Multiculturalism, Multilingualism and the Self: Literature and Culture Studies PDF Download

Author: Jacek Mydla
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331961049X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
This edited collection explores the conjunction of multiculturalism and the self in literature and culture studies, and brings together essays by prominent researchers interested in literature and culture whose critical perspectives inform discussions of specific examples of multicultural contexts in which individuals and communities strive to maintain their identities. The book is divided into two major parts, the first of which comprises literary representations of multiculturalism and discussions of its impasses and impacts in fictional circumstances. In turn, the second part primarily focuses on culture at large and real-life consequences. Taken together, the two complementary parts offer an illuminating and well-rounded overview of representations of multiculturalism in literature and contemporary culture from a variety of critical perspectives.

Author: Danuta Gabryś-Barker
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319568922
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
This book offers several insights into cross-cultural and multilingual learning, drawing upon recent research within two main areas: Language Studies and Multilingual Language Learning/Teaching. It places particular emphasis on the Polish learning environment and Poles abroad. Today’s world is an increasingly complex network of cross-cultural and multilingual influences, forcing us to redefine our Selves to include a much broader perspective than ever before. The first part of the book explores attitudes toward multiculturalism in British political speeches, joking behaviour in multicultural working settings, culture-dependent aspects of taboos and swearing, and expressive language of the imprisoned, adding a diachronic perspective by means of a linguistic study of The Canterbury Tales. In turn, the studies in the second part focus on visible shifts in contemporary multilingualism research, learners’ attitudes towards multiple languages they acquire, teachers’ perspectives on the changing requirements related to multiculturalism, and immigrant brokers’ professional experience in the UK.

Author: Johanna Domokos
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643910010
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The present volume consists of articles dealing with a broad range of multilingual practices in Finno-Ugric literatures, in a variety of sociopolitical contexts from Central Europe to Western Siberia. Literature can strengthen the voices of minority communities, enhance the prestige of languages and encourage their creative use. Today's Finno-Ugric literatures give valuable insights into the everyday realities of multilingualism and cultural diversity, showing the performativity of cultures in multicultural and transcultural settings.

Author: Charles Bernheimer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Addressing the future of comparative literature, the essays contained in this text consider issues such as the discipline's traditional Eurocentrism at a time of expanded multiculturalism and the role that foreign language study and translation can play in broadening the scope of critical inquiry.

Author: Wolfgang Behschnitt
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401209855
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Literature, Language, and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries presents a ground-breaking comparative approach to the study of multicultural literature. Focusing on the development of migration literature in Sweden, Denmark, Flanders, and the Netherlands, the volume argues that the political and institutional preconditions for the development of ‘multicultural’ literatures are still given within the frame of the nation-state. As a consequence, both the field of ‘migration literature’ and the (multi-)lingual quality of literary texts are shaped differently in each state and in each language area. The volume delineates the development of multicultural literature in Scandinavia and the Low Countries as a function of the specific language situations in these countries as well as the various political, institutional, and discursive contexts. This book not only offers a comprehensive theoretical and methodological analysis of multilingualism and multicultural literature, but also provides overviews sketching the discourse on multiculturalism, language and the development of the literary field in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Flanders. Besides it presents a broad range of in-depth analyses of selected literary texts from each of these countries.

Author: Hywel Dix
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527527050
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
The term ‘multiculturalism’ has been widely quoted to explain and study transnational networks and cultural changes on a global scale. This book focuses on the application of multicultural theories and perspectives in the field of literature and particularly in contemporary narratives. Bringing together ten studies which blur the limits of conventional discourse, and employing an interdisciplinary approach to address research problems using methods and insights borrowed from multiple disciplines, it features theoretical and analytical writings on multiculturalism and its traces in literatures that subvert the essentialist binary frameworks of ethnicity, race, nation and identity in a variety of texts. These include Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Salman Rushdie’s Midnights Children and Shame, Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You, J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise, Lady Annie Brassey’s Sunshine and Storm in the East; or, Cruises to Cyprus and Constantinople, and Sir Henry Blount’s A Voyage into the Levant. Approaching theoretical issues concerning multiculturalism from multiple perspectives and looking for its traces in different time periods and genres, this book will be of interest for scholars and researchers working in the fields of literature and cultural studies, as well as students studying in the same fields and the general reader.

Author: Eva Hoffman
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The late poet and memoirist Czeslaw Milosz wrote, "I am enchanted. This book is graceful and profound." Since its publication in 1989, many other readers across the world have been enchanted by Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, a classic of exile and immigrant literature, as well as a girl’s coming-of-age memoir. Lost in Translationmoves from Hoffman's childhood in Cracow, Poland to her adolescence in Vancouver, British Columbia to her university years in Texas and Massachusetts to New York City, where she becomes a writer and an editor at the New York Times Book Review. Its multi-layered narrative encompasses many themes: the defining power of language; the costs and benefits of changing cultures, the construction of personal identity, and the profound consequences, for a generation of post-war Jews like Hoffman, of Nazism and Communism. Lost in Translation is, as Publisher's Weekly wrote, "a penetrating, lyrical memoir that casts a wide net," challenges its reader to reconsider their own language, autobiography, cultures, and childhoods. Lost in Translation was first published in the United States in 1989. Hoffman’s subsequent books of literary non-fiction include Exit into History, Shtetl, After Such Knowledge, Time and two novels, The Secret and Appassionata. "Nothing, after all, has been lost; poetry this time has been made in and by translation." — Peter Conrad, The New York Times "Handsomely written and judiciously reflective, it is testimony to the human capacity not merely to adapt but to reinvent: to find new lives for ourselves without forfeiting the dignity and meaning of our old ones." — Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post "As a childhood memoir, Lost in Translation has the colors and nuance of Nabokov'sSpeak, Memory. As an account of a young mind wandering into great books, it recalls Sartre's Words. … As an anthropology of Eastern European émigré life, American academe and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, it's every bit as deep and wicked as anything by Cynthia Ozick. … A brilliant, polyphonic book that is itself an act of faith, a Bach Fugue." — John Leonard, Harper’s Magazine

Author: Holly E. Martin
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786488492
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Hybrid narrative forms are used frequently by authors exploring or living in multicultural societies as a method of reflecting multicultural lives. This timely book examines this rhetorical strategy, which permits an author to bridge cultures via literary technique. Strategies covered include multilingualism, magical realism, ironic humor, the use of mythological figures from the characters' heritage cultures, and the presentation of different perspectives on landscapes and other spaces as related to ethnicity. By investigating elements of ethnic literature comparatively, this book reaches beyond the boundaries of any one ethnic group, a vital quality in today's world.

Author: Werner Sollors
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814780930
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Aside from the occasional controversy over "Official English" campaigns, language remains the blind spot in the debate over multiculturalism. Considering its status as a nation of non-English speaking aborigines and of immigrants with many languages, America exhibits a curious tunnel vision about cultural and literary forms that are not in English. How then have non-English speaking Americans written about their experiences in this country? And what can we learn-about America, immigration and ethnicity-from them? Arguing that multilingualism is perhaps the most important form of diversity, Multilingual America calls attention to-and seeks to correct-the linguistic parochialism that has defined American literary study. By bringing together essays on important works by, among others, Yiddish, Chinese American, German American, Italian American, Norwegian American, and Spanish American writers, Werner Sollors here presents a fuller view of multilingualism as a historical phenomenon and as an ongoing way of life. At a time when we are just beginning to understand the profound effects of language acquisition on the development of the brain, Multilingual America forces us to broaden what in fact constitutes American literature.

Author: Norbert Francis
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 149855184X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Poetry, music, and narrative are the three aesthetic genres based on uniquely human verbal and vocal capabilities. Universal across all languages and cultures and accessible to all developing children, their foundation must be primary and essential. How did they arise among our early ancestors, and what does this origin imply about our participation in their creation and performance? How do we learn poetic, narrative, and musical abilities? Studying these questions from a scientific point of view requires a cross-cultural approach that also considers contact and interaction between different languages. Research in recent years has made significant progress toward a better understanding of the underlying competencies in literature and music and of the acquisition of artistic sensibility in each case. Bilingual and Multicultural Perspectives on Poetry, Music, and Narrative reviews the relevant research and, at the same time, challenges popular views in academia associated with cultural studies and related fields that have rejected the methods of modern science. Its contributions will be of particular value to students and scholars of linguistics, literary studies, and musicology.