Utopia Fading: Taxonomies,Freedom and Dissent in Open Access Publishing

This essay focuses on some of Mayhew's interviews in London Labour and the London Poor, and especially his interview with one coster-girl. Do these sources express the lived experience of a speaking subject; or do they merely rehearse contemporary cultural and linguistic codes? There is no subject without language; language precedes and determines the subject, but nor is there language without subjects. Language exists only insofar as individuals and groups utilize it, reproduce it and transform it – and always within specific social relations and networks of power and in a relentlessly material world. Mayhew's writings provide a wonderful resource to explore some of these complex struggles over meaning – in a precise time and place.     

The politics of rebirth in Colm Tóibín's ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’

This paper explores the compatibility of Catholic and homosexual identities. Because the language of Catholicism is so deeply entrenched in the popular imagination, I aim to show that not only does it provide a vocabulary for oppression but also for change. For the contemporary Irish novelist, the latter means conferring new meaning onto formerly oppressive language. In ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’, two short stories from Tóibín's Mothers and Sons (2007), the protagonists undergo a ‘baptism’ that signals their emergence into a new world, one tolerant of homosexual desire. Fergus, in the ocean, and Miquel, in the bathtub, experience moments at once erotic and cleansing. I outline their participation in the traditional world – the time before their bathing rites – in contradistinction to a re-imagined, modern, ‘queer’ world. I argue that Tóibín appropriates a Catholic, and therefore heteronormative, rite in a way that includes homosexuals. Thus, he reworks an oppressive framework in order to allow for the formerly excluded to participate and celebrate their non-heteronormativity, or queerness.     

VERNACULAR INTELLIGENCE: COLONIAL PEDAGOGY AND THE LANGUAGE QUESTION IN MINANGKABAU

In the late 1920s the Dutch colonial government resolved to use local languages instead of Malay as the medium of instruction in indigenous schools throughout the Netherlands East Indies. In West Sumatra, this programme was launched in the academic year 1931–1932, and the government required schools to use the first series of textbooks published in the Minangkabau language – Lakēh pandai [Learn quickly], Kini lah pandai [Now I have learnt] and Dangakanlah [Listen!] – written by the Dutch linguist M.G. Emeis. This essay traces Minangkabau resistance to Emeis' works, and examines the confrontation between Dutch colonial policy and local expectations regarding the language of instruction used in the school system of West Sumatra. It also documents the philological efforts of Dutch experts to render the spoken Minangkabau language in a written romanised form, and looks at the scholarly discourse on Minangkabau language in the colonial period.     

Metaphor and the Anthropocene: Presenting Humans as a Geological Force

Intellectually as well as materially, the Anthropocene is a deeply cultural phenomenon. This includes its communicative form, which is a contested trope‐rich narrative, even within the sciences. In this essay I focus on the role of metaphor in Anthropocene thought and in particular, on the provocative, ambiguous, and potentially far‐reaching idea of humans as a geological force. By considering the different interpretations and meaning this metaphor encourages – including differences in what is meant by geological and force, both within and beyond stratigraphy and Earth System Science – we gain a stronger sense of the deeply allegorical and theological character of the Anthropocene story and the way it promises to reposition humans in the world.     

Staging the Interior: The Public and Private Intimacies of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle's Domestic Lives

‘Home’ is one of the most evocative and comforting words in the English language. It produces, at least in its idealized form, notions of safety, comfort, privacy, individuality and communion with family and friends. The supposed autonomy or permanence of home, however, is undermined frequently throughout one's life course revealing instead spaces of interactionism, public disturbance, discomfort, conflict, labour, stress and even violence. Reading Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle's voluminous letters one reads the emotional and psychological importance of ‘home’ and the vital necessity of the ideal world apart. The middle-class home was meant to stage a domesticated and comfortable private haven, withdrawn from public view and distant from the imperatives of the economy and politics, however, the house was also the physical representation, the outward ‘sign’, of the Carlyles' public identity. How the House looked and functioned – externally and internally – represented the Carlyles to the outside world. Home was, as Walter Benjamin alluded, like a sheltered theater box from which the occupants looked at the stage of the outside world and also the stage upon which the outside world cast its own critical eye on the action within. The necessities of life and the public fascination with the interior signify that private and public are largely mutable concepts. Any clear distinction between inside and outside, private and public are complicated as we look at the intimacies of the Carlyles' lives.     

The right to be heard: Citizenship and language

In this paper we address the importance and contestation of language in terms of citizenship and the development of political communities by focusing on the example of a minority language – British Sign Language. Language is crucial to debates about citizenship and belonging because the State has to rely on language for its very functioning, indeed political practice itself is a form of communicative action. For individuals language is deeply implicated in their ability to claim and maintain their rights and in their affective connections with others and sense of identification. The paper therefore begins by identifying that Deaf people's legal entitlements (e.g. to vote) are an abstract form of citizenship because as sign language users they have difficulties understanding both political and wider civil institutions and practices, and so lack the cultural proficiencies necessary to exercise citizenship in a substantive sense. We then go onto consider citizenship in the broader sense of how groups are included or situated in the public sphere, and in doing so to consider the extent to which Deaf people might be understood to have a liveable place in an oral society. The final section examines how the sense of injustice which flows from Deaf people's experiences of marginalisation in the public realm means that they are developing alternative forms of political commitment predicated on non-state spaces of belonging – where they can live their language – at both local and transnational scales. The paper concludes by reflecting on the notion of differentiated citizenship and the implications of Deaf people's claims to language rights.     

The Colonial (Dis)order and the (Im)possibility of Redemption: Jeong,Abolition, and Living from the “End of the World”

This article develops the oppositional edge of postcolonial theologies by way of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial desire for the “end of the world.” It connects W. Anne Joh’s elaboration of jeong – the living in excess of (neo)colonial violence – to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s anti-fascist critique of the godlike desires of European humanism (the sicut deus). The overall aim of the article is to clarify and assess what is at stake in a project of eschatological decolonialism. What might it mean to think theologically about salvation as abolition? And what might it look like to live from the “end of the world?”     

Chemistry: Facts not Fiction

Abstract

Brecht has said that ‘the task of science is to lighten the laboriousness of human existence’ and some examples are given of the way chemistry has contributed to this task. Yet great challenges remain – atomic war and the population explosion – and it is essential to achieve a just and informed balance between benefits and risks. Uninformed criticism of chemistry in the media is roundly condemned, and tribute is paid to antipollution measures taken by the chemical industry. The common language which unites scientists from all nations must be used to further peace and understanding in the world.     

Strange associations: Elizabeth Bowen and the language of exclusion

Since The Last September was first published in 1929, the novel's style has been a major source of controversy amongst Elizabeth Bowen's critics, many of whom align the work with reactionary feeling among the Anglo-Irish community in early 1920s Ireland. This longstanding view ignores, I think, a complex but critically overlooked aspect not only of The Last September but also of Bowen's many opinions about the novel form: the author's fascination with the language of exclusion. In this essay I argue that Bowen's use of literary devices in The Last September that rely on exclusion – including ellipses, euphemism, rumour, overheard conversation, narrative digression, and lying – dramatise the ways in which war disorients figurative language and, in so doing, subverts and transforms the apparently stable metaphors through which the Anglo-Irish sought to reconcile events occurring in September 1920, that fitful last September of the Republic's colonial ties to England, with their historical role as settler-colonialists in Ireland. Further, Bowen's experimental style disorients the reader, thereby undermining any confidence in the legitimacy of Ascendancy protocol, or the morality of British colonialism, or the militant expression of Irish nationalism, and leads instead to an emergent, though ultimately unfulfilled, cosmopolitan vision of late modernist Ireland.     

Yeats,Wittgenstein and the ladder of linguistic inversion

This paper will consider the philosophy of language by Ludwig Wittgenstein in relation to the later modernist poetry of W. B. Yeats in Last Poems (1939). Accordingly, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953) are used to understand the limits of language in conveying the facts of existence and the necessity for the inversion of previously held truths to navigate the altering nature of reality through time. W. B. Yeats’s final volume of poetry, Last Poems (1939), is shown to parallel the philosophical ideas of Wittgenstein, thus demonstrating the subversive nature of Yeats’s last written poetry as an interrogation of his own constructed truths of the past. Both philosopher and poet are shown to coalesce in the deconstruction of linguistic representations of the world through the “form of life” that is the game of language in order to question limiting worldviews.     

Cultural networks between Portugal and Brazil: a postcolonial review

This paper aims to study notable examples of transatlantic transmissions of norms, beliefs and values that have revised the sense of a Luso-Brazilian community in a global world. The so-called Atlantic Civilization understood before as essentially Anglo-Saxon, takes a new shape when seen by the South Atlantic. If the historical relationship between Portugal and Brazil was one of colonial containment, since the nineteenth century those bilateral relations have passed through a process of reconciliation and networking – first through a mutual acceptance, then through the establishment of common international goals. On the one hand, this networking between Portugal and Brazil has occurred through public symbolic demonstration and the commemoration of a common culture; on the other hand, this networking has evolved through cultural connections – music, literature, and cinema, – all of which serve to validate a postcolonial review. Cultural connections that have survived the proverbial test of time have proven to be valuable in assessing the evolving relationship between Portugal and Brazil. Therefore, the Brazilian conscientiousness of its importance in the regional and world sphere involved the preparation of a Brazilian cultural diplomacy that recognized the political desire of diplomacy between Portugal and Brazil – a diplomacy that is largely demonstrative of the importance of soft power in a world of global networks.     

Fichte and the German Idiom: the Metaphysics of the Addresses to the German Nation

This article argues against the dominant Anglophone and Francophone interpretation of Fichte, which reads him as advancing either a form of ethnic or cultural nationalism. It claims that what is missing from the current reception of Fichte is the essentially philosophical and cosmopolitan character of his nationalism – the fact that the Addresses to the German Nation uses non‐empirical and cosmopolitical concepts to develop and articulate its nationalistic viewpoint. It therefore claims that the notion of a national philosophical idiom that the Addresses present, far from being a screen for its nationalism, is its driving engine. It does this by considering the problems of translating the German locution ist unsers Geschlechts. Consequently, it is claimed that the cosmo‐nationalism of Fichte is not reducible to a set of claims regarding ethnicity or even the empirical world, even if a discourse on the organismic, on what counts as life, irreducibly haunts the Addresses.     

Social Notes: Oscar Wilde,Francis Bacon,and the Medium of Aphorism

This paper reads Oscar Wilde's aphoristic style in terms of the note-taking practices he develops as an undergraduate at Oxford. It treats his use of small, mobile pieces of language as a strategy for dealing with methodological uncertainty in a time of curricular upheaval. His trademark style is perhaps best understood as a form of social notation, whereby pieces of information behave as actors seeking sociality and recombination, rather than placement in systematic arrangements. One significant unpublished source – the ‘Notebook on Philosophy’ – discloses Wilde's engagement with a surprising aphoristic precursor, Francis Bacon, who deploys the form for similar purposes. In modelling a form of non-teleological informational assembly, Wilde's notebooks also body forth the utopian social life he conceives in his later critical writings.     

Calls for educating girls in the Third World: futurity,girls and the ‘Third World Woman’

In this article I examine three calls for Western support for girls' education in the ‘developing world’. Using transnational feminist theory and discourse analysis I look at three examples of these calls; Three Cups of Tea, ‘Because I Am a Girl’ and the United National Girls Education Initiative. I suggest that what Mohanty (1988) terms the ‘Third World Woman’ – a homogeneous, static image of women in the third world – is the spectre used to motivate Western support. Through representations of girls, Western viewers/readers are hailed to invest in order to save the girl-child from the haunting ‘Third World Woman’. The girl-child, through her particularity as a girl, her future womanhood as motherhood and her neoliberal potential, becomes presented as emblems of a better future with the investment of Westerners.     

Culture and power: the rise of Afrikaner nationalism revisited*1

ABSTRACT. Outside parliament, the story of Afrikaner nationalism is largely a story of political (and sometimes economic) activists establishing language and cultural organisations. In a preliminary attempt to systematise the intentions and achievements of these extra‐parliamentary components of the Afrikaner movement, this article critiques and refines Joep Leerssen's model of nationalism as ‘the cultivation of culture’ (Nations and Nationalism 12, 4: 559–78). Drawing on the examples of the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaanders and the Afrikaner‐Broederbond, I revisit the relationship between cultural and political nationalism – both as concepts and as actual movements – and question the notion of a dichotomy.     

VICO'S NEW SCIENCE AND A NEW POETIC PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

This review essay discusses Giambattista Vico and the New Psychological Science, which contains seven essays that challenge traditional anthropological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions that define psychology as a social science and instead interpret it as an embodied understanding of human cultural activity. The authors use Vico's New Science to support this endeavor because, they suggest, it traces the creation of human existence from a prehuman animal state with the agency of poiesis, an embodied meta‐phoric language and social practices that are inseparable from that language. This effort is a potentially transformative reinterpretation of Vico, whose verum factum principle scholars interpret as challenging Cartesian epistemology. Identifying the true with the made, Vico's principle limits human knowing to what humans make—that is, their historical world. The authors rightly emphasize the embodied nature of making with poetic language and social practices. However, they undermine the significance of that embodiment by assuming that knowing what is made with poiesis is, like traditional understandings of knowledge, epistemic. Thus, they implicitly retain humanism's metaphysical assumption that grounds epistemology: humans know intelligible reality because they are dualistic beings who possess rational, subjective natures. By contrast, I claim that Vico's poetic humanism is a more radical move from traditional humanism's belief in epistemology toward a culturally active anthropology. For Vico, bodily skills of perception, memory, and imagination create a metaphoric language based on random perceptions, images, and sounds. This metaphoric language is inseparable from social practices and physical skills, creating a meaningful human world. The making achieved by embodied poetic language cannot lead to epistemic knowledge; it can only lead to the self‐referential hermeneutic understanding that humans are the creators of their human existence. Vico's verum factum is not an epistemological principle in the Cartesian tradition but an ontological unity of knowing and making through sociophysical skills that are inseparable from poetic language. Humans make their ontologically real, meaningful human world and know themselves as its creators.     

Who identifies with the “Russian World”? Geopolitical attitudes in southeastern Ukraine,Crimea, Abkhazia,South Ossetia,and Transnistria

Abstract

The concept of the Russian world (Russkii mir) re-entered geopolitical discourse after the end of the Soviet Union. Though it has long historical roots, the practical definition and geopolitical framing of the term has been debated and refined in Russian political and cultural circles during the years of the Putin presidency. Having both linguistic-cultural and geopolitical meanings, the concept of the Russian world remains controversial, and outside Russia it is often associated with Russian foreign policy actions. Examination of official texts from Vladimir Putin and articles from three Russian newspapers indicate complicated and multifaceted views of the significance and usage of the Russkii mir concept. Surveys in December 2014 in five sites on the fringes of Russia – in southeastern Ukraine, Crimea, and three Russian-supported de facto states (Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria) – show significant differences between the Ukrainian sample points and the other locations about whether respondents believe that they live in the Russian world. In Ukraine, nationality (Russian vs. Ukrainian) is aligned with the answers, while overall, attitudes toward Russian foreign policy, level of trust in the Russian president, trust of Vladimir Putin, and liking Russians are positively related to beliefs about living in the Russian world. In Ukraine, the negative reactions to geopolitical speech acts and suspicions about Russian government actions overlap with and confuse historical linguistic-cultural linkages with Russia, but in the other settings, close security and economic ties reinforce a sense of being in the Russian “world.”     

Language maintenance through corpus planning – the case of Kven

ABSTRACT

The Kven language that is spoken in northernmost Norway was officially recognized as a language in 2005. The history of the language community dates back to the sixteenth century according to tax books. There is still an ongoing discussion among certain language users, whether Kven is in fact a language or one of the Finnish dialects. The language planning of Kven has started in 2007 by determining the orthography and choosing principles for the standardization. This article discusses the history of the process that led to the recognition of Kven as a language and reviews the progress of the language standardization until the present. The principles of language planning are reviewed through document analysis – earlier literature, minutes or summaries and participant observation of the language board’s meetings, and expert interviews – and analysed according to Lars S. Vikør’s language planning model. Some of the preferred features seem to follow the language planning ideology of the Norwegian standards – Bokmål and Nynorsk – in terms of allowance of variation and parallel forms as well as dialectal diversity.     

语言艺术在小学语文课堂中的运用技巧

语言是一门艺术。语文教学语言同时还是一种专业语言。它是教师引导学生认识客观世界的一种特殊形式的语言,是课堂教学的媒介和重要工具。     

Die Einheit der Wissenschaftssprache. Einige wissenschaftstheoretische und wissenschaftshistorische Anmerkungen

Among those conceptions of the history of science which deal with the formation of theories is the concept of the unity of science. This unity is in turn based on the unity of scientific method, the unity of scientific laws and the unity of the language of science. After a systematic explication of modern approaches, historical conceptions of the unity of the language of science are described and analyzed. To these belong first of all the idea of a mathesis universalis and the so called Leibniz program, which leads to the architecture of a Leibniz world.