This product contains the supplemental listening activities (21 tracks) to support the textbook American Legal English (978-0-472-03206-0), and are available via MP3 download. Running time: 000:36:43.
 

The American Legal English products were developed to help non-native speakers improve their ability to understand and communicate in English with their legal counterparts around the world. The text is an introduction to basic legal information and the U.S. legal system that addresses the major areas of law and provides actual cases and statutes so that students can become familiar with legal syntax and legal vocabulary.

The Russian critic M. M. Bakhtin has recently become a major figure in contemporary theory beyond his traditional influence in Slavic literary studies. Bakhtin in Contexts explores the revolutionary impact Bakhtin's ideas have carried in contemporary discussion of language, art, culture, and social science in recent years. The contributors represent a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, epitomizing the views of Russian and American specialists in those fields Bakhtin often referred to as "the human sciences." The diversity of perspective and flexibility of approach make this a unique contribution to Bakhtin studies and to the ongoing dialogue between Western and Russian theorists.

In ten essays spanning more than three decades of scholarship, Charles R. Forker, the author of Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster, explores the dramatic and poetic styles of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in relation to Elizabethan ideas of space and time, image patterns and aesthetic form in drama, cultural contexts (the family, the state, the individual), and political and religious values.

Forker has divided his essays into three sections. The essays in the first section, "The Stage," explore theatrical self-consciousness; those in "The Green World" examine the use of pastoral and natural settings as significant factors in dramatization; the essays in the final section, "The Family," discuss ideas of dramatic engagement and disengagement in major Elizabethan playwrights other than Shakespeare.

The first substantial collection of essays about the trickster since 1955

Mythical Trickster Figures, is the first substantial collection of essays about the trickster to appear since Radin’s 1955 The Trickster. Contributions by leading scholars treat a wide range of manifestations of this mischievous character, ranging from the Coyote of the American Southwest to such African figures as Eshu-Elegba and Ananse, the Japanese Susa-no-o, the Greek Hermes, Christian adaptations of Saint Peter, and examples found in contemporary American fiction and drama.

The many humorous trickster stories included are fascinating in themselves, but Hynes and Doty also highlight the wide range of features of the trickster—the figure whose comic appearance often signifies that the most serious cultural values are being both challenged and enforced.

For more than four centuries, Europeans and Euroamericans have been making written records of the spoken words of American Indians. While some commentators have assumed that these records provide absolutely reliable information about the nature of Native American oral expression, even its aesthetic qualities, others have dismissed them as inherently unreliable. In Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts, William Clements offers a comprehensive treatment of the intellectual and cultural constructs that have colored the textualization of Native American verbal art. Clements presents six case studies of important moments, individuals, and movements in this history. He recounts the work of the Jesuits who missionized in New France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and textualized and theorized about the verbal expressions of the Iroquoians and Algonquians to whom they were spreading Christianity.

He examines in depth Henry Timberlake’s 1765 translation of a Cherokee war song that was probably the first printed English rendering of a Native American "poem." He discusses early-nineteenth-century textualizers and translators who saw in Native American verbal art a literature manqué that they could transform into a fully realized literature, with particular attention to the work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an Indian agent and pioneer field collector who developed this approach to its fullest. He discusses the "scientific" textualizers of the late nineteenth century who viewed Native American discourse as a data source for historical, ethnographic, and linguistic information, and he examines the work of Natalie Curtis, whose field research among the Hopis helped to launch a wave of interest in Native Americans and their verbal art that continues to the present.

In addition, Clements addresses theoretical issues in the textualization, translation, and anthologizing of American Indian oral expression. In many cases the past records of Native American expression represent all we have left of an entire verbal heritage; in most cases they are all that we have of a particular heritage at a particular point in history. Covering a broad range of materials and their historical contexts, Native American Verbal Art identifies the agendas that have informed these records and helps the reader to determine what remains useful in them. It will be a welcome addition to the fields of Native American studies and folklore.