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The Unvanquished (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series)
by SparkNotesThe Unvanquished (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by William Faulkner Making the reading experience fun! Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster. Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides: *Chapter-by-chapter analysis *Explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols *A review quiz and essay topicsLively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers
The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang: Republican-Era Martial Arts Fiction
by John Christopher HammXiang Kairan, who wrote under the pen name “the Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang,” is remembered as the father of modern Chinese martial arts fiction, one of the most distinctive forms of twentieth-century Chinese culture and the inspiration for China’s globally popular martial arts cinema. In this book, John Christopher Hamm shows how Xiang Kairan’s work and career offer a new lens on the transformations of fiction and popular culture in early-twentieth-century China.The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang situates Xiang Kairan’s career in the larger contexts of Republican-era China’s publishing industry, literary debates, and political and social history. At a time when writers associated with the New Culture movement promoted an aggressively modernizing vision of literature, Xiang Kairan consciously cultivated his debt to homegrown narrative traditions. Through careful readings of Xiang Kairan’s work, Hamm demonstrates that his writings, far from being the formally fossilized and ideologically regressive relics their critics denounced, represent a creative engagement with contemporary social and political currents and the demands and possibilities of an emerging cultural marketplace. Hamm takes martial arts fiction beyond the confines of genre studies to situate it within a broader reexamination of Chinese literary modernity. The first monograph on Xiang Kairan’s fiction in any language, The Unworthy Scholar from Pingjiang rewrites the history of early-twentieth-century Chinese literature from the standpoints of genre fiction and commercial publishing.
The Unwritten Book: An Investigation
by Samantha Hunt“A beautiful, inventive collection shot through with wildness and grace.” —Maggie Nelson, author of On FreedomFrom Samantha Hunt, the award-winning author of The Dark Dark, comes The Unwritten Book, her first work of nonfiction, a genre-bending creation that explores the importance of books, the idea of haunting, and messages from beyond I carry each book I’ve ever read with me, just as I carry my dead—those things that aren’t really there, those things that shape everything I am. A genre-bending work of nonfiction, Samantha Hunt’s The Unwritten Book explores ghosts, ghost stories, and haunting, in the broadest sense of each. What is it to be haunted, to be a ghost, to die, to live, to read? Books are ghosts; reading is communion with the dead. Alcohol is a way of communing, too, as well as a way of dying. Each chapter gathers subjects that haunt: dead people, the forest, the towering library of all those books we’ll never have time to read or write. Hunt, like a mad crossword puzzler, looks for patterns and clues. Through literary criticism, history, family history, and memoir, inspired by W. G. Sebald, James Joyce, Ali Smith, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and many others, Hunt explores motherhood, hoarding, legacies of addiction, grief, how we insulate ourselves from the past, how we misinterpret the world. Nestled within her inquiry is a very special ghost book, an incomplete manuscript about people who can fly without wings, written by her father and found in his desk just days after he died. What secret messages might his work reveal? What wisdom might she distill from its unfinished pages? Hunt conveys a vivid and grateful life, one that comes from living closer to the dead and shedding fear for wonder. The Unwritten Book revels in the randomness, connectivity, and magic of everyday existence. And at its heart is the immense weight of love.
The Upper Case: Trouble in Capital City (Private I)
by Tara LazarJust when Private I thinks all is calm-now that he's cracked the case of 7 Ate 9-Question Mark storms into the office.Mark is worried. All the uppercase letters are M-I-S-S-I-N-G! But that's absurd. This is CAPITAL City!Private I is the last letter standing. Will he solve his BIGGEST mystery yet, the UPPER CASE, before it's too late?!Filled with the same humor, wit, and quirkiness of the hit 7 Ate 9: The Untold Story, comes another laugh-out-loud whodunit.
The Ups and Downs of Child Language: Experimental Studies on Children's Knowledge of Entailment Relationships and Polarity Phenomena (Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics)
by Andrea GualminiThe new experimental evidence presented in The Ups and Downs of Child Language shows that it is possible to extend research on child language to children's semantic competence, adopting the same theoretical framework that has proven useful to the study of children's syntactic competence. Andrea Gualmini investigates the role of entailment relations for child language in a series of interconnected experiments assessing children's negation and their interpretation of words like or, every, and some. Comparing his study to other models of language acquisition and characterizing the observed differences between children and adults, Gualmini asserts that even in the domain of semantic competence there is no reason to assume that child language differs from adult language in ways that would exceed the boundary conditions imposed by Universal Grammar.
The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion: A Memoir
by Cory LeadbeaterA brilliant debut memoir about a young writer—struggling with depression, family issues, and addiction—and his life-changing decade working for Joan DidionAs an aspiring novelist in his early twenties, Cory Leadbeater was presented with an opportunity to work for a well-known writer whose identity was kept confidential. Since the tumultuous days of childhood, Cory had sought refuge from the rougher parts of life in the pages of books. Suddenly, he found himself the personal assistant to a titan of literature: Joan Didion.In the nine years that followed, Cory shared Joan’s rarefied world, transformed not only by her blazing intellect but by her generous friendship and mentorship. Together they recited poetry in the mornings, dined with Supreme Court justices, attended art openings, smoked a single cigarette before bed.But secretly, Cory was spiraling. He reeled from the death of a close friend. He spent his weekends at a federal prison, visiting his father as he served time for fraud. He struggled day after day to write the novel that would validate him as a real writer. And meanwhile, the forces of addiction and depression loomed large.In hypnotic prose that pulses with life and longing, The Uptown Local explores the fault lines of class, family, loss, and creativity. It is a love letter to a cultural icon—and a moving testament to the relationships that sustain us in the eternal pursuit of a life worth living.
The Uralic Languages (Routledge Language Family Series)
by Daniel AbondoloThis book provides a unique, up-to-date survey of individual Uralic languages and sub-groupings from Finnish to Selkup.Spoken by more than 25 million native speakers, the Uralic languages have important cultural and social significance in Northern and Eastern Europe, as well as in immigrant communitites throughout Europe and North America. The introductory chapter gives an overview of the Uralic language family and is followed by 18 chapter-length descriptions of each language or sub-grouping, giving an analysis of their history and development as well as focusing on their linguistic structures.Written by internationally recognised experts and based on the most recent scholarship available, the volume covers major languages - including the official national languages of Estonia, Finland and Hungary - and rarely-covered languages such as Mordva, Nganasan and Khanty. The 18 language chapters are similarly-structured, designed for comparative study and cover phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. Those on individual languages also have sample text where available. Each chapter includes numerous tables to support and illustrate the text and bibliographies of the major references for each language to aid further study. The volume is comprehensively indexed.This book will be invaluable to language students, experts requiring concise but thorough information on related languages and anyone working in historical, typological and comparative linguistics.
The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature: City Fissures (Literary Urban Studies)
by Patricia GarcíaThe Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature explores transnational perspectives of modern city life in Europe by engaging with the fantastic tropes and metaphors used by writers of short fiction. Focusing on the literary city and literary representations of urban experience throughout the nineteenth century, the works discussed incorporate supernatural occurrences in a European city and the supernatural of these stories stems from and belongs to the city. The argument is structured around three primary themes. “Architectures”, “Encounters” and “Rhythms” make reference to three axes of city life: material space, human encounters, and movement. This thematic approach highlights cultural continuities and thus supports the use of the label of “urban fantastic” within and across the European traditions studied here.
The Use And Training Of The Human Voice: A Bio-dynamic Approach To Vocal Life
by Frank Langella Arthur LessacThis introductory text details Arthur Lessac’s proven procedures for understanding, training, and improving the voice and speech of the performer by exploring the varied qualities of the physical energies associated with producing sounds.
The Use and Abuse of Literature
by Marjorie GarberAs defining as Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education were to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively, Marjorie Garber's The Use and Abuse of Literature is to our times. Even as the decline of the reading of literature, as argued by the National Endowment for the Arts, proceeds in our culture, Garber ("One of the most powerful women in the academic world"--The New York Times) gives us a deep and engaging meditation on the usefulness and uselessness of literature in the digital age. What is literature, anyway? How has it been understood over time, and what is its relevance for us today? Who are its gatekeepers? Is its canonicity fixed? Why has literature been on the defensive since Plato? Does it have any use at all, or does it merely serve as an aristocratic or bourgeois accoutrement attesting to worldly sophistication and refinement of spirit? Is it, as most of us assume, good to read literature, much less study it--and what does either mean? The Use and Abuse of Literature is a tour de force about our culture in crisis that is extraordinary for its brio, panache, and erudition (and appreciation of popular culture) lightly carried. Garber's winning aim is to reclaim literature from the margins of our personal, educational, and professional lives and restore it to the center, as a fierce, radical way of thinking.From the Hardcover edition.
The Use and Status of Language in Brunei Darussalam
by James Mclellan David Deterding Noor Azam Haji-OthmanThis book provides an overview of the linguistic situation in Brunei, including a historical overview and a synopsis of the current education system. It investigates pronunciation, particularly the intelligibility of Brunei English and the vowels of Brunei Mandarin, and it also describes the acquisition of Malay grammar, Malay politeness strategies, the use of language online, language in the courts, a comparison of Malay and English newspapers, the language of shop signs, the status of Dusun, and lastly, English literature in Brunei.
The Use of Children's Literature in Teaching: A study of politics and professionalism within teacher education (Routledge Research in Teacher Education)
by Alyson SimpsonThe Use of Children's Literature in Teaching reveals the impact of politics, professional guidelines and restrictive measurements of literacy on the emerging identities of young teachers. It places renewed emphasis on the importance of creative teaching with children’s literature for the empowerment of teacher agency to enhance the learning of their students. Framing the debate alongside the issue of teacher autonomy, Simpson describes results from a two-year study, which brings together information from interviews, surveys, document analysis and digital stories from Australia, Canada, the UK and the US to assess the role of children’s literature in pre-service teacher education. Through cross-cultural comparison, this research captures the different levels of connection between politics, education systems, higher education and pre-service teachers. It exposes how politics, narrow views of professionalism and program structures in teacher education may adversely affect the development of pre-service teachers. This book presents a strong case that reading and responding critically to literary texts leads to better educational outcomes than basic decoding and low-level comprehension training. As such, this book will be of great interest to researchers and scholars working in the areas of teacher education and literacy and primary education. It should also be essential reading for teacher educators and policymakers.
The Use of History (Routledge Library Editions: Historiography)
by A. L. RowseThis book, originally published in 1963, discusses the place of history in education and general culture, methods of teaching and how to tackle reading. It deals with problems that are among the most pressing intellectual issues of the twentieth century as well as being a practical handbook, on how to read history.
The Use of L1 Cognitive Resources in L2 Reading by Chinese EFL Learners (China Perspectives)
by Shiyu WuThis book focuses on the effects of L1 cognitive resources on L2 reading e.g. the effects of L1 reading ability, the ability in L1 mental-structure building, L1 cognitive use in L2 reading, and other related cognitive mechanisms and capacities of EFL learners in China. It integrated test-based and product-oriented as well as VPA-based (verbal protocol analysis) and process-oriented experiments to address the problems of reading in a second language. This book provides several theoretical, methodological and pedagogical insights, including the multidimensional nature of L2 reading and Vygotskyan sociocultural theory as a suitable L2 reading framework, combined approaches on L2 studies, and the rewarding active use of L1 cognitive resources in L2 learning.
The Use of Technology in English Medium Education (English Language Education #27)
by Jack K. H. Pun Samantha Curle Dogan YukselThis volume discusses how the use of technology creates opportunities for effective teaching practice and illustrates ways to apply innovative and stimulating ways to engage and interact with students on-line. This research-led book brings together teaching practice and case studies and provides a comprehensive understanding of how technology can enhance teaching and learning through English as medium of instruction. It helps to further the understanding of challenges that language teachers and learners may experience, and provides suggested solutions to address these challenges. It also reflects on the use of technology trough case studies and practical tasks. This book brings theory and practice together and it informs research and classroom practices. It will therefore be of great value to teachers in training as well as to those already working or researching in the field.
The Uses of Digital Literacy (Creative Economy + Innovation Culture Ser.)
by John HartleyAt the heart of this book lies a reappraisal of humanities research and its use in understanding the conditions of a consumer-led society. This is an open, investigative, critical, scientific task as well as an opportunity to engage with creative enterprise and culture. Now that every user is a publisher, consumption needs to be rethought as action not behavior, and media consumption as a mode of literacy.Online social networks and participatory media are often still ignored by professionals, denounced in the press and banned in schools. But the potential of digital literacy should not be underestimated. Fifty years after Richard Hoggart's pioneering The Uses of Literacy reshaped the educational response to popular culture, John Hartley extends Hoggart's argument into digital media. Media evolution has made possible the realism of the modern age journalism, the novel and science not to mention mass entertainment on a global scale.Hartley reassesses the historical and global context, commercial and cultural dynamics and the potential of popular productivity through analysis of the use of digital media in various domains, including creative industries, digital storytelling, YouTube, journalism, and mediated fashion. Encouraging mass participation in the evolutionary growth of knowledge, The Uses of Digital Literacy shows how today's teenage fad may become tomorrow's scientific method. Hartley claims the time has come for education to catch up with entertainment and for the professionals to learn from popular culture. This book will stimulate the imagination and stir further research.
The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity
by John A. OchoaWhile the concept of defeat in the Mexican literary canon is frequently acknowledged, it has rarely been explored in the fullness of the psychological and religious contexts that define this aspect of "mexicanidad. " Going beyond the simple narrative of self-defeat, The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity presents a model of failure as a source of knowledge and renewed self-awareness. Studying the relationship between national identity and failure, John Ochoa revisits the foundational texts of Mexican intellectual and literary history, the "national monuments," and offers a new vision of the pivotal events that echo throughout Mexican aesthetics and politics. The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity encompasses five centuries of thought, including the works of the Conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, whose sixteenth-century True History of the Conquest of New Spain formed Spanish-speaking Mexico's early self-perceptions; José Vasconcelos, the essayist and politician who helped rebuild the nation after the Revolution of 1910; and the contemporary novelist Carlos Fuentes. A fascinating study of a nation's volatile journey towards a sense of self, The Uses of Failure elegantly weaves ethical issues, the philosophical implications of language, and a sociocritical examination of Latin American writing for a sparkling addition to the dialogue on global literature.
The Uses of Literacy: Aspects Of Working-lass Life (Classics In Communication And Mass Culture Ser.)
by Richard HoggartThis pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media. First published in 1957, it mapped out a new methodology in cultural studies based around interdisciplinarity and a concern with how texts-in this case, mass publications-are stitched into the patterns of lived experience. Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, The Uses of Literacy anticipates recent interest in modes of cultural analysis that refuse to hide the author behind the mask of objective social scientific technique. In its method and in its rich accumulation of the detail of working-class life, this volume remains useful and absorbing.Hoggart's analysis achieves much of its power through a careful delineation of the complexities of working-class attitudes and its sensitivity to the physical and environmental facts of working-class life. The people he portrays are neither the sentimentalized victims of a culture of deference nor neo-fascist hooligans. Hoggart sees beyond habits to what habits stand for and sees through statements to what the statements really mean. He thus detects the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances.Through close observation and an emotional empathy deriving, in part, from his own working-class background, Hoggart defines a fairly homogeneous and representative group of working-class people. Against this background may be seen how the various appeals of mass publications and other artifacts of popular culture connect with traditional and commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance. Hoggart argues that the appeals made by mass publicists-more insistent, effective, and pervasive than in the past-are moving toward the creation of an undifferentiated mass culture and that the remnants of an authentic urban culture are being destroyed.In his introduction to this new edition, Andrew Goodwin, professor of broadcast communications arts at San Francisco State University, defines Hoggart's place among contending schools of English cultural criticism and points out the prescience of his analysis for developments in England over the past thirty years. He notes as well the fruitful links to be made between Hoggart's method and findings and aspects of popular culture in the United States.
The Uses of Literary History
by Marshall BrownIn this collection, Marshall Brown has gathered essays by twenty leading literary scholars and critics to appraise the current state of literary history. Representing a range of disciplinary specialties and approaches, these essays illustrate and debate the issues that confront scholars working on the literary past and its relation to the present.Concerned with both the theory and practice of literary history, these provocative and sometimes combative pieces examine the writing of literary history, the nature of our interest in tradition, and the ways that literary works act in history. Among the numerous issues discussed are the uses of evidence, anachronism, the dialectic of texts and contexts, particularism and the resistance to reductive understanding, the construction of identities, memory, and the endurance of the past. New historicism, nationalism, and gender studies appear in relation to more traditional issues such as textual editing, taste, and literary pedagogy. Combining new and old perspectives, The Uses of Literary History provides a broad view of the field.Contributors. Charles Altieri, Jonathan Arac, R. Howard Bloch, Richard Dellamora, Paul H. Fry, Geoffrey Hartman, Denis Hollier, Donna Landry, Lawrence Lipking, Jerome J. McGann, Walter Benn Michaels, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Virgil Nemoianu, Annabel Patterson, David Perkins, Marjorie Perloff, Meredith Anne Skura, Doris Sommer, Peter Stallybrass, Susan Stewart
The Uses of Literature: Essays
by Italo CalvinoIn these widely praised essays, Calvino reflects on literature as process, the great narrative game in the course of which writer and reader are challenged to understand the world. Calvino himself made the selection of pieces to be included in this volume. Translated by Patrick Creagh. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System
by Perry LinkWhy do people in socialist China read and write literary works? Earlier studies in Western Sinology have approached Chinese texts from the socialist era as portraits of society, as keys to the tug-of-war of dissent, or, more recently, as pursuit of "pure art." The Uses of Literature looks broadly and empirically at these and many other "uses" of literature from the points of view of authors, editors, political authorities, and several kinds of readers. Perry Link, author of Evening Chats in Beijing, considers texts ranging from elite "misty" poetry to underground hand-copied volumes (shouchauben) and shows in concrete detail how people who were involved with literature sought to teach, learn, enjoy, explore, debate, lead, control, and resist. Using the late 1970s and early 1980s as an entree to the workings of China's "socialist literary system," the author shows how that system held sway from 1950 until around 1990, when an encroaching market economy gradually but fundamentally changed it. In addition to providing a definitive overview of how the socialist Chinese literary system worked, Link offers comparisons to the similar system in the Soviet Union. In the final chapter, the book seeks to explain how the word "good" was used and understood when applied to literary works in such systems. Combining aspects of cultural and literary studies, The Uses of Literature will reward anyone interested in the literature of modern China or how creativity is affected by a "socialist literary system."
The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism (Routledge Revivals)
by Allon WhiteOriginally published in 1981, this book examines why and how textual difficulty became a norm of modernist literature and questions how we can begin to account for the forms of obscurity and difficulty which developed in the late 19th Century and which became so important to modernism. The author argues that the decline of realism entailed the growth of ‘symptomatic’ or ‘subtextual’ reading which tended to treat fiction as compromised autobiography. This kind of reading left the author dangerously isolated and exposed in the midst of a newly sophisticated public. Within this general cultural perspective, the book traces the private anxieties that led George Meredith, Joseph Conrad and Henry James to conceal themselves within their complex and resistant fictions. It discusses opacity in the texts themselves – embarrassment and shame in Meredith; ‘engimas’ in Conrad; and the fear of vulgarity and knowledge in Henry James.
The Uses of Reminiscence: New Ways of Working With Older Adults
by Mark KaminskyThe meaning and value of reminiscence in the lives of elders is beautifully explored.
The Uses of the Future in Early Modern Europe (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)
by Andrea Brady Emily ButterworthIs modernity synonymous with progress? Did the Renaissance really break with the cyclical, agrarian time of the Middle Ages, inaugurating a new concept of irreversible time in a secular culture defined by development? How does methodology affect scholarly responses to the idea of the future in the past? This collection of interdisciplinary essays from the fields of literary criticism, cultural studies, politics and intellectual history offers new answers to these commonplace questions. They explore elite and popular culture, women and men’s experiences, and the encounter between East and West, providing a comparative view on the range of personal, political and social practices with which early modern people planned for, imagined, manipulated or even rejected the future. Examining poetry, architecture, colonial exploration, technology, drama, satire, wills, childbirth and deathbed rituals, humanism, religious radicalism and republicanism, this collection provides new readings of canonical early modern texts and insights into popular culture. With a foreword by Peter Burke.
The Uses of the Past in Contemporary Western Popular Culture: Nostalgia, Politics, Lifecycles, Mediations, and Materialities
by Tobias Becker Dion GeorgiouThis book takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the different ways in which the past remains present in Western popular culture in the twenty-first century. It combines theoretical analyses with case study-based chapters focusing on examples from Britain, the US, and Germany, among other countries. In doing so, it pushes beyond a simplistic and monolithic conception of what ‘nostalgia’ is to allow for a more nuanced and varied conceptualisation of this phenomenon, and to also incorporate other ways of understanding the invoking or inclusion of different histories within cultural objects, formats, and practices.