H. L. Mencken’s reputation as a journalist and cultural critic of the twentieth century has endured well into the twenty-first. His early contributions as a writer, however, are not very well known. He began his journalistic career as early as 1899 and in 1910 cofounded the Baltimore Evening Sun. The next year he initiated a column—The Free Lance—that ran six days a week for four and a half years, until the Sun discontinued it, partially in response to Mencken’s controversial defense of Germany during World War One.
In this early forum for his renowned wit, Mencken broached many of the issues to which he would return again and again over his career, establishing himself as a fearless iconoclast willing to tackle the most divisive subjects and apply a heady mix of observation, satire, and repartee to clear away what he regarded as the “saturnalia of bunk” that clouded American thinking. The Free Lance reveals Mencken at his scintillating best as a journalist, polemicist, and satirist.
These columns are collected here for the first time, edited and annotated by Mencken expert and critic S. T. Joshi. This extraordinary collection is an invaluable resource for Mencken scholars and fans and provides an entertaining immersion into the early twentieth-century American zeitgeist.
Frank Farmer has contributed important essays to the study of Bakhtin in composition, and in Saying and Silence he gathers some of those, along with several new essays, into a single volume. Scholars who specialize in Bakhtin will find this work engaging, but equally Farmer wants to explicate and apply Bakhtin for readers whose focus is teaching or some other nonspecialist dimension of writing scholarship.
Farmer explores the relationship between the meaningful word and the meaningful pause, between saying and silence, especially as the relationship emerges in our classrooms, our disciplinary conversations, and encounters with publics beyond the academy. Each of his chapters here addresses some aspect of how we and our students, colleagues, and critics have our say and speak our piece, often under conditions where silence is the institutionally sanctioned and preferred alternative. He has enlisted a number of Bakhtinian ideas (the superaddressee, outsideness, voice in dialogue) to help in the project of interpreting the silences we hear, naming the silences we do not hear, and of encouraging all silences to speak in ways that are freely chosen, not enforced.
The definitive source for how to write and publish in the field of biblical studies
The long-awaited second edition of the essential style manual for writing and publishing in biblical studies and related fields includes key style changes, updated and expanded abbreviation and spelling-sample lists, a list of archaeological site names, material on qur’anic sources, detailed information on citing electronic sources, and expanded guidelines for the transliteration and transcription of seventeen ancient languages.
Features:
A decade ago in the Times Literary Supplement, Roderick Conway Morris claimed that “almost everything that was going to happen in book publishing—from pocket books, instant books and pirated books, to the concept of author’s copyright, company mergers, and remainders—occurred during the early days of printing.” Ian Maclean’s colorful survey of the flourishing learned book trade of the late Renaissance brings this assertion to life.
The story he tells covers most of Europe, with Frankfurt and its Fair as the hub of intellectual exchanges among scholars and of commercial dealings among publishers. The three major religious confessions jostled for position there, and this rivalry affected nearly all aspects of learning. Few scholars were exempt from religious or financial pressures. Maclean’s chosen example is the literary agent and representative of international Calvinism, Melchior Goldast von Haiminsfeld, whose activities included opportunistic involvement in the political disputes of the day. Maclean surveys the predicament of underfunded authors, the activities of greedy publishing entrepreneurs, the fitful interventions of regimes of censorship and licensing, and the struggles faced by sellers and buyers to achieve their ends in an increasingly overheated market.
The story ends with an account of the dramatic decline of the scholarly book trade in the 1620s, and the connivance of humanist scholars in the values of the commercial world through which they aspired to international recognition. Their fate invites comparison with today’s writers of learned books, as they too come to terms with new technologies and changing academic environments.
Ever since the threads of seventeenth-century natural philosophy began to coalesce into an understanding of the natural world, printed artifacts such as laboratory notebooks, research journals, college textbooks, and popular paperbacks have been instrumental to the development of what we think of today as “science.” But just as the history of science involves more than recording discoveries, so too does the study of print culture extend beyond the mere cataloguing of books. In both disciplines, researchers attempt to comprehend how social structures of power, reputation, and meaning permeate both the written record and the intellectual scaffolding through which scientific debate takes place.
Science in Print brings together scholars from the fields of print culture, environmental history, science and technology studies, medical history, and library and information studies. This ambitious volume paints a rich picture of those tools and techniques of printing, publishing, and reading that shaped the ideas and practices that grew into modern science, from the days of the Royal Society of London in the late 1600s to the beginning of the modern U.S. environmental movement in the early 1960s.
The scientific article has been a hallmark of the career of every important western scientist since the seventeenth century. Yet its role in the history of science has not been fully explored. Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross remedy this oversight with The Scientific Literature, a collection of writings—excerpts from scientific articles, letters, memoirs, proceedings, transactions, and magazines—that illustrates the origin of the scientific article in 1665 and its evolution over the next three and a half centuries.
Featuring articles—as well as sixty tables and illustrations, tools vital to scientific communication—that represent the broad sweep of modern science, The Scientific Literature is a historical tour through both the rhetorical strategies that scientists employ to share their discoveries and the methods that scientists use to argue claims of new knowledge. Commentaries that explain each excerpt’s scientific and historical context and analyze its communication strategy accompany each entry.
A unique anthology, The Scientific Literature will allow both the scholar and the general reader to experience first hand the development of modern science.
Zacher's account delves into details inside a major newspaper operation during World War I and provides fascinating accounts of its struggles with competition, attending to patriotic duties, and internal editorial dissent. Zacher also looks at war-related issues, considering the newspapers' relationship with President Woodrow Wilson, American neutrality, the move to join the war, and fallout from disillusionment over the actuality of war. As Zacher shows, the progressive spirit and political independence at the Scripps newspapers came under attack and was changed forever during the era.
An anecdotal history published on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Ohio University’s renowned E. W. Scripps School of Journalism.
After its founding in 1924, what is now the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University quickly became one of the premier programs in the country. For decades, it has produced leaders who have reached the highest levels of journalism and communication in their careers, and their success is a direct product not only of the education they get in Athens but of the community the school fosters.
In this book, nearly one hundred alumni, faculty, friends, and students offer their stories of life at and after Scripps. The result is a multilayered, inspiring portrait of the school and how it shapes those who pass through its doors. At the same time, The Scripps School gives a nuanced history of journalism education at Ohio University. From covering assassinations and presidential elections to major moments in sports, alumni have documented the unprecedented and the historic, and here they show just how Scripps prepared them to be there.
The Scripps School, edited by former director Ralph Izard, is a love letter to the people and the institution. At a time when journalism is more important than ever, this book humanizes and contextualizes the profession in ways that will resonate in the Scripps community and beyond.
Securing a Place for Reading in Composition addresses the dissonance between the need to prepare students to read, not just write, complex texts and the lack of recent scholarship on reading-writing connections. Author Ellen C. Carillo argues that including attention-to-reading practices is crucial for developing more comprehensive literacy pedagogies. Students who can read actively and reflectively will be able to work successfully with the range of complex texts they will encounter throughout their post-secondary academic careers and beyond.
Considering the role of reading within composition from both historical and contemporary perspectives, Carillo makes recommendations for the productive integration of reading instruction into first-year writing courses. She details a “mindful reading” framework wherein instructors help students cultivate a repertoire of approaches upon which they consistently reflect as they apply them to various texts. This metacognitive frame allows students to become knowledgeable and deliberate about how they read and gives them the opportunity to develop the skills useful for moving among reading approaches in mindful ways, thus preparing them to actively and productively read in courses and contexts outside first-year composition.
Securing a Place for Reading in Composition also explores how the field of composition might begin to effectively address reading, including conducting research on reading, revising outcome statements, and revisiting the core courses in graduate programs. It will be of great interest to writing program administrators and other compositionists and their graduate students.
The rhetorical tradition, Michelle Ballif asserts, is based on the systematic exclusion of sophistry. In keeping with Aristotle’s prescription, rhetoric continues to be a counterpart to dialectic, a handmaiden to the pursuit of truth—even if that truth is merely probable.
According to Ballif, this search for truth manifests itself among current rhetoric and composition scholars in the form of an assumption that language is primarily communicative (i.e., that language can represent truth more or less faithfully). Ballif shows how invested we are in the notion of truth, in the idea that language represents truth, and in the assumption that the speaking/writing subject has, or should have, some essential relation to truth.
Provocatively, Ballif questions why the profession wants to retain these beliefs in the face of vociferous arguments from "new rhetorics" that the discipline no longer posits a foundational self or truth, and in the face of the poststructuralist critique, which has demonstrated that founding truth is always accomplished by first positing and then negating an “other.” As an alternative to this negative and violent rhetorical process, Ballif suggests a turn to sophistry as embodied in the figure of Woman, one with the power to seduce us (literally, to lead astray) from our truth and our demand for it.
This figuration of Woman, however, is not the dialectical other used to sustain the identity and privilege of Man. On the contrary, this Woman is an Other Woman: A Third Woman as a Third Sophistic practice that escapes Plato’s binary (philosophic rhetoric vs. sophistry) and renders the distinction between truth and deception incalculable. Ballif examines three figurations of the Third Woman as Third Sophistic as offered by Gorgias, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean Baudrillard.
In 1955 William C. Stokoe arrived at Gallaudet College (later Gallaudet University) to teach English where he was first exposed to deaf people signing. While most of his colleagues dismissed signing as mere mimicry of speech, Stokoe saw in it elements of a distinctive language all its own. Seeing Language in Sign traces the process that Stokoe followed to prove scientifically and unequivocally that American Sign Language (ASL) met the full criteria of linguistics—phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and use of language—to be classified a fully developed language.
This perceptive account dramatically captures the struggle Stokoe faced in persuading the establishment of the truth of his discovery. Other faculty members ridiculed or reviled him, and many deaf members of the Gallaudet community laughed at his efforts. Seeing Language in Sign rewards the reader with a rich portrayal of an undaunted advocate who, like a latter-day Galileo, pursued his vision doggedly regardless of relentless antagonism. He established the Linguistics Research Laboratory, then founded the journal Sign Language Studies to sustain an unpopular dialogue until the tide changed. His ultimate vindication corresponded with the recognition of the glorious culture and community that revolves around Deaf people and their language, ASL.
The five essays presented here—Rhetoric, Style, Language, Conversation, and Greek Literature—were published together for the first time in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey in 1889–1890. Frederick Burwick brings the essays together again in this volume, introducing them by tracing the sources and development of a belletristic theory of rhetoric, which he says “is one of the most original, and for a few critics, the most puzzling of the nineteenth century.” Burwick makes the edition complete with a comprehensive index and a selected bibliography.
Pagans’ advocate.
Libanius (AD 314–393) was one of the last great publicists and teachers of Greek paganism. His story, as presented in his Autobiography and the Life by Eunapius, is supplemented by information from a correspondence of over 1500 items and sixty-four extant orations. A native of Antioch, he began his teaching career in Constantinople in 340, but soon had to retire to Nicomedeia, where he became acquainted with St. Basil and influential in the development of Julian’s paganism. After a second tenure at Constantinople he returned home to become professor in Antioch in 354, a position which he held, through many vicissitudes, for the rest of his life.
As sophist of Antioch and a devoted exponent of the traditional Hellenic system of education, Libanius remained deliberately and contemptuously unacquainted with Latin, and deplored its growing influence. Naturally humane in outlook and sympathizing with the local bourgeoisie, he criticized bitterly the encroachments and oppressions of the central administration, and the general cruelty of his day. Sincerely pagan in an increasingly aggressive Christian society, he became an influential voice against religious persecution, official or unofficial. The orations on Julian, to whose memory he remained devoted all his life, were composed between 362 and 365, and present Libanius with a congenial subject, revealing him at the height of his powers and influence.
Also available in the Loeb Classical Library is a two-volume edition of Libanius’ Autobiography and Selected Letters.
Pagans’ advocate.
Libanius (AD 314–393) was one of the last great publicists and teachers of Greek paganism. His story, as presented in his Autobiography and the Life by Eunapius, is supplemented by information from a correspondence of over 1500 items and sixty-four extant orations. A native of Antioch, he began his teaching career in Constantinople in 340, but soon had to retire to Nicomedeia, where he became acquainted with St. Basil and influential in the development of Julian’s paganism. After a second tenure at Constantinople he returned home to become professor in Antioch in 354, a position which he held, through many vicissitudes, for the rest of his life.
As sophist of Antioch and a devoted exponent of the traditional Hellenic system of education, Libanius remained deliberately and contemptuously unacquainted with Latin, and deplored its growing influence. Naturally humane in outlook and sympathizing with the local bourgeoisie, he criticized bitterly the encroachments and oppressions of the central administration, and the general cruelty of his day. Sincerely pagan in an increasingly aggressive Christian society, he became an influential voice against religious persecution, official or unofficial. The orations on Julian, to whose memory he remained devoted all his life, were composed between 362 and 365, and present Libanius with a congenial subject, revealing him at the height of his powers and influence.
Also available in the Loeb Classical Library is a two-volume edition of Libanius’ Autobiography and Selected Letters.
Donald E. Knuth’s influence in computer science ranges from the invention of methods for translating and defining programming languages to the creation of the TeX and METAFONT systems for desktop publishing. His award-winning textbooks have become classics that are often given credit for shaping the field, and his scientific papers are widely referenced and stand as milestones of development over a wide variety of topics. The present volume is the eighth in a series of his collected papers.
Nick Tingle investigates the psychoanalytic dimensions of composition instruction in Self-Development and College Writing to boldly illustrate that mastering academic prose requires students to develop psychologically as well as cognitively. Asserting that writing instruction should be an engaging, developmental process for both teachers and students, he urges reaching for new levels of consciousness in the classroom to aid students in realigning their subjective relationships with knowledge and truth.
Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and twenty years of experience as a teacher, Tingle outlines the importance of moving beyond usual ways of thinking, abandoning the common sense of everyday reality, and coming to understand beliefs as beliefs and not absolutes. These developmental moves must be accompanied, Tingle says, by a new attitude towards language—not as something that points to things, but as a series of concepts that arrange the very things one points to. And this development is necessary not just in order to perform well in the writing class, but also to fully participate in and reap the academic rewards of structured, university life.
Self-Development and College Writing calls attention to the psychological destabilization this method may produce for students. Tingle explains that, if writing instructors are to respond to this destabilization, they must conceive of the classroom as a transitional space, or a kind of holding environment. They must also become aware of their psychological allegiances to particular theories of writing if they are to construct such environments.
But the goal of the transitional environment is worth pursuing, Tingle argues, contending that university education fails to address students’ developmental needs. With purposeful writing and deft analyses, Tingle shows that this goal also affords a means by which to place writing courses at the center of the educational curriculum. Conceived as a transitional space, the writing class may support and stabilize students in their developmental passage, thereby fostering an improved understanding of their academic work and, more importantly, an increased intellectual understanding of themselves and the complex world in which they live.
In Semantic and Conceptual Development, Frank Keil presents the firstpsychological investigation of thedeveloping child's ontological knowledge. Building on previous philosophical work, Keil shows that ontologicalcategories develop in a highly predictable progression. Moreover, Keil demonstrates that ontological development obeys a strong formal constrainton the relations among categories.Although there are many possibleontological systems, children appearto be inherently targeted to consider asystem of only one sort.
Keil's results represent exactly the sortof interdisciplinary study of thehuman mind which is graduallyemerging as the new field of cognitivescience. We are proud to publish hiswork as the first book in the CognitiveScience Series, which is designed tofoster major empirical and theoreticalcontributions to this new field.
In the course of research, most scholars have known moments of surprise, catastrophe, or good fortune, though they seldom refer to these occurrences in reports or discuss them with students. Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research reveals the different kinds of work scholars, particularly those in rhetoric, writing, and literacy, need to do in order to recognize a serendipitous discovery or a missed opportunity.
In published scholarship and research, the path toward discovery seems clean and direct. The dead ends, backtrackings, start-overs, and stumbles that occur throughout the research process are elided, and seems that the researchers started at point A and arrived safely and neatly at point B without incident, as if by magic. The path, however, is never truly clear and straight. Research and writing is messy. Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research features chapters from twenty-three writing scholars who have experienced moments of serendipity in their own work—not by magic or pure chance but through openness and active waiting, which offer an opportunity to prepare the mind.
Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research illustrates the reality of doing research: there is no reliable prescription or one-size-fits-all manual, but success can be found with focused dedication and an open mind.
Contributors: Ellen Barton, Zachary C. Beare, Lynn Z. Bloom, Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Caren Wakerman Converse, Gale Coskan-Johnson, Kim Donehower, Bill Endres, Shirley E. Faulkner-Springfield, Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Brad Gyori, Judy Holiday, Gesa E. Kirsch, Lori Ostergaard, Doreen Piano, Liz Rohan, Ryan Skinnell, Patricia Wilde, Daniel Wuebben
Institutions of higher learning around the nation have embraced the concept of student civic engagement as part of their curricula, a movement that has spurred administrators in various fields to initiate programs as part of their disciplines. In response, sign language interpreting educators are attempting to devise service-learning programs aimed at Deaf communities. Except for a smattering of journal articles, however, they have had no primary guide for fashioning these programs. Sherry Shaw remedies this in her new book Service Learning in Interpreter Education: Strategies for Extending Student Involvement in the Deaf Community.
Shaw begins by outlining how to extend student involvement beyond the field experience of an internship or practicum and suggests how to overcome student resistance to a course that seems atypical. She introduces the educational strategy behind service-learning, explaining it as a tool for re-centering the Deaf community in interpreter education. She then provides the framework for a service-learning course syllabus, including establishing Deaf community partnerships and how to conduct student assessments.
Service Learning in Interpreter Education concludes with first-person accounts from students and community members who recount their personal and professional experiences with service learning. With this thorough guide, interpreter education programs can develop stand-alone courses or modules within existing coursework.
Applying the complexities of literacy development and personal ethos to the teaching of composition, Zan Meyer Goncalves challenges writing teachers to consider ethos as a series of identity performances shaped by the often-inequitable social contexts of their classrooms and communities. Using the rhetorical experiences of students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender, she proposes a new way of thinking about ethos that addresses the challenges of social justice, identity, and transfer issues in the classroom.
Goncalves offers an innovative approach to teaching identity performance theory bound by social contexts. She applies this new approach to theories of specificity and intersectionality, illustrating how teachers can help students redefine the relationship between their social identities and their writing. She also addresses bringing social activism and identity politics into the classroom, helping writers make transfers across rhetorical contexts and linking students' interests to public conversations.
Theoretical and practical, Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom provides teachers of first-year and advanced composition studies with useful, detailed assignments based in specific identity performance. Goncalves offers techniques to subvert oppressive language practices, while encouraging students to recognize themselves as writers, citizens, and active participants in their own educations and communities.
From a behind-the-scenes perspective, David Witwer describes how Pegler and his publisher, the politically powerful Roy W. Howard, shaped the news coverage of this scandal in ways that obscured the corrupt ties between employers and the mob while emphasizing the perceived menace of union leaders empowered by New Deal legislation that had legitimized organized labor. Pegler, Howard, and the rest of the mainstream press pointedly ignored evidence of the active role that business leaders took in the corruption, which badly tarnished the newly reborn labor movement.
Because he was more concerned with pursuing political gains for the conservative movement, Pegler's investigative journalism did little to reform union governance or organized crime's influence on labor unions. The union corruption scandal only undercut the labor movement. Pegler's continuing campaign against labor corruption framed the issue in ways that set the stage for postwar political defeats, culminating with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which greatly limited the power of labor unions in the United States.
Demonstrating clearly and convincingly how journalism is wielded as a political weapon, Witwer studies a broad range of forces at play in the labor union scandal and its impact, including the influence of the press, organized crime, political corruption, and businessmen following their own economic imperatives.
From charts, texts, and graphs to illustrations, icons, and screens, we live in an information age saturated with visual language. Yet the underlying principles that provide structure for visual language have long eluded scholars of rhetoric, design, and engineering. To function as a language that reliably conveys meaning, visual language must embody codes that normalize its practices among both the designers who employ it and the readers who interpret it.
In this wide-ranging analysis, Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett demonstrate how visual language in professional communication—text design, data displays, illustrations—is shaped by conventional practices that are invented, codified, and modified by users in visual discourse communities. Drawing on rhetorical theory, design studies, and a broad array of historical and contemporary examples, Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions explores the processes by which conventions evolve and proliferate and shows how conventions serve as the medium that designers use to shape, stabilize, and streamline visual information.
Kostelnick and Hassett extend contemporary theories that define rhetoric as a social act, arguing that visual conventions also thrive within discourse communities and are fragile forms that vary widely in their longevity and scope. Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions is a thorough guide for scholars, teachers and practitioners of rhetoric and business and technical communication and for professionals in engineering, science, design, and business.
In Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies, author Scott Wible explores the significance and application of two of the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s key language policy statements: the 1974 Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution and the 1988 National Language Policy. Wible draws from a wealth of previously unavailable archived material and professional literature to offer for the first time a comprehensive examination of these policies and their legacies that continue to shape the worlds of rhetoric, politics, and composition.
Wible demonstrates the continued relevance of the CCCC’s policies, particularly their role in influencing the recent, post-9/11 emergence of a national security language policy. He discusses in depth the role the CCCC’s language policy statements can play in shaping the U.S. government’s growing awareness of the importance of foreign language education, and he offers practical discussions of the policies’ pedagogical, professional, and political implications for rhetoric and composition scholars who engage contemporary debates about the politics of linguistic diversity and language arts education in the United States. Shaping Language Policy in the U.S. reveals the numerous ways in which the CCCC language policies have usefully informed educators’ professional practices and public service and investigates how these policies can continue to guide scholars and teachers in the future.
Shared Land/Conflicting Identity: Trajectories of Israeli and Palestinian Symbol Use argues that rhetoric, ideology, and myth have played key roles in influencing the development of the 100-year conflict between first the Zionist settlers and the current Israeli people and the Palestinian residents in what is now Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is usually treated as an issue of land and water. While these elements are the core of the conflict, they are heavily influenced by the symbols used by both peoples to describe, understand, and persuade each other. The authors argue that symbolic practices deeply influenced the Oslo Accords, and that the breakthrough in the peace process that led to Oslo could not have occurred without a breakthrough in communication styles.
Rowland and Frank develop four crucial ideas on social development: the roles of rhetoric, ideology, and myth; the influence of symbolic factors; specific symbolic factors that played a key role in peace negotiations; and the identification and value of criteria for evaluating symbolic practices in any society.
Praise for the first collection of stories:
Stephen Daubert's Threads from the Web of Life is written in the tradition of Aldo Leopold and Bernd Heinrich. It teaches by drawing you into the drama, excitement, and beauty of nature.
--Don Glass, host of the NPR-syndicated program "A Moment of Science"
Threads from the Web of Life is a uniquely wide-ranging combination of scientific research and literary imagination that takes the reader on journeys through time and space that even the most elaborate television programs still can't provide. Stephen Daubert's grasp of a variety of botanical, zoological, geological, and climatological disciplines is impressive, and he presents them and their interactions with grace and authority.
--David Rains Wallace, author of The Klamath Knot, The Monkey's Bridge, and Beasts of Eden
Each of these happenings is a thread in the intricate web of life, and Daubert, a molecular scientist at the University of California, Davis, demonstrates that these threads are easily broken by humans. ... Instructive and entertaining.
--Publishers Weekly
Threads from the Web of Life takes readers on a journey around the globe as the author describes unique and unusual ecological processes. It is ideal for casual reading as well as a source of selections to read aloud (!) or to link literature with the study of natural history.
--NSTA Recommends, National Science Teachers Association
Highly recommended. ... The stories are as much enjoyable as they are informative.
--Science Books& Films
In these sixteen stories of the interplay of organisms, weather, and geophysics, many a being succumbs to predation, and many another endures. Evolution happens as species learn the hard way. There is often a tragic element in these fascinating tales. . . . These vivid, poetic tales . . . afford good teaching. Threads from the Web of Life will appeal to any reader whose heart is in the living world.
-- ForeWord
Most scholarly speculation on the origin of human language has centered around speech. However, the growing understanding of sign languages on human development has transformed the debate on language evolution. David F. Armstrong’s new book Show of Hands: A Natural History of Sign Language casts a wide net in history and geography to explain how these visible languages have enriched human culture in general and how their study has expanded knowledge of the human condition.
Armstrong addresses the major theories of language evolution, including Noam Chomsky’s thesis of an innate human “organ” for language and Steven Pinker’s contention that there is language and not-language without any gradations between gesture and language. This engrossing survey proceeds with William C. Stokoe’s revival of the early anthropological cognitive-linguistic model of gradual development through the iconicity of sign languages. Armstrong ranges far to reveal the nature of sign languages, from the anatomy of early human ancestors to telling passages by Shakespeare, Dickens, and Pound, to the astute observations of Socrates, Lucretius, and Abbé de l’Epée on sign communication among deaf people. Show of Hands illustrates the remarkable development of sign languages in isolated Bedouin communities and among Australian indigenous peoples. It also explores the ubiquitous benefits of “Deaf Gain” and visual communication as they dovetail with the Internet and its mushrooming potential for the future.
From antiquity to the modern age, legal, documentary, exegetical, literary, and linguistic traditions have viewed the relationship between image and letter in diverse ways. There is a long history of scholarship examining this relationship, probing the manner and meaning of its dynamics in terms of equivalency, complementarity, and polarity.
This volume addresses the pictorial dimension of writing systems from cross-cultural and multidisciplinary perspectives. Historians—including specialists in art and literature—paleographers, and anthropologists consider imagistic scripts of the ancient and medieval Near East, Europe, Byzantium, and Latin America, and within Jewish, polytheistic, Christian, and Muslim cultures. They engage with pictographic, ideographic, and logographic writing systems, as well as with alphabetic scripts, examining diverse examples of cross-pollination between language and art.
The 13th Volume in the Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities Series
This volume collects for the first time various accounts of contact between sign languages throughout the world, presenting an exciting opportunity to further understand the structural and social factors of this linguistic component in Deaf communities. Editor David Quinto-Pozos has divided Sign Languages in Contact into four parts, starting with Contact in a Trilingual Setting. The sole essay in this section features a study of Maori signs by Rachel McKee, David McKee, Kirsten Smiler, and Karen Pointon that reveals the construction of indigenous Deaf identity in New Zealand Sign Language.
In Part Two: Lexical Comparisons, Jeffrey Davis conducts an historic, linguistic assessment of varieties of North American Indian sign languages. Daisuke Sasaki compares the Japanese Sign Language lexicon with that of Taiwan Sign Language by focusing on signs that share the same meaning and all parameters except for their handshapes. Judith Yoel’s chapter takes up the entirety of Part Three: Language Attrition, with her analysis of the erosion of Russian Sign Language among immigrants to Israel.
The final part describes how educators and other “foreign”visitors can influence indigenous sign languages. Karin Hoyer delineates the effects of international sign and gesture on Albanian Sign Language. Jean Ann, Wayne H. Smith, and Chiangsheng Yu close this significant collection by assessing contact between Mainland China’s sign language and Taiwan Sign Language in the Ch’iying School in Taiwan.
Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus.
Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri.
The ninth volume in the Studies in Interpretation series offers six succinct chapters on the state of signed language interpreting by Brazil by editors Ronice Müller de Quadros, Earl Fleetwood, Melanie Metzger and ten Brazilian researchers. The first chapter advocates for the affiliation of Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) interpretation research with the field of Translation Studies to generate greater academic power empowerment of Libras. The second chapter outlines how Brazilian sign language interpreters construct a position in discourse. Chapter 3 explores the possibility that bimodal, bilingual interpreters—hearing children of deaf adults—face unique cognitive tasks compared to unimodal bilingual interpreters.
Chapter 4 describes how the systematic expansion and documentation of new academic and technical terms in Brazilian Sign Language, in which fingerspelling is uncommon, resulted in the development of an online glossary. The fifth chapter details the challenges of Libras interpreters in high schools. Chapter 6 concludes this revealing collection with findings on whether gender traits influence the act of interpretation of Brazilian Sign Language.
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