Bøker utgitt av Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

This volume explores discourse genres in Web-mediated communication, and in particular it deals with genre change and evolution under the pressure of technological renewal and the availability of new affordances, focusing on a variety of discursive practices including those that emerge from Web 2.0 platforms.

The book presents a text-based study of discourse practices in placement, a hybrid zone which re-contextualises academic knowledge and professional practices. Using Lave and Wenger's Communities of Practice as the overarching theoretical framework, the study investigates how novices learn to write like their professional counterparts. By collecting texts completed in various placement contexts and in-depth qualitative interviews with informants, the study features a multi-dimensional approach to the analysis of discourse practices in terms of text construction and text consumption. The issues of genre, feedback, identity and role associated with placement learning are brought into focus.

This book received the Cambridge/Language Teaching Brumfit Award 2010. Drawing upon a convergence of sociocultural theory and linguistic emergentism, this book presents a longitudinal investigation of the development of ESL users' written lexicogrammatical patterning (collocations and colligations). A qualitative methodology ('Lexical Trail Analysis') was developed in order to capture a dynamic and historical view of the ways in which the participants combined words in their writing. This involved tracing single lexemes diachronically through individuals' written corpora. The writers were interviewed about the histories of particular word combinations. Selected patterns were later tested using the principles of dynamic testing. The findings of these combined data types - essays, interviews and tests - suggest that sociocognitive resources such as memory and attention and the ability to imitate and adapt linguistic resources are paramount in the massive task of internalizing the lexicogrammatical patterning of a second language. The participants were agents of change, seeking assistance and adapting patterns to suit their changing goals. Their activity is theorized in a model of language patterning from which implications for second language learning and teaching are drawn.

In many parts of the world the language education scenario is increasingly dynamic, as demographic, economic and social changes powerfully influence socio-political agendas in the sphere of language education. This volume provides a useful overview of (second) language education in the world today.

This book is an introductory study of the Old Testament and it is based on the lesson taught for many years by the authors in two different Universities in Ghana. It is an interactive and didactic work that provides an innovative approach to the study of the Hebrew Bible. Through reading selected passages from the Bible and doing recommended exercises as a means of reinforcing what has been learnt, the reader will achieve a good knowledge of the Old Testament and will acquire the capability of reading and interpreting further texts. Each chapter begins with a presentation of a map of the journey, the objectives to be achieved, a summary and a final section that helps the student to evaluate his/her comprehension. This book is also a contextualized text. The last chapter is dedicated to the Old Testament in Africa and the relationship between the African Continent and the Bible, giving the reader the possibilities of acquiring skills to interpret the Old Testament from African perspectives.

Corrupted Principles and the Challenges of Critically Reflective Leadership

Developing Emotionally Intelligent Leadership in Higher Education

Visual Anthropology in Sardinia explores the technique, style and methodology of documentary films about Sardinia, investigating how such films construct different experiences and identities, and reflecting on the advantages of the medium of documentary film over written ethnographic texts. Following a discussion of theoretical developments in the area of visual anthropology in the twentieth century, the author turns to case studies of documentary filmmaking related to Sardinia from the fascist era onwards, offering a survey of the particular and somewhat peculiar filmic ethnographic discourse established in relation to Sardinia, which has been constructed to a large extent as an 'Other' to peninsular Italy. The subject is a complex one, ranging across the fields of film studies, anthropology, literary and cultural studies and, to some extent, philosophy. The book enriches scholarship not only on the cultural construction of Sardinia in the popular, political and intellectual imaginary and in its relation to Italy, but also on visual epistemologies and the ethics and practice of ethnographic filmmaking.

In the nineteenth century a woman's place was considered to be in the home. During the Risorgimento and the years following the Unification of Italy in 1861, economic, political and social changes enabled women to engage in pursuits that had previously been the exclusive domain of men. This book traces this shift in cultural perception.

This book presents a detailed study of the notion of conscience, from the perspective of its historical development and existential environment. It investigates how conscience has been understood over the centuries, especially in the New Testament and the Scholastic period, and analyses various important issues concerning its nature and function.

This book examines the attitudes of tertiary students in Melanesia and Timor-Leste to national identity and key issues of nation-building. Their views are pivotal to understanding the challenges of building a more cohesive sense of national identity and political community in these states. Melanesian countries show a relatively high degree of similarity in their responses to the surveys on national identity carried out by the authors, but with key differences attributable to particular historical, regional or linguistic legacies of colonial rule. The ongoing importance of traditional authority and kastom/adat in conceptions of political community and identity is evident in all four case study sites, and in each case matches indicators of respect for modern state authority. Although different for each site, the authors' findings also illustrate the importance of students' geographical region of origin, language orientation and gender in explaining key differences in attitudes towards national identity. The book demonstrates that strong levels of national identification and pride persist among the future leaders of the countries surveyed, even in the face of ongoing regional and linguistic divisions and weak state capacity, suggesting a strong potential basis for nation-building agendas if wider challenges of democratic performance, service provision and regional development can be addressed over time.

Translation of fiction is always interpretation. This book discusses the challenges facing translators of fictional works from German into English using as examples English translations of canonical German novellas by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theodor Storm, Gerhart Hauptmann, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. The author addresses the difficulties of translating in the poststructuralist era, when every fictional work potentially has a large number of interpretations and, therefore, at least the same number of possible translations. Considering interpretations of the original text in detail not only improves the reader's understanding and ability to criticize the translated text, but it will also provide valuable insight into the possible intentions of the writer. An initial linguistic observation of a target text can therefore lead to a fruitful connection between the linguistic and literary analysis of translated works. This book offers new perspectives on the delicate negotiation of translating source texts for a contemporary audience while maintaining the values, ideas and hidden meanings from the source in relation to its original epoque.

The Church and wider society in Northeast India have witnessed a number of shifts in ethnic identity and the resultant inter-ethnic conflicts since the 1980s are threatening the peaceful co-existence of various ethnic groups. Caught up in the throes of such ethnic turmoil, people of the region are confronted with two options. On the one hand, there is a need to safeguard their respective ethnic identities against the dominant hegemony; on the other, there is a need to promote a peaceful co-existence amongst diverse ethnic groups. These twin challenges, in their turn, confront the Northeast Indian tribal theologies by posing a series of questions with serious implications: how is one to maintain a balance between these two conflicting identities? What should the priority be: preserved ethnic identity or ethnic blending? In all this, what is the role of tribal theology? Notwithstanding the importance of safeguarding ethnic identity, this book focuses on the urgent necessity of promoting a peaceful co-existence among diverse ethnic groups by exploring their various tribal theologies and cultural standpoints and finding a common base.

'Internationalisation' is a key issue within Higher Education, but what exactly is meant by this term and how can universities meet the challenges involved? This book explores how language teaching and learning strategies and cross-cultural understanding can support the cause of internationalisation within modern Higher Education.

Immaterial Culture engages with texts that are now largely unread and dismissed as trivial or dubious: the vast body of plays - thrillers, narrative poetry, comedy sketches, documentaries and adaptations of literature and drama - that aired on American network radio during the medium's so-called golden age. For a quarter century, from the stock market crash of 1929 to the introduction of the TV dinner in 1954, radio plays enjoyed an exposure unrivalled by stage, film, television and print media. As well as entertaining audiences numbering in the tens of millions for a single broadcast, these scripted performances - many of which were penned by noted novelists, poets and dramatists - played important and often conflicting roles in advertising, government propaganda and education. Reading these fugitive and often self-conscious texts in the context in which they were created and presented, the author considers what their neglect might tell us about ourselves, our visual bias and our attitudes toward commercial art and propaganda. The study's ample scope, its interdisciplinary approach and its insistence on the primacy of the texts under discussion serve to regenerate the discourse about cultural products that challenge the way we classify art and marginalise the unclassifiable.

A companion to the 2007 volume The Light of the Soul, this book presents the texts of three Latin works that are commonly attributed to Ulrich Putsch, Bishop of Brixen (Bressanone) in the South Tyrol, including his Diarium, an account of his life as bishop. The volume also features a detailed introduction to Ulrich and his work.

Since the late 1990s, German cinema has gone through a period of astonishing productivity and success that has made it the focus of scholarly analysis once more. What can contemporary German cinema tell us about current German society and its problems? What are the distinguishing features of filmmaking in Germany today? This book analyses the representation of individual and collective behaviour in post-unification German cinema. It looks at performances of gender, ethnicity and nationality in a wide range of contemporary German films. Using Performance Theory as a framework, the book discusses how modern German identities are presented as conformist, liberating or subversive responses to external challenges. Theoretical considerations regarding the efficacy of performance and the dialectical relationship between transgression, resistance and normalization form the background for an analysis that investigates contemporary German films in terms of their function within the restructuring of post-unification German society.

Fictions of Appetite explores and investigates the aesthetic significance of images of food, appetite and consumption in a body of modernist literature published in Italian between 1905 and 1939. The corpus examined includes novels, short stories, poems, essays and plays by F.T. Marinetti, Aldo Palazzeschi, Massimo Bontempelli, Paola Masino and Luigi Pirandello. The book underlines the literary relevance and symbolic implications of the culinary sign suggesting a link between the crisis of language and subjectivity usually associated with modernism and figures of consumption and corporeal self-obliteration in alimentary discourse. In revisiting these works under label of modernism, which has traditionally been shunned in the Italian critical field, the volume brings critical discourse on early twentieth-century Italian literature closely into line with that of other Western literatures. The author argues that an alimentary perspective not only sheds striking new light on each of the texts examined, but also illustrates the signifying power of the culinary sign, its relations to the aesthetic sphere and its prominent role in the construction of a modernist sensibility.

This book traces a hundred years of the development of Chinese nursery rhymes, children's rhymes and children's poems from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. It draws on anthologies of traditional and modern rhymes and poems published in The People's Republic of China and Taiwan, exploring the form, function and content of these texts in the light of rapid political change in China. The role of traditional rhymes is examined within the context of a male-dominated family hierarchy of Confucian thinking that profoundly shaped children's development. The language and literature reforms of the 1920s brought a poetry revolution in China, as authors began to write for children in the vernacular language and offer a purposeful argument against Confucianism, in favour of science and democracy. Literary approaches evolved, first into the socialist-realist approach of the 1940s and 1950s, then into the three prominences of the Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, children's rhymes promoted the messages of modern science, but maintained a traditional Confucian outlook. In the 1980s, children's poetry in the People's Republic of China began to follow a new direction, in keeping with the new era of cultural and economic liberalization. This book uses the evolution of the children's poetry genre to provide a fascinating insight into Chinese political, moral and social life in the twentieth century.

Northern Ireland is now generally regarded to be a post-conflict region since the official end to three decades of violence in 1998. However, given some of the stipulations of the Good Friday Belfast Agreement, including the early release of politically motivated prisoners from jail, society in Northern Ireland remains in a state of flux, uncertainty and disagreement. This book presents four thematic studies revolving around the issues of imprisonment, surveillance, traumatic recall and myth-making in Northern Ireland. These studies examine the different ways in which artists and filmmakers are experimenting with film aesthetics and new media technologies to represent, re-present and invite engagement with the underlying anxieties that continue to trouble post-Agreement society. In doing so, the author argues for a reassessment of the critical analysis of film's convergence with other forms of visual art. Ultimately, the volume assesses the usefulness of such an approach in examining how artists and filmmakers experiment with diverse forms that open up space for discussion of the hidden and marginalized concerns in Northern Ireland's new, 'shared' society. This book was the winner of the 2012 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Film Studies.

To date, translation theory offers no satisfactory response to the multidimensional challenge of rerendering postmodern texts. As the existence of linguistic and cultural plurality in these writings is now widely acknowledged, many theorists recognise the impossibility of achieving complete equivalence in translation. If the fragmented, decentred, postmodern source text (ST) is to be rerendered in the target language (TL), a process of 'rewriting' is deemed necessary. Nevertheless, such an approach, if taken too far, may not always be the most appropriate. Focusing on the French journalist and novelist Claude Sarraute, whose postmodern writings offer a suitable body of texts for study, this book seeks to determine effective means by which the translator can first read and analyse postmodern STs and subsequently preserve their intricacies in the TL. To provide an original response to this challenge grounded in both theoretical and practical evidence, the author refers to the work of the Bakhtin Circle; concepts from literary theory, stylistics and translation theory; and translations of a body of texts as variegated in character as those of Sarraute. Using the approach which she recommends, the author then explains how she rerenders in English a collection of Sarraute's polyphonic writings.

Queer Impact and Practices brings together selected papers arising from the third annual Queering Paradigms conference. The chapters address contemporary theorizing about gay citizenship and 'homonationalism' as well as a critique of gay visibility. The authors examine the symbolics of queer subversion and transgression in performers who transgress gender and sexuality codes.

In this volume, a range of local and international scholars explore bilateral relations between Romania and Hungary and look at the entangled history of their two peoples. Going beyond traditional nation-centred narratives, the contributors approach the shared pasts of Romanians and Hungarians within a transnational research framework.

This selection of essays by Alan Raitt provides a series of cross-readings of nineteenth-century French literary authors and texts, revolving around Flaubert and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, situating them and their principal works in relation to each other as well as to Balzac, Nerval, Baudelaire, Huysmans and Mallarme.

This book explores the concept of displacement in the fiction produced by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende between 1982 and 2000. Displacement, understood in the author's analysis to encompass social, geographical, linguistic and cultural phenomena, is argued to play a consistently central role in Allende's fictional output of this period. Close readings of Allende's texts illustrate the abiding importance of displacement and reconcile two apparently contradictory trends in her writing: as the settings of her fiction have become more international, questions of individual identity have gained in importance. This discussion employs displacement as a means of engaging with critical debates both on Allende's individual texts and on her status as an original writer. After examining in detail the seven works of fiction written by Allende during this period, the book concludes with reflections on the general trajectory of her work in this genre.

The two volumes of Reviewing Dante's Theology bring together work by a range of internationally prominent Dante scholars to assess current research on Dante's theology and to suggest future directions for research. Volume 1 considers some of the key theological influences on Dante.

Using a corpus-based Discourse-Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis, the author analyses the representation of the 2008 Olympic torch relay in the British and Chinese media, shedding light on the importance of the Olympic Games for East-West media discourse and analysis.

This book presents and evaluates the liturgical vision of Pope Benedict XVI and the theological background underlying that vision. It describes the main features of Joseph Ratzinger's theology of the liturgy and analyses them within the context of his theology as a whole. Ratzinger's evaluation of the contemporary Roman Catholic liturgy is explored in relation to his overall assessment of the post-Vatican II era in the Church, alongside an examination of his project of liturgical renewal ('reform of the reform') and its practical implementation during his pontificate. The author discusses the various critical voices which have been raised against the Pope's liturgical agenda and against certain aspects of his general theology. Overall, the book offers an assessment of the importance of Ratzinger's vision for the Church at the threshold of the third millennium.

Picturing the end of the world is an enduring cultural practice. This groundbreaking collection of essays offers an overview of the Apocalyptic imagination in French literature and culture from the thirteenth century to the present day, scrutinizing material as diverse as medieval French biblical commentaries and science fiction.

Of all the playwrights from the age of Louis XIV, only Moliere's work is still regularly performed in France and beyond. This book analyses certain elements of the plays that may explain Moliere's longevity: a plausible chain of events peppered with shocks and surprises; tensions between opposites; intellectual concerns that had not previously been the province of comedy; and plots founded on situations that are anything but comic. These hallmarks added up to an intense type of comic theatre, meaningful in ways that gave the genre a new dimension. The author of this study does not treat Moliere's plays as variations on a single prototype, but brings a fresh approach to each. The book's witty, learned and penetrating readings examine critical issues such as the ambiguous anti-feminism of Les Femmes savantes, Moliere's revisions of the myth of Don Juan, 'conversion' as the theological starting point of Le Tartuffe, contrariety as the basis of comedies such as George Dandin and Le Misanthrope, and coded satire in the comedie-ballets. Each play is revealed to have a seamless comic design, while at the same time speaking to the wider world. Moliere's works are shown to be entirely and immediately involved in human society, in the social dimension of the human condition.