Böcker utgivna av Verlag Peter Lang

Is the utopian project dead? Is it possible to imagine a utopian society or a utopian world in the aftermath of the collapse of ideologies? This book contains eighteen essays which are the result of the 7th International Conference of Utopian Studies held in Spain in 2006, either debating the subject, or suggesting alternative readings to some of the theoretical ideas raised within utopian studies. This volume focuses on the importance of narratives in utopian literature. They define the world we live in and the world we wish to live in. Through narratives of confession, and indeed through silence itself, the unconscious emerges and desire is articulated. The articles in this volume question and challenge the power of the word, the stability of meaning, and the relationship between thought and action in the construction of utopia and dystopia. They also point to the various literary frameworks of utopian and dystopian narratives, thus connecting stories from the past, present and future of both real and imaginary and communities.

Is the utopian project dead? Is it possible to imagine a utopian society or a utopian world in the aftermath of the collapse of ideologies? This book contains fifteen essays which are the result of the 7th International Conference of Utopian Studies held in Spain in 2006, either debating the subject, or suggesting alternative readings to some of the theoretical ideas raised within utopian studies. The title of the volume suggests that the idea or dream of utopia is indeed very important, but that the framework and boundaries of the concept are fast changing. The contributors to this first volume of essays write from different countries and represent different standpoints. Their discussions focus on the analysis of films, political theories, utopian projects of the past and present, and an insight into the dialectics of global movements.

This book explores European and Argentinean writers' complex relationships with food and wine. It includes examinations of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Honore de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Italo Svevo, Marcel Schwob, James Joyce, Robert Louis Stevenson, Domingo F. Sarmiento, Lucio V. Mansilla, Roberto J. Payro and Ezequiel Martinez Estrada.

How is meaning created by a poem? Through the invisible ideas and thoughts conveyed by the text or through the physical presence of book, paper and print? In Bodies of Poems the author argues that the material properties of poetic texts are meaningful in their own right but often ignored and made invisible in poetry criticism. Through a number of examples ranging from the introduction of print technology in the fifteenth century to late twentieth-century poets such as Adrienne Rich and Seamus Heaney, this study examines the ways in which poems are products of the contemporary state of print technology, legal and social definitions of authors and texts, and culturally and historically determined assumptions about the self and the body. Although indebted to recent innovative work in textual criticism, this book is a pioneering attempt to place the study of poetic texts as material artefacts in a sustained historical narrative.

The author links Chaucer¿s writings with the medieval optical tradition in its various forms (scholastic texts, encyclopedias, exempla, vernacular poetry) both in general cultural terms and through the discussion of specific examples. He shows how the science of optics, or perspectiva, provides an account of spatial perception, including visual error, and demonstrates how these aspects of optical theory impact on Chaucer¿s poetry. He provides detailed and sustained analysis of the spatial content of narratives across the range of Chaucer¿s works, relating them to optical ideas and making use of Lefebvre¿s theory of the production of space. The texts discussed include the Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, Knight¿s Tale, Miller¿s Tale, Reeve¿s Tale, Merchant¿s Tale, Squire¿s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde.

South Tyrol is a small, mountainous area located in the central Alps. This book provides a fresh analysis of this dynamic and turbulent period of South Tyrolean and European history. It also provides insights into the political and cultural evolution of the understanding of the region and the definition of its role within the European framework.

Häd Bouazza is a highly in¿uential and celebrated author in the Netherlands today. In the context of contemporary Dutch literature, Bouazzäs Moroccan background still marks a divergence from the born-and-bred Dutch norm. Authors with a bi- or multicultural background are still often cast in the role of ¿exotic outsider¿. Bouazza both challenges and uses this position to the full. His writing demonstrates that the perceived us-them or self-other positions are questionable ideological constructs. He undermines the concept of a uni¿ed culture and the wholeness of the self. He explores and exploits stereotypical beliefs held on both sides of the East¿West divide. The result is a magical realist setting that both puzzles and enchants. This book offers a reading of Bouazzäs literary prose that responds to the interpretative opportunities offered by an author who skilfully and creatively explores his peculiar freedom in his Homeless Entertainment.

This book examines the authority and power of a «sermonic text» through its ¿ctive qualities. The author argues that a sermonic text functions in the manner of a work of ¿ction and creates an event and space that forces a decision upon the reader. The text creates a place where the Kingdom of God is about to happen and is happening. Consequently, the reader is forced to make a decision. Will he or she «go and do likewise», or reject the Kingdom of God? In this way, a sermonic text acts like a work of ¿ction and invites a reader into its space and event. If the reader of the sermonic text chooses temporally to enter the event of the text, the reader has the potential to participate in its dynamics and is forced to make a decision either to believe or not believe. Like a work of ¿ction, it does not require those external guarantees of authority that are found in the community of faith: its doctrines, creeds and ecclesiology. Rather, the authority of the sermonic text is intrinsic as in a work of fiction and stands on its own. The discussion is interdisciplinary, drawing upon literary theory, cultural theory and theology.

This book examines the present-day distribution and diachronic evolution of a set of infinitival structures in Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, making use of extensive corpus data and investigating how pragmatic factors and usage patterns interact with syntax. After a contrastive account of the patterns of clausal subordination in Latin and Romance, the rise of prepositional infinitives is traced through the documented history of the three languages, revealing astonishing parallels in their development. The analysis of the data shows how cognitive principles such as reanalysis and entrenchment combine with parameters such as relevance and usage frequency to cause syntactic change. Beyond providing a genuine explanation for the observed processes in the Romance languages, this study offers new evidence for the existence of language-independent, cross-linguistically applicable principles and mechanisms in language change.

This collection of essays looks at the most recent work of Juan Goytisolo from a variety of perspectives and critical stances. The contributors, all specialists in the work of the Spanish author, employ theories of intertextuality, postmodernist irony, queer ethics and even the esoteric science of Huru¿sm to uncover the complexities of Goytisolös creative practice, in particular his radical blurring of the generic boundaries between fiction, autobiography and literary criticism. Such challenging of genre conventions is seen as both integral to the author¿s own questioning of his identity as an expression of his radical dissidence and essential to the response his work evokes in the reader. Life and writing, autobiography and ¿ction, constitute the interconnecting poles of Goytisolös artistic universe. The essays included in this volume explore the varying patterns of con¿uence of these twin strands in the writer¿s later work as a whole, but particularly in novels such as Las semanas del jardín (1997) and Carajicomedia (2000). The essays are set in context by a contribution from Juan Goytisolo himself in which he sums up his philosophy of life and writing as a pursuit of ¿non-prötable knowledge¿.

What does an Australian look like? Many Australians assume that there is such a thing as an ¿ethnic¿ face, and that it indicates recent arrival or refugee status. This volume contains nine life narratives by Australians who reflect on the experience of being categorised on the basis of their facial appearance. The problem of who is ¿us¿ and who is ¿them¿ is at the heart of some of the most important challenges facing the contemporary world. Assuming that facial appearance and identity are inextricably linked makes this challenge even harder. The introduction by the editor provides the theoretical framework to these narratives. It discusses the relevance to notions of belonging and identity of the term ¿mixed race¿, and concludes that we are all mixed race, whether we look white, black or ¿ethnic¿.

This empirical study examines the learning problem of the argument structure of psych predicates such as «The dog frightens John» and the related V-ing adjectives such as «The dog is frightening to John». The problem is theoretically interesting because of the marked nature of the thematic role mapping of these sentences in relation to the principle of the Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH). The problem is highly relevant to our understanding of second language acquisition, as this is known to be a prevalent difficulty among language learners. The author has framed the learning problem within a coherent parametric framework drawing on a sophisticated critical review of the syntax/semantics literature and theories of L2 development. The author has specifically developed a theory, the «Semantic Salience Hierarchy Model» (SSHM), to explain the learning process. The significance of the model is not confined only to this particular study, as the issues related to the L2 acquisition of other causative verbs can also be examined within this model. The findings of this study also bear implications to TESOL.

This volume explores intercultural communication in specialist fields and its realisations in language for specific purposes. Special attention is given to legal, commercial, political and institutional discourse used in particular workplaces, analysed from an intercultural perspective. The contributions explore to what extent intercultural pressure leads to particular discourse patternings and lexico-grammatical / phonological realisations, and also the extent to which textual re-encoding and recontextualisation alter the pragmatic value of the texts taken into consideration.

This volume includes fifteen papers focussing on three important aspects of the history of English in Britain and overseas since the eighteenth century: the grammatical tradition of prescriptivism, syntactic developments and sociolinguistic factors affecting language variation. Within these areas, methodological approaches include those relating to corpus linguistics, social network theory, the investigation of specialized discourse in a diachronic perspective, and lexicography. The individual sections are highly cohesive with each other, as the ideological considerations on which the prescriptive tradition was founded are underpinned by sociological factors. Theoretical contributions appear alongside ¿case studies¿ in which instances of specific usage are investigated.