Those once fashionable Frenchies designated them are Langue, language as an idea, and parole, language as utterance...
Balderdash: Stephen Fry on English, and Pedantry - 0 views
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The structuralists: one of their number, perhaps the best known, Roland Barthes, liked to use two words jouissance and plaisir. Le plaisir du texte. The pleasure of the text. Those who think structuralism spelt or spelled death to conscious art and such bourgeois comforts as style, accomplishment and enjoyment might be surprised that the pleasure of the text, the jouissance, the juicy joy of language, was important to Roland and his followers. Only to a dullard is language a means of communication and nothing more. It would be like saying sex is a means of reproduction and no more and food a means of fuelling and no more.
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What is considered "correct" language works very much like how Scientific theories get in vogue. When there's a Kuhnian paradigm shift - voilà, what was once wrong becomes right, and vice versa. That said, outside of the usual hunting grounds of pedants (who Fry is decrying), grammar has functions outside of being correct for the sake of being correct.
pdf of The English literature researcher in the age of the Internet - 2 views
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This article talks about the effects that the Internet is having on English professors and researchers. It mentions the increased research and publishing possibilities, the opportunities provided by email, and the opinions of academics - many of whom were reluctant to accept these new technologies as equal to traditional methods.
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Hopefully the link works - I'm not sure since it's a download of the pdf.
Dissent Magazine - Arguing The World - Are English Departments Killing the Humanities? - - 0 views
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The focus of this post is not the thousand-and-one times told tale of how the corporatization of the university and state divestment from higher education has had a particularly disastrous impact upon humanities departments
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We can treat these realities as facts to be taken for granted.
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We might wonder if there are conditions of intellectual deprivation for which the institutional structures governing the humanities are partly to blame.
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An alternate take on the "future of the humanities" argument. This author proposes a revamped sort of literature study incorporating modern languages and a fervently international approach to literature, thought, and culture.
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This one skirts the edges of the digital humanities, by proposing a vision of future literature study. Explicitly digital projects could be useful for finding the international connections this author calls for.
Asymptote: Literary Encounters Between Languages and Cultures | the kent rid... - 0 views
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Asymptote is a new, international literary journal dedicated to the translation of literary works, both from various languages to English as well as from English to other languages. It was founded by our very own Singaporean writer, Lee Yew Leong, whose editorial team spans various continents and cultures – South Asia, the Middle East, Europe, America and East Asia – and is a veritable international, multi-cultural and multilingual task force.
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A ‘classic’ metaphor comes from the Italian – “traduttore, traditore”, which means “translator, traitor”. My teacher had written this phrase on the board in my first translation class, demonstrating her (rather cynical) philosophical stance on the whole project of translation – something is always ‘lost in translation’, and the translator necessarily interferes in this gap of meaning guided her own bias, conscious or unconscious, political or philosophical.
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In philosophy classes my charismatic and wildly esoteric professor once railed on about the possibility (or impossibility) of commensuration between various little narratives ( petits récits ), given the rejection of ‘modernist’ grand or meta-narratives. But translation, he declared dramatically, the possibility of translation hints at the possibility of commensurability between the little narratives. In his view, little narratives were understood as discrete cultures (Japanese, Iranian, Russian) and inter-cultural communication (and consequent kindness and friendliness amongst humankind) is only possible if translation is possible.
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This Week In Ed Tech - Home - A Case for the iPad: Teaching English as a Seco... - 0 views
Postprotest resistance - 0 views
Victorian Literature, Statistically Analyzed With New Process - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The titles of every British book published in English in and around the 19th century — 1,681,161, to be exact — are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer fresh insight into the minds of the Victorians.
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This research, which has only recently become possible, thanks to a new generation of powerful digital tools and databases, represents one of the many ways that technology is transforming the study of literature, philosophy and other humanistic fields that haven’t necessarily embraced large-scale quantitative analysis.
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There is also anxiety, however, about the potential of electronic tools to reduce literature and history to a series of numbers, squeezing out important subjects that cannot be easily quantified.
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Kamila Shamsie on the perils and delights of translation | Books | The Guardian - 0 views
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When it comes to books of high merit, the translated sentence that fails to relay some nuance or music of the original, is tinged with loss; the translated sentence that doesn't understand the nuance or music to begin with is negligent; the untranslated sentence is a terrible deprivation.
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"translated" and "foreign" are two separate things – sometimes a translated world can feel far more familiar than the foreign worlds I might find in a novel of the English language; and as a reader I am at home with both familiarity and foreignness.
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