Author: Elizabeth Klosty BeaujourPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
Alien Tongues
Author: Elizabeth Klosty BeaujourPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
The Language of Doctor Who
Author: Jason BarrPublisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442234814
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
In a richly developed fictional universe, Doctor Who, a wandering survivor of a once-powerful alien civilization, possesses powers beyond human comprehension. He can bend the fabric of time and space with his TARDIS, alter the destiny of worlds, and drive entire species into extinction. The good doctor’s eleven “regenerations” and fifty years’ worth of adventures make him the longest-lived hero in science-fiction television. In The Language of Doctor Who: From Shakespeare to Alien Tongues, Jason Barr and Camille D. G. Mustachio present several essays that use language as an entry point into the character and his universe. Ranging from the original to the rebooted television series—through the adventures of the first eleven Doctors—these essays explore how written and spoken language have been used to define the Doctor’s ever-changing identities, shape his relationships with his many companions, and give him power over his enemies—even the implacable Daleks. Individual essays focus on fairy tales, myths, medical-travel narratives, nursery rhymes, and, of course, Shakespeare. Contributors consider how the Doctor’s companions speak with him through graffiti, how the Doctor himself uses postmodern linguistics to communicate with alien species, and how language both unites and divides fans of classic Who and new Who as they try to converse with each other. Broad in scope, innovative in approach, and informed by a deep affection for the program, TheLanguage of Doctor Whowill appeal to scholars of science fiction, television, and language, as well as to fans looking for a new perspective on their favorite Time Lord.
Native Tongue
Author: Suzette Haden ElginPublisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558617760
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 340
Book Description
First published in 1984, Native Tongue earned wide critical praise, and cult status as well. Set in the twenty-second century after the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment, the novel reveals a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights, and banned from public life. In this world, Earth’s wealth relies on interplanetary commerce, for which the population depends on linguists, a small, clannish group of families whose women breed and become perfect translators of all the galaxies’ languages. The linguists wield power, but live in isolated compounds, hated by the population, and in fear of class warfare. But a group of women is destined to challenge the power of men and linguists. Nazareth, the most talented linguist of her family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for the government, supervising the children’s language education in the Alien-in-Residence interface chambers, running the compound, and caring for the elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth does not yet know is that a clandestine revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them of men’s domination. Their secret must, above all, be kept until the language is ready for use. The women’s language, Láadan, is only one of the brilliant creations found in this stunningly original novel, which combines a page-turning plot with challenging meditations on the tensions between freedom and control, individuals and communities, thought and action. A complete work in itself, it is also the first volume in Elgin’s acclaimed Native Tongue trilogy.
Motherless Tongues
Author: Vicente L. RafaelPublisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374579
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
In Motherless Tongues, Vicente L. Rafael examines the vexed relationship between language and history gleaned from the workings of translation in the Philippines, the United States, and beyond. Moving across a range of colonial and postcolonial settings, he demonstrates translation's agency in the making and understanding of events. These include nationalist efforts to vernacularize politics, U.S. projects to weaponize languages in wartime, and autobiographical attempts by area studies scholars to translate the otherness of their lives amid the Cold War. In all cases, translation is at war with itself, generating divergent effects. It deploys as well as distorts American English in counterinsurgency and colonial education, for example, just as it re-articulates European notions of sovereignty among Filipino revolutionaries in the nineteenth century and spurs the circulation of text messages in a civilian-driven coup in the twenty-first. Along the way, Rafael delineates the untranslatable that inheres in every act of translation, asking about the politics and ethics of uneven linguistic and semiotic exchanges. Mapping those moments where translation and historical imagination give rise to one another, Motherless Tongues shows how translation, in unleashing the insurgency of language, simultaneously sustains and subverts regimes of knowledge and relations of power.
E.T. Culture
Author: Debbora BattagliaPublisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387018
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Book Description
Anthropologists have long sought to engage and describe foreign or “alien” societies, yet few have considered the fluid communities centered around a shared belief in alien beings and UFO sightings and their effect on popular and expressive culture. Opening up a new frontier for anthropological study, the contributors to E.T. Culture take these communities seriously. They demonstrate that an E.T. orientation toward various forms of visitation—including alien beings, alien technologies, and uncanny visions—engages primary concepts underpinning anthropological research: host and visitor, home and away, subjectivity and objectivity. Taking the point of view of those who commit to sci-fi as sci-fact, contributors to this volume show how discussions and representations of otherworldly beings express concerns about racial and ethnic differences, the anxieties and fascination associated with modern technologies, and alienation from the inner workings of government. Drawing on social science, science studies, linguistics, popular and expressive culture, and social and intellectual history, the writers of E.T. Culture unsettle the boundaries of science, magic, and religion as well as those of technological and human agency. They consider the ways that sufferers of “unmarked” diseases such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome come to feel alien to both the “healthy” world and the medical community incapable of treating them; the development of alien languages like Klingon; attempts to formulate a communications technology—such as that created for the spaceship Voyager—that will reach alien beings; the pilgrimage spirit of UFO seekers; the out-of-time experiences of Nobel scientists; the embrace of the alien within Japanese animation and fan culture; and the physical spirituality of the Raëlian religious network. Contributors. Debbora Battaglia, Richard Doyle, Joseph Dumit, Mizuko Ito, Susan Lepselter, Christopher Roth, David Samuels
The Gift of Tongues
Author: Christine F. Cooper-RompatoPublisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271099402
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
Tales of xenoglossia—the instantaneous ability to read, to write, to speak, or to understand a foreign language—have long captivated audiences. Perhaps most popular in Christian religious literature, these stories celebrate the erasing of all linguistic differences and the creation of wider spiritual communities. The accounts of miraculous language acquisition that appeared in the Bible inspired similar accounts in the Middle Ages. Though medieval xenoglossic miracles have their origins in those biblical stories, the medieval narratives have more complex implications. In The Gift of Tongues, Christine Cooper-Rompato examines a wide range of sources to show that claims of miraculous language are much more important to medieval religious culture than previously recognized and are crucial to understanding late medieval English writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Margery Kempe.
The Conference of the Tongues
Author: Theo HermansPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317640209
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 196
Book Description
The Conference of the Tongues offers a series of startling reflections on fundamental questions of translation. It throws new light on familiar problems and opens up some radically different avenues of thought. It engages with value conflicts in translation and the social accountability of translators, and turns the old issue of equivalence inside out. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary and historical examples, the book teases out the translator's subject-position in translations, makes notions of intertextuality and irony serviceable for translation studies, tries to think translation without transformation, and uses a controversial sociological model to cast a cold eye on the entire world of translating. This is a highly interdisciplinary study that remains aware of the importance of theoretical paradigms as it brings concepts from international law, social systems theory and even theology to bear on translation. Self-reference is a recurrent theme. The book invites us to read translations for what they can tell us about translating and about translators' own perceptions of their role. The argument throughout is for more self-reflexive translation studies.
Uncommon Tongues
Author: Catherine NicholsonPublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081224558X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
Uncommon Tongues explores the tension between the political value of eloquence and its classical definition in sixteenth-century English literature, locating eccentricity and unfamiliarity at the heart of pedagogical, rhetorical, and literary culture.
(M)Other Tongues
Author: Juliane PradePublisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527551571
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Book Description
(M)Other Tongues: Literary Reflexions on a Difficult Distinction examines a key problem of literary criticism: the differentiation between languages is at the same time necessary and impossible. It is indispensable in order to read a text, yet literary texts are precisely those that question this distinction, articulating the link between languages and cultures, as well as the inherent strangeness of even one’s own mother tongue. (M)Other Tongues explores texts from the 16th century to the 21st century, focusing on different aspects of one main feature of literary texts: formally, as well as semantically, they transcend the rules and conventions of the language they speak. Crossing cultural borders is commonly discussed in historical, social, linguistic, and psychoanalytical terms – whether it be as (post-)colonialism, exilic or diasporic identities, creoles, or the displaced other within the own. (M)Other Tongues argues that, rather than being mere evidence in the theoretical analysis of cultural transitions, literary texts are a unique medium to reflect such processes as they challenge and modify the notion of language itself. The book discusses texts written mainly in English, French, and German, but also in Spanish and the complex formerly known as Yugoslavian. (M)Other Tongues shows that such distinctions between languages are precise since they can be exemplified with an indefinite number of words and rules, and still remain uncertain because they cannot be abstracted from these examples. What separates the mother tongue from other tongues is indeed precise uncertainty.
Narratives of Place, Belonging and Language
Author: Máiréad Nic CraithPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 023035551X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
Examining identity in relation to globalization and migration, this book uses narratives and memoirs from contemporary authors who have lived 'in-between' two or more languages. It explores the human desire to find one's 'own place' in new cultural contexts, and looks at the role of language in shaping a sense of belonging in society.