the various subjects and disciplines that can be found in a university course in Italian Studies. Various chapters are included within that range, for example, from Italian phonetics and dialectology to art as a means to deepen elements of the Italian language, to morphology with word formations, and to translation as well as subtitling. The range also covers technology as a tool for telecollaboration, academic writing, and learning Italian through geography or the language of vulgarity. Besides, the manual takes into consideration the use of the Italian press for learning, together with the use of comics and cartoons to teach the Italian language. The contribution aims to be a point of reference both for teachers and students who are focusing on linguistics, philology, didactics, and pedagogy. It lays emphasis on the teaching methodology, the instruments of teaching, and the available resources. It also seeks to deal with the various teaching problems and reflects on the disciplines as well as alternative proposals for teaching.

Dogmas in Literature and Literary Missionary: Text, Reader and Critique

Edited by Önder Çakırtaş, Bingol University, Türkiye

Literature does have an aspect that drags the readers, habitually burying them in its pages and blindly attaching them to itself. Blind devotion stems from the factors that are effective in determining the readers' faith. Theories of literature, similarly, might bring about the generation of blind adherence and dogmatic approaches. This book explores the existence of dogma in literature and some cult texts and writers and how dogmas in literature are conveyed to various audiences as a mission by some literary readers, experts, and academics. Generally, dogma is a word related mostly to religion. In this frame, Mathew Arnold's 'Dogma in Religion and Literature' is of great importance as far as religion is concerned. However, there are dogmas in every field, literature being no exception. Virginia Woolf, for instance, wrote stupendous works that turned out to be well-known, and in 1928, she delivered a lecture at Cambridge University, where women were once not allowed, that formed the basis for the celebrated 'A Room of One's Own' (1929). Roland Barthes' 1967 'La mort de l'auteur' ('The Death of the Author') essay might be another text that some of its literary readers have developed a dogmatic commitment to. In addition to revealing how dogma finds its place in literature, this book also discusses how literary writers and readers often unwittingly embrace 'literary missionary.' Focusing on the dogmatic elements of literature and the dogmatized literary theory and criticism through cult works of various authors, the book offers a striking and interesting contribution to literary theory and criticism and literature readings.

Heroic Disobedience: The Forced Marriage Plot and the British Novel, 1747-1880

Leah Grisham

'Heroic Disobedience: The Forced Marriage Plot and the British Novel, 1747-1880' shows the ways in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels used what the author terms the forced marriage plot - a plot arc in which a greedy father tries to force his daughter into a marriage she does not want but that would be financially expedient to himself - to explore capitalism’s detrimental impacts on women’s right to autonomy. As capitalist economic practices replaced mercantilism, a woman’s value was seen primarily in the economic sense. That is, men came to recognize that women – especially young, marriageable women – could be used as objects of exchange between men. Recognizing this phenomenon, the novelists considered in 'Heroic Disobedience' – Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Stone, and Anthony Trollope – depict the very specific ways in which women were raised to become willing pawns in this system. Religious discourse, conduct guides, marriage and property laws, wages, lack of meaningful education, and inheritance practices combined to leave women with no other options besides dependence on their patriarchs. Importantly, authors who use the forced marriage plot go beyond exposing women’s subjugation by creating – and celebrating – heroically disobedient heroines who believe, above all else, that they have the right to determine their own futures: futures in which they are autonomous agents, not subjected objects.

Impressions from Paris: Women Creatives in Interwar Years France

Edited by Sylvie Eve Blum-Reid, University of Florida

‘Impressions from Paris’ studies the contributions of various women artists and writers who lived in Paris during the Interwar Years, from the 1920s to 1940. The “Roaring Twenties” constituted years of experimentation and freedom to test new techniques and lifestyles at a time affected by serious political changes leading to World War II. Their trajectories have left traces that can be mapped out, studied, and addressed today, a hundred years later. The volume revisits their experiences through various lenses that include art history, gender, fashion, literary analysis, psychology, philosophy, as well as film and food. The volume revisits the artistic, literary, and journalistic contributions of women worldwide, including France, as they flocked to Paris from the 1920s to 1940. The overall principle lies in the inclusion of female painters, visual artists, and writers from diverse international and national backgrounds. Scholars who participate in the volume explore the possibilities presented in a modern literary and artistic history while building on previous scholarship. Two seminal books and a documentary film inspire this project: Shari Benstock’s ‘Women of the Left Bank. Paris 1900-1940’ (Texas UP 1986) and Andrea Weiss’s ‘Paris was a woman. Portraits from the Left Bank’ (HarperSanFrancisco 1995), which in turn produced an eponymous film (Greta Schiller/Andrea Weiss 1996). These works highlight the community of women artists, editors and writers during the interwar years in Paris. There is scholarship in the area, although most of it is scattered in single monographs, crossing various genres, and various languages, from (recent) graphic novels, to fiction, biographical studies, cultural histories as well as scholarly artistic and literary studies.

Monsters in the Classroom: Noam Chomsky, Human Nature, and Education

Philip G. Hill

In this lucid, original, and comprehensive work, the articulated approaches to pedagogy are based on specific conceptions of human nature. Drawing on a vast range of Chomsky’s prodigious output in linguistics, politics, biology, cognitive science, and education, Hill highlights two fundamental elements of Chomsky’s understanding of human nature and uses these elements as the foundation of a highly creative approach to pedagogy. The originality of the work is apparent in the way the author identifies how key ideas in Chomsky’s linguistics and political discourse are rooted in a liberatory approach to education. The value of the work lies in its practical nature. Even though it makes reference to ideas in various academic disciplines, the work’s overall value is reflected in the way ideas relate to Hill’s personal teaching experiences and how they apply in a concrete classroom setting. The reader is offered a practical and highly creative way to apply Chomsky’s understanding of human nature in a classroom setting.

Transfiction: Characters in Search of Translation Studies

Edited by Marko Miletich, SUNY Buffalo State University

This book explores the uses of translation, translators, and interpreters in fiction as a gateway to introduce issues related to Translation Studies. The volume follows recent scholarship on Transfiction, a term used to describe the portrayal of translation (both a topic and a motif), as well as translators and interpreters in fiction and film. It expands on the research by Kalus Kaindl, Karleheinz Splitzl, Michael Cronin, and Rosemary Arrojo, among others. Although the volume reflects the preoccupation with translator visibility, it concentrates on the importance of power struggles within the translatorial task. The volume could be an invaluable tool to be used for pedagogical purposes to discuss theoretical aspects within Translation and Interpreting Studies.

Women’s Representations from Radical Naturalism to the New Woman Response

A Transatlantic Perspective of European, Latin American, and American Narratives

José F. Rojas-Viana, Louisiana State University

In this book, Rojas explores comparatively the representations of deviant and criminal women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Transatlantic perspectives in literary productions of the first-wave feminist writers of the New Woman movement and writers of Radical Naturalism. This work addresses how the writers' sex is relevant in depictions of social constructions of female characters and how they established a dialogue based on gender through the themes of 'femme fatale', marginal spaces, eugenics, and social Darwinism in the novels of Emilia Pardo Bazán's 'La piedra angular' (1891), 'La gota de sangre' (1911), and "Tio Terrones" (1920); Refugio Barragán de Toscano's 'La hija del bandido o los subterráneos del nevado' (1887); Federico Gamboa's 'Santa' (1903); Kate Chopin's (Katherine O'Flaherty) 'The Awakening' (1899); Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' (1891); and 'Grand's Ideala' (1888). There is a good volume of research on different aspects of these novels, but this book addresses issues of the social constructions of deviant and criminal women from an interdisciplinary and metatheoretical perspective often missed from established criticism. This work is not only reachable for the non-expertise reader, graduate, or undergraduate students but also it is sufficiently elaborated for the expert reader in different fields. It provides a detailed analysis of the social, historical, philosophical, and scientific background that shows how the treatment of the female characters converges and diverges from male and female writers of the New Woman and Radical Naturalism points of view. It can be a good contribution for references or classes in Hispanic studies, gender studies, women's studies, sexuality studies, nineteenth-century studies, and in other fields.

On Second Language Learner Acquisition of English Collocations

James Martin Rogers, Meijo University, Japan

Collocations are words that commonly co-occur, such as ‘jury’ and ‘verdict.’ Collocational fluency is an essential aspect of second language fluency. Learning a language via collocations improves upon the efficacy of language acquisition because it essentially kills three birds with one stone: students learn vocabulary, collocations, and also subconsciously absorb the grammar patterns of language through mastery of these chunks of language. This is, in fact, similar to the way native speakers learn language and an efficient way to become fluent. This book will detail efforts to create and then apply a methodology to develop a large-scale high-frequency collocation list and custom-tailored collocation resources for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean learners to study directly and for practitioners to utilize as reference materials to create additional resources. Presented in this book is a novel approach taken to fill a major gap in the research and to create large-scale resources that were previously unavailable. Therefore, this book should be considered a valuable contribution to research that aims to help second language learners more effectively achieve fluency in English as a second language.