Haun Saussy

Écrits de linguistique générale

Substance # 100, Vol. 32, no. 1, 2003 her symbolic inscription, paradoxically, that excess comes to me by virtue of its inadequate inscriptive form. Without a theological dimension, without the neighbor to intervene in mere political or cultural practices, these norms alone can result in nothing but the tragic struggles of hegemony that mark our world today. Stuart J. Murray University of California, Berkeley

Women writers of traditional china :an anthology of poetry and criticism

Editorial conventions Abbreviations Maps Introduction: genealogy and titles of the female poet Part I. Poetry: 1. From ancient times to the six dynasties (222-589) 2. Tang (618-907) and five dynasties (907-60) 3. Song dynasty (960-1279 4. Yuan dynasty (1264-1368) 5. Ming dynasty (1368-1644 6. Qing dynasty (1644-1911) Part II. Criticism: 7. Female critics and poets 8. Male critics and poets Appendixes Notes Bibliography Index of names.

The Refugee Speaks of Parvenus and Their Beautiful Illusions: A Rediscovered 1934 Text by Hannah Arendt

When Hannah Arendt left Berlin in 1933, embarking on an eighteenyear period of wandering without a nationality, she carried in her bags eleven chapters of a book manuscript about Rahel Levin Varnhagen von Ense, a salonnière and letter-writer of the early nineteenth century.1 Arendt’s doctoral dissertation about the concept of love in Saint Augustine had already been accepted and published in 1929. Retrospectively at least, the book about Rahel Varnhagen became the Habilitation that Arendt could not have submitted, given the legal exclusion of Jews from German university teaching as of 1933. Nothing is simple about the Rahel Varnhagen book. She carried the unfinished manuscript to Paris, where Walter Benjamin, another author of a Habilitation that went nowhere (though for different reasons), urged her to finish it, as she finally did in 1938. Thereafter she was interned in a camp for enemy aliens at Gurs in southwest France, escaped, and made her way to New York. The manuscript, entrusted to a friend, resurfaced in 1945. In 1958 the book was published by the Leo Baeck Institute in an English translation by Richard and Clara

Language and Literature—a Pedagogical Continuum?

People learn languages for all sorts of reasons?not always to talk with other people. They may learn Assyrian or Old Persian to interpret stone carvings, Italian to sing Rossini, Chinese to do calligraphy, Turkish to ex plore psycholinguistics, other languages to decipher intelligence intercepts. There is even an academic specialty called English for special uses, most prominent in places like Hong Kong where certain professions (e.g., the law) rely on the making of fine distinctions in a variety of English that no body in Hong Kong really speaks. These special uses are not the ones that colleges have in mind when they set out language requirements. Most of us, I think quite reasonably, expect that the goal of language study in college is to be able to talk with native speakers more or less readily and naturally and to read the sorts of texts that a native speaker encounters in the course of daily life (newspapers, novels, letters, reports). And when we express that goal as the attainment of advanced competency instead of mandating two years of study or a certain score on a placement test, we mean a kind of all around ability, which is the most plausible way of justifying the existence of language requirements as well as the fairest way of allowing for the many reasons people choose to study this or that language.1 Competence or competency is a feature of learners, not of the thing learned, so when we test for competency or elaborate standards for assess ing it, we are really doing diagnosis: not measuring a thing or property as much as gauging a potential, scrutinizing behavior for the signs that we

Master Zhuang’s blue guitar

ABSTRACTThe standard definition of translation as the rendering, in one language, of content originally formulated in another language is insufficient to describe some situations that closely appro...

Languages as Knowledge Reservoirs

In the spring of 2016 the eminent medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman (who, likeme, has spent much of his career in contact with China) convened a day-longmeeting at the American Academy to address the crisis in area studies and foreign-language learning. Thirty or so concerned professionals showed up: language teachers; historians; professors of literatures bothanglophoneandother, bothancient and modern; linguists; political scientists; anthropologists; sociologists; specialists in public health—and we could easily have drawn on the population of natural scientists, engineers, and computer researchers,whose labs are asmultinational as any place on earth. Given that this was a national and not a supranational academy, we focused on shortcomings in theUnited States.We talked about the receding importance of foreign-language study as recognized in college entrance and graduation requirements; about the plight of the humanities, social sciences, and liberal arts generally; about the job anxiety that pulls students away from time-consuming language classes and in-country experiences; about the creeping English-only norms of globalization; about the failure of the overburdened primary-education system in

Lyric Lost and Found

Abstract A tenacious tradition considers the lyric as the manifestation of a subjectivity, whether personal or universal. But folk traditions as well as the twentieth-century avant-gardes offer the counter-example of poetry that arises from the collocation of verbal fragments, of artificial languages, of subjects in name only, and dare to present these as a new-style lyric. Less startling versions of this displacement of the lyric subject occur in such artifacts as the overheard poem. For such poems, the fact of publication replaces the mythic occasion of utterance as the poem’s moment of truth. This foregrounding of the moment of production is a feature linking the so-called primitive, oral, or folk poetry of many cultures to the purportedly post-humanist poetry of the different avant-gardes, and it links them, not through an irony, metaphor or coincidence, but through a model of the function of the artwork that indeed puts the act of signifying temporally and axiologically before the signified meanings

Getting Mimetic Again

Although its editor, Giorgio Colli, warns the reader of “a certain abruptness” in its formulations, Nietzsche’s draft essay “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense” has served as a rallying point for those concerned to work out the relation between language and literature.1 It puts a skeptical finger on the psychophysical operations we know as experience, damning them with the faint praise of rhetorical terminology as it names them instances of “translation” and “metaphor”:

Ecrits de linguistique generale (review)

Substance # 100, Vol. 32, no. 1, 2003 her symbolic inscription, paradoxically, that excess comes to me by virtue of its inadequate inscriptive form. Without a theological dimension, without the neighbor to intervene in mere political or cultural practices, these norms alone can result in nothing but the tragic struggles of hegemony that mark our world today. Stuart J. Murray University of California, Berkeley

Saussure, Ferdinand de.Ecrits de linguistique générale. Ed. Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. Pp. 353.

Substance # 100, Vol. 32, no. 1, 2003 her symbolic inscription, paradoxically, that excess comes to me by virtue of its inadequate inscriptive form. Without a theological dimension, without the neighbor to intervene in mere political or cultural practices, these norms alone can result in nothing but the tragic struggles of hegemony that mark our world today. Stuart J. Murray University of California, Berkeley