Bøker utgitt av Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

This book addresses the theme of what nature is and humans' obligations toward the natural world. It demonstrates that an approach based in metaphysics can help us to understand better what nature is and our obligations to the natural world. Beginning with ideas traced from Aristotle through some of the signifcant figures in European philosophy, the author shows that each living thing is a unique source of value. He then argues that this value puts humans under an obligation and that adopting an attitude of responsibility to living things is an essential part of what it means to be human.

Elizabeth Gaskell and the Art of the Short Story

The hallmark technique of Jane Austen's mature writing - known as free indirect discourse (FID) - is responsible for what has become known as the inward interest of Austen's writing. This book tests the applicability of the conceptual framework of narratology within the field of Translation Studies.

This book investigates lexical borrowing processes of our era in a sociolinguistic context. Innovatively, it seeks to examine language contact in a comprehensive way, taking into account socio- and psycholinguistic aspects as well as implications for language politics. As the sociolinguistic focus is primary, the volume also discusses how technology influences languages and to what extent it creates new conditions for language contact. As a result, it is proposed that the term language contact needs to be reevaluated, since the context of globalization has changed its very essence. As the increase in the importance of English has been the most significant global geolinguistic event in the past fifty years, the role of English as an international lingua franca in modern borrowing is analyzed in detail. Two case studies are also given, one on the role of English in the EU and another on the linguistic situation of multilingual Switzerland. The characteristic features of lexical borrowing are illustrated in a complex way on linguistic material of a total of over 5000 recent loans in English, Spanish, German and Hungarian.

This book is born out of a sense of scepticism with self-indulgence in architecture. It seeks a new prescription for readdressing architecture as an expression of human need. Sense, Sagacity and the Sublime define the architectural realities of its organizing principle, while Gods and Goddesses; Princes and Prelates; Corporate Clients and Citizens identify strategic shifts in Western Civilization. The book carries the judgment of democracy derived from Greek Goddess Athena. This is followed by the measured building world of Le Thoronet which advances unswervingly towards the Paris Opera - the greatest processional triumph of the 19th Century. The finale deals with Frank Lloyd Wright at Falling Water Le Corbusier at Ronchamp, Renzo Piano at Kansai Airport, Japan, and Santiago Calatrava's winged vehemence at Milwaukee, USA. The book concludes with a thoughtful reminder - emphasizing the values of human engagement while providing philosophical support for the social contract in architecture.

Interest in the history of ownership rights is growing and spreading to different disciplines. Historians are turning their attention mainly to the rise of private and individual ownership as it was codified in 19th-century liberal Europe. This title seeks to define the uneasy, often intricate relation between legal and legitimate.

Offers varied studies of the problematic construction of contemporary identities from a literary and cultural perspective. This book covers transcendental, relevant and polemic topics like the difficulty of growing up, classist and interracial struggles, narratives of displacement and exile, queering the world, power politics and the individual.

This book is an attempt to provide a systematic interpretation of Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics in light of one of the most important, interesting and debated questions of the present age: the question concerning the role played by science and technology in shaping our civilization. The author argues that this question lies at the heart of Gadamer's thought, and that such an approach to his philosophy might help to overcome some inveterate interpretive prejudices, like, for example, the idea of Gadamer as an anti-scientific and politically authoritarian thinker. In order to clarify these points, the author closely examines not only Gadamer's 1960 masterpiece, Wahrheit und Methode, or his main writings (later gathered in ten volumes of collected papers), but most of the works he published in his more than centenarian life, including many short essays, lectures and interviews. Gadamer's hermeneutics is seen as offering both an intriguing description of the main pathologies of the Western modern civilization, and a challenging proposal for healing the uneasiness and malaise of modernity by revaluating all forms of unmethodical, i.e. non-scientific, experience and knowledge.

Between 1910 and 1945 Korea was subjected to Japanese colonial rule. Monuments, Memory, and Identity investigates ways how postcolonial South Korea commemorated this difficult past in light of changing political and social conditions, and against the background of the divided nation. By analyzing museums, memorial halls, parks and monuments, the author deciphers and maps the South Korean commemorative landscape. He analyzes the layouts of the country's well-known sites of memory and explores the on-site plaques, exhibits, and photos as well as the booklets and publications. This book underpins the shifts and trends in recollecting this important historical period by addressing the following questions: How has postcolonial South Korea been constructing and reconstructing its colonial past? Why were certain narratives and images chosen at different times? What debates, controversies, and challenges were involved in this dynamic process? Furthermore, the author discusses the South Korean case within the broader context of the postcolonial discourse.

Deals with unresolved questions regarding asymmetrical intercultural relationships and the historical reasons for the present cultural conflicts. This book looks at the role played by nineteenth century visual and literary stereotyped representations of 'oriental' otherness when compared with the western tradition.

The syntax and semantics of deverbal action nominals, notoriously ambiguous between event and result interpretation, have been a thought-provoking issue in many areas of theoretical linguistics. This volume contributes to current work on this topic by showing how the analysis of these nouns can benefit from a morphological and lexical-semantic treatment. While being a revealing synthesis of a number of formal accounts on this popular research domain, this study specifically targets the largely unexplored area of result nouns and addresses several crucial issues. What are result nouns in a strictly lexical-semantic perspective? Why do some verb classes allow ambiguous event/result nominal correlates, while others do not? What are the relevant verbal features involved in result noun formation? Is there a range of predictability in the number and types of meaning conveyed by a derived nominal? Couched within a framework of decompositional lexical semantic, the analysis offers original formal solutions to the polysemy issues arising in this word formation domain and convincingly argues in favor of the semantic alignment between the morphologically simplex and complex lexicon. A compelling range of Italian data provides empirical support to the author's claims.

CIUTI-Forum 2010

This book offers a close study of how film produces sensory-affective experience for the spectator. It argues that we must explore this affective dimension if we want to understand how cinema takes up cultural or thematic issues. Examining cinematic affect through close readings of how affective immersion in cinema works to engage viewers with history, memory and cultural specificity, it deals with both fiction film and documentary. Taking an international perspective, it includes case studies of Korean detective film, classical Japanese cinema, modern Greek cinema, independent American cinema, Indian documentary, Australian television documentary, Indonesian political docudrama, avantgarde French documentary and Australian Indigenous film. Rutherford draws on the analysis of embodied affect to revise many of the foundational concepts of film studies. Drawing on Miriam Hansen's readings of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, the book explores the capacity of film to produce experiences in which the boundaries between the spectator and the film become porous and the viewer is transported in a heightened way into the film.

This work provides an analysis of The Book of Margery Kempe and the figure of Margery Kempe herself, with a specific focus on contemporary critical re-readings as well as creative re-writings. The author re-reads the text making reference to recent theoretical conceptualizations and taking into consideration the figure of Margery Kempe as mystic, preacher and pilgrim. This book looks into the multiple layers of interpretation that this autobiography from the 15th century allows today, highlighting the importance of The Book of Margery Kempe as the first English autobiography, unique surviving example of travel text by a female pilgrim, and socio-historical document. At the same time, the author questions the complex identity conflicts which emerge in Margery Kempe's challenge of traditional social norms. She takes her analysis one step further by reading the text in the light of new critical approaches and by taking into exam the 1985 radio play The True Tale of Margery Kempe by contemporary Anglo-German novelist Eva Figes.

The Symposium at Basel University was an interdisciplinary event where complex issues were elucidated by historians, geographers, sociologists and political scientists. The event enabled East and West European scholars and their American counterparts to exchange their somewhat divergent views. This book deals with this topic.

Consumer satisfaction is one of the most widely investigated topics in marketing research. Yet, despite the huge research efforts invested in this area, what satisfaction really is, how it can be measured and improved, and how it impacts consumer behavior and firm performances remain unclear. This book presents the state-of-the-art in consumer satisfaction research and reports an empirical application of a new model, the Knowledge-Hope Model by Guido (2010), which promises to make a substantial contribution to the field. The application has been structured in two connected studies, following a procedure that is easily implementable by researchers, managers, and practitioners.

Colour and Light, Illness and Death

Reel Schools takes a fresh look at the history of Australian schooling through the lens of Australian cinema from the silent era until 2010. In exploring the relationship between cinematic representation and educational history, Josephine May shows how numerous Australian feature and documentary films offer access to powerful vernacular imaginings about school education in Australia. May argues that the cinematic school is a pervasive metaphor for the Australian nation. She demonstrates that, while Australian films about schooling have consistently commented on the relationship of schooling to the Australian class structure, they also increasingly explored gender, race and ethnicity at school, especially after the 1970s. From then on the egalitarian dream of school education and the nation's capacity to generate meaningful futures for the young became increasingly contested.

A journey to discover Michele Roberts' work as a feminist writer, novelist and memoirist. It is an overall analysis and detailed overview of Roberts' novels first provide the reader with a study of Roberts' rewriting of stories that have been inspired by historical, mythological and religious women who gain a voice in her fiction.

Discourse, Communication and the Enterprise Genres and Trends

The assumption of an environmental crisis, global warming and climate change, has put into question the viability of modern development patterns in industrialised societies. This pattern is characterised by excessive exploitation of energy and resources without concern for negative impact upon the natural ecosystem. One of the primary challenges to sustainable development is identified as the dilemma between long term economic development and environmental damage. Influenced by this pattern, modern design of buildings and cites contributes to environmental degradation. To explore an alternative paradigm for sustainable design, this book investigates a model of open systems evolution based on scientific foundations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and complex systems science. It states the creativity of the universe appears as the emergence of order via the mechanisms of open systems evolution, a manifesto of the Post-Modernism world-view. Furthermore, the book argues this novel paradigm of open systems evolution implies a conceptual framework for sustainable design, an intelligent model of buildings and cities, adapting to the natural ecosystem and ensuring positive impact upon it, and a contextual design strategy for ecologically symbiosis with nature, an order of buildings and cities.

This book represents a fresh look at cohesion, the point of departure being Halliday and Hasan's seminal Cohesion in English, which is examined in depth as are other notable approaches to cohesion such as Hoey's Patterns of Lexis in Text. It also compares different studies of relevance to cohesion from other areas of linguistics, such as: generative grammar, Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), and corpus linguistics. In this way, this work extends discussion of cohesion beyond the realms of systemic linguistics to include a broader spectrum of approaches including research into languages other than English. The main focus, however, is on varieties of English and on general and specialised discourse types. Rather than limiting itself to the text as product, the manifestation of a discourse, this book looks at cohesion from the wider perspective of discourse, seen as an interactive process. Consequently, different sociolinguistic and cultural factors are also taken into consideration: How far is cohesion a constitutive feature of text? What is the precise link between cohesion and coherence? What specific role does discourse have in phenomena such as anaphora? Do such things as cohesive universals exist across languages? How far do socio-cultural, or discourse-specific, conventions contribute to the type and degree of cohesion present in a text?

This book contributes to our knowledge and awareness of musical instruments and sound-producing objects in the region called Oceania. The author uses principles of organology to describe a research project at the Australian Museum. He explains the classification, provenance and cultural significance of diverse objects that were individually examined and measured. Four main sections are reflecting the regions of Oceania: Indigenous Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musical instruments and sound-producing objects reveal a great diversity, as do the instruments in the Melanesian section, in particular Papua and New Guinea; some objects being exquisitely designed and crafted. The Polynesian section includes objects collected on the voyages of Captain James Cook, as well as different types of flute. By combining introductory essays with quality photographs and a numbered catalogue of basic nomenclature, vernacular names and dimensions, the book constitutes a valuable resource.

This book deals with the political corruption which infested Peru during the Fujimori years (1990-2000). The work is not about petty corruption, the small bribe paid to the underpaid police officer to avoid being booked for a minor traffic violation, but addresses the corruption of the powerful. Elites rely on corruption, and particularly in repressive regimes the practice is the most important tool of 'criminal governance'. The author utilizes the concept of the protection racket developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory to explain the links between political, economic, and societal elites in Fujimori's Peru such as the military, political parties, multinational corporations, or conservative groups within the Catholic Church.

This book explores a paradox: how can a musical work that was written specifically for a certain architectural space survive dramatic changes in performance conditions, as in the case of Handel's Messiah? From the chamber music hall in Dublin where it was first performed in 1742, small baroque theaters, and the chapel of London's Foundling Hospital, performances of Messiah after Handel's death moved to cathedrals, to new and large 19th-century concert halls, and finally to the immense Crystal Palace in Sydenham. Are there boundaries determining an adequate performance? How can we define the quality of room acoustics and how does this quality affect the performance as actual sonorous presentation of a musical work? In short, how do different acoustical conditions affect basic aesthetic premises? There are no simple answers to these complex questions, which elicit different responses according to varying points of view. This aspect of cultural history necessarily calls for an investigation based on systematic, historical, and psychological methods. In the first part of this book, which draws from an extensive database of documents on halls, theatres, and churches, essential concepts from the main disciplines involved are introduced in order to define quality of room acoustics in relation to different performance situations. This background then serves as framework to investigate the performance history of Handel's Messiah in the second part.

In recent labour market history, one of the most striking features has been the increase in part-time employment. In Switzerland, one person out of three works part-time. 57% of women work part-time compared to only 13% of men. This disparity between women and men is one of the highest worldwide. At the same time, differences in the level of education between genders are disappearing. Given the magnitude of this phenomenon, new questions and challenges need to be addressed. By presenting several econometrical models and taking into account historical and social gender focused behaviors, the author analyzes the impact of part-time employment on earning disparities, labour market segmentation and the probability of being promoted to a higher level of responsibility. While introducing ways to improve the situation for part-timers, the author examines innovative models of work organization such as job-sharing, top-sharing, functional flexibility and project team rotations. Beyond demonstrating the need for changes within public and private companies, the book also reveals concrete instruments on policy which could facilitate the implementation of such innovative models.

This book deals with the prevention of potential non-evident risks on human health associated with technology which encloses the general knowledge of developing processes used to achieve either goods or services. The voids in technological knowledge used in the development of new technologies are responsible for hidden defects in the same. The authors suggest that hidden defects in technologies are accountable for hazards in generations of environmental factors that they call technopathogens. These factors can cause adverse effects to human health which are expressed not immediately but over years or even generations. This phenomenon is defined as technopathogeny. Since technopathogeny cannot be framed within existing disciplines related to the phenomenon such as risk assessment, risk management, technology assessment, technological genesis, environmental impact assessment, life cycle assessment or ecology, the authors coin a new term for this specific discipline called Technopathogenology.

Suitable for researchers, scholars and students interested in the field of pragmatics, in general, or in the fields of cross-cultural and second, and specifically for those interested in speech acts and politeness, this book provides a description of a variety of speech acts and politeness strategies in different languages and cultures.

One of the most outstanding properties of Russian postmodernist fiction is its reliance on metafictional devices which foreground aspects of the writing, reading or structure, and draw attention to the constructed nature of fiction writing. Some common metafictional strategies include overt commentary on the process of writing, the presence of an obtrusive narrator, dehumanization of character, total breakdown of temporal and spatial organization and the undermining of specific literary conventions. This book examines the most representative postmodernist texts and addresses the following questions: How widespread is the use of metafiction in contemporary Russian literature? What are its most pronounced forms? What is the function of metafictional devices? How innovative are Russian postmodernist writers in their use of metafictional techniques? This study reveals the unique contribution of postmodernist writers to the development of Russian literature through their systematic use of metafiction and their bold experimentation with new metafictional devices on all the principal levels of the text, including narration, plot, characterization, setting and language.

In no previous generation have so many educated Chinese women with young children immigrated to western countries. Whereas most of the existing research literature in this field tends to study Chinese immigrants in general, this book focuses on a group of skilled female migrant mothers in New Zealand. It aims at understanding the dilemmas and ambiguities particularly concerning skilled female migration: although they belonged to a privileged group in their native land, these women become members of a visible minority in the new country. Middle-class professionals in their birth country, they experience downward social mobility when taking on unskilled jobs in their adopted land; besides having to shoulder heavier domestic workloads as the traditional support for childcare is no longer available in New Zealand. Centering on their mothering practices, this book provides detailed descriptions of how mothers deploy various strategies to maximise the benefits for their children's education amidst changes and readjustments after migration.