Bücher veröffentlicht von Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

This monograph is a fundamental theme in Thomism. It deals with the basic ontological principles. From the Thomistic perspective and based on Aristotle, it studies the nature and roles of the essential principles on which reality itself is constructed. The work starts with a brief historical survey of first principles from the classical period through the modern/post-modern philosophical schools. The monograph proceeds to study Thomas Aquinas' understanding and use of the principles along with the possibility of the knowledge of these first principles especially through their habits. It underlines the central position of the habits of the first principles in realistic philosophy. To determine their proper character, the volume juxtaposes the first ontological principles with some transcendental notions followed by the most basic practical ethical principles. Since there are no demonstrations for the first principles, the work further investigates the evidence and indirect demonstration of these first realistic crucial principles and ends with an accent on transition from principles to a wise vision that culminates in man's relationship to reality and especially to God

Cruel Britannia: Sarah Kane's Postmodern Traumatics examines four plays by British playwright Sarah Kane (1971-1999), all written between 1995 and 1999 within the context of the Cool Britannia or In-Yer-Face London theatre movement of the 1990s. Kane's plays were notorious for their shocking productions and challenging and offensive subject matter. This book analyzes her plays as products of a long history of theatrical convention and experimentation, rather than trend. I read Kane's plays through an optic of trauma theory, and link the trauma to postmodern experience as defined by war, inter-personal violence, repetitive memory, and sex as medium of violence. Kane's plays' unrelenting violence and graphic depictions of violent sex suggest a relationship with theories and practices such as Artaud's theatre of cruelty, and Kroker and Cook's theory of the postmodern as sign of excremental culture and an inherently abject state of being. Through a play by play analysis I conclude that Kane's work suggests that violence and trauma are endemic to postmodern life, and are ultimately apocalyptic due to their culmination in Kane's final play, the suicide text of 4.48 Psychosis.

This book compares Butler's and Wang's moral vision and conception of conscience. It seeks to advance our ongoing inquiry into the complex encounter between Christianity and Confucianism. The study shows that in both thinkers' treatises are profound consonances that could serve as framework for a constructive interaction between these two civilizations.

In the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, all five of the Chief Ministers since 1967 have been former actors. This provocative book debunks the notion of Bollywood as the synecdoche of Indian cinema to explore the hitherto less studied, yet highly influential cinema in South Asia. Developing the concept of the politics of sentiment, the author examines the ways in which actor-politicians constructed their cinematic charisma, projecting themselves as messiahs saving the people from injustices, to create a political appeal to voters. The resilience of cinematic charisma, as Indian society undergoes massive socio-economic changes, provides a compelling study of modern politics, cinema, celebrity and the culture of the subcontinent.

Focusing on national qualifications frameworks and on the dual model of vocational training, this volume analyses the challenges that are tied to the transfer of models in the domain of vocational skills development. It brings together contributions from authors involved in both the theory and practice of vocational skills training development.

Gathers contributions from two disciplines which have much to gain from one another - rhetoric and cognitive science - as they both have much to say in the broad realm of argumentation studies.

Given the consolidated effects of the greening process on the tourism industry, this volume investigates the relationship between three areas of research - the natural environment, tourism and discourse -, and how this relationship is affected by and affects society as a whole. In particular, the book highlights the central role of language in constructing eco-friendly tourist sites. Since the images associated to nature are various, this study examines the uses of nature and explores how the terms nature and natural are constructed within the texts. The research identifies how nature is linguistically defined and constructed by advertisers in travel promotion texts in order to attract potential 'green' tourists. The study also analyses the promotion of protected areas to verify the extent to which these areas meet the criteria on sustainable tourism set by the World Tourism Organization. By adopting a corpus-based discourse analysis perspective which combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches, the book unravels the complex interrelationship between the environment, tourism and advertising.

This book explores both a contribution of telecollaboration to the democratic education, solidarity and social justice in the globalized world as well as the complexities and challenges that arise from attempts to align international collaborations and social justice.

Investigates the European debate on culture and identity by pointing to those uses of language that shape the image and perception of migrants in host societies.

This book is a collection of essays exploring the impact of spirituality on American literature from the nineteenth century to the present with essays devoted to Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Ellen Glasgow, Leonard Cohen, Fanny Howe, Toni Morrison, Paul Auster, Margaret Atwood, Erna Brodber, Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx.

Literatures in English have emerged in several Asian communities and have enjoyed a growing readership. Creative writing programmes in Asia and other parts of the world have also attracted many new voices from Asia. However, little is known about how learners from different language backgrounds become published poets in English. This book is a pioneering work on the development of poets and poetry in English in Asia. It offers a five-stage model to understand such phenomena. The life experiences of 50 published poets from five Asian locations: Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines and India, based on interviews conducted by the author, and their poetry are analyzed to appreciate how learners of English in multilingual environments become published poets and how such individual metamorphosis contributes to the growth of literary communities at local, regional and cosmopolitan levels. Researchers on Asian Englishes and literatures in English, teachers and participants in creative writing programmes, policy makers for English in education or the nurturing of the creative arts and any one interested in poetry writing will find the book highly informative and inspiring.

The book refers to universal eschatology contained in the Letters to the Thessalonians (1 Thess 4, 13-5, 11; 2 Thess 2, 1-12). The whole material is divided in two groups (eschatological motifs and apocalyptic motifs). Each of the motifs is analysed in the Biblical context and in the Intertestamental Literature context (the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the Qumran Literature). The exegetical analysis and the comparative analysis show similarity and diversity of the way Paul used the motifs. They also show which motifs were created or extensively modified by Paul in order to contribute to the creation of Christian eschatology. After presentation of the importance of eschatological topics in the 1-2 Thess (chapter I), the analyses of prodroms (chapter II) and events connected with the parousia (chapter III) indicate the way of using each of the motifs in different traditions. Based on results of the analyses, the Jewish background and Paul's original contribution to the New Testament eschatology are presented in chapter IV.

The book outlines in five chapters the different perspectives of sustainable language policies, role of translators and interpreters and the challenges they face on the globalized market. A special section is dedicated to training and research issues, which have to handle the difficult task of preparing students for the globalized and changing market.

This monograph offers an incisive analysis of how the second language learner can achieve cultural proficiency, which is more than a set of rules and facts to be memorized by rote. How can the cultural dimension be taken into account, among the many choices of instructional material and language assessment tools? Is it possible to distinguish levels of cultural competence? How can the degree of cultural proximity between the source language and the target language influence the acquisition process? What strategies should be implemented in order to decode any cultural pitfalls? This handy guide addresses these and many other frequently asked questions underpinning language teaching methodology. Illustrated with a broad range of classroom-based examples, this book presents language as inextricably intertwined with social relations. The variety of languages involved (Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Hungarian, French and English) makes the volume especially attractive for language educators seeking effective teaching strategies in specific local contexts around the globe.

This book is the first collection of essays dealing with game localization and accessibility from a multidisciplinary perspective, including game design, media accessibility, translation studies, terminology management, and cultural studies. It is also unique in the way it combines contributions from academia and the industry.

Derrida is one of the most influential, controversial and complex thinkers. The book offers a critical evaluation of deconstruction by focusing on the problematic of writing, self and other in the thought of Derrida. It examines how these concepts relate to one another in order to analyse systematically the influence that the concept of alterity has had in deconstructing a certain idea of subjectivity in Western metaphysics. Thea Bellou argues that Derrida's intellectual project is to examine the fate of irreducible alterity within Western metaphysics. Hence, the question of the other remained Derrida's most fundamental and constant intellectual engagement throughout his oeuvre. The book starts with the early works of Derrida where his notions of alterity and writing are embedded in his engagement with phenomenology. It ends with the last phase of Derrida's work where he turns towards more concrete ethico-political situations, and increasingly adopts theological and messianic discourses, focusing on violence to the other, an 'other-orientated' notion of responsibility, and a 'futural' concept of democracy and politics.

This book focuses on inclusion and exclusion in sporting activities among young people in a multicultural society. Do young people who identiy with cultural groups other than the majority experience exclusion from sporting teams, or do they find themselves readily included? Does this vary across identities, and sports? In the context of Australia, where sport is an integral part of national life and one in four of the population were born overseas, and over 270 different ancestries are acknowledged, young people were asked to write about their cultural identity and their experiences playing sport. Using a humanistic sociological approach, the inductive analysis justaposed their sense of cultural identity with their participation or non-participation in sport, and with the particular sports played. This book is important for all those in culturally diverse society especially academics, teachers and sports administrators, who are interested in the issue of exclusion and inclusion of cultural minorities in sport.

This book addresses the issue of task equivalence, which is of fundamental importance in the areas of language testing and task-based research, where task equivalence is a prerequisite. The main study examines the two 'seemingly-equivalent' picture-based spoken narrative tasks, using a multi-method approach combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies with MFRM analysis of the ratings, the analysis of linguistic performances by Japanese candidates and native speakers of English (NS), expert judgements of the task characteristics, and perceptions of the candidates and NS. The results reveal a complex picture with a number of variables involved in ensuring task equivalence, raising relevant issues regarding the theories of task complexity and the commonly-used linguistic variables for examining learner spoken language. This book has important implications for the possible measures that can be taken to avoid selecting non-equivalent tasks for research and teaching.

The people in Myanmar have faced socio-politico-economic crises under the military civil-turned regime since 1962. This book attempts to develop a theological response to the suffering (dukkha) of people (Ludu). By transferring the Korean Minjung Theology into the Myanmar context a "Ludu Theology" is evolved.

Aiming at exemplifying the methodology of learner corpus profiling, this book describes salient features of Romanian Learner English. As a starting point, the volume offers a comprehensive presentation of the Romanian-English contrastive studies. Another innovative aspect of the book refers to the use of the first Romanian Corpus of Learner English, whose compilation is the object of a methodological discussion. In one of the main chapters, the book introduces the methodology of learner corpus profiling and compares it with existing approaches. The profiling approach is emphasised by corpus-based quantitative and qualitative investigations of Romanian Learner English. Part of the investigation is dedicated to the lexico-grammatical profiles of articles, prepositions and genitives. The frequency-based collocation analyses are integrated with error analyses and extended into error pattern samples. Furthermore, contrasting typical Romanian Learner English constructions with examples from the German and the Italian learner corpora opens the path to new contrastive interlanguage analyses.

As an internationally renowned musicologist well-known for his critical editions of Girolamo Frescobaldi, Etienne Darbellay is also a man arbiter of taste who appreciates painting as much as he does music. This book contains essays in German, French, English and Italian.

Deconstructive rewritings are re-visions. This monograph engages Robinson Crusoe in tandem with two of its re-visions, Michel Tournier's Friday and J. M. Coetzee's Foe, from the perspective of the Enlightenment ideology. Basing the argument upon the assumption that Robinson Crusoe is a myth of the Enlightenment ideology representing the master narrative of the Enlightenment discourse, the book examines how the major ideological themes of the Enlightenment master narrative as manifested through the myth of Robinson Crusoe are rearticulated in Friday and Foe. It dismantles how these two re-visions, through deconstructive freeplay, question and more importantly deconstruct the basic premises and principles, or the concepts that enjoy the full presence of an absolute signified in the myth of Robinson Crusoe. Thus these re-visions not only transform the logocentric repressive structure in Defoe's text into open-ended and dialogic discourses, they also partly constitute a chain of differance in signifying the myth of Robinson Crusoe. The author desires to generate large-scale understandings from small-scale insights through this research.

This book provides a cognitive analysis of the poetry of George Herbert (1593-1633). From Herbert's own thinking, recorded in his prose treatises, can be deduced that his poems should serve a specific function: teaching self-knowledge to his readers. The cognitive framework applied here can serve to explain this function.

Helps you explore the dynamics of communicating specialised contents to the lay public is an undoubtedly topical issue.

Pragmatic competence plays a key role in intercultural communication, particularly for students studying in a target community. This book investigates the effect of study abroad on second language learners' productive and receptive pragmatic competences, as well as their cognitive processes during speech act production. It employs a variety of research instruments, both quantitative and qualitative, to explore learners' pragmatic development over one year. The inclusion of a control group is a methodological strength of the longitudinal study, many such studies often not including a control group. In addition, the study longitudinally examines learners' cognitive processes during study abroad with innovative and insightful analyses. The book makes an important contribution to second language pragmatics with regard to developmental changes in both speech act production and perception during such processes.

Based on two richly described case studies - a Pentecostal worship service and popular music festival - this book draws on sociology, theology and religious studies in order to understand the significance of ecstatic experience in these contexts. Interviews with performers in both settings, together with detailed first person accounts of worship services and live performances, combine to create a picture of the role of music, performance and space in catalysing ecstasy. Drawing on the work of thinkers as diverse as Michel Foucault, Emile Durkheim, Victor Turner and Friedrich Schleiermacher, this book demonstrates that religious and non-religious disciplines, paradigms and understandings can work in a complementary fashion to help us understand the significance of phenomena such as music and ecstatic experience. Ultimately, the argument put forward in the book is that ecstatic experience takes place in both religious and secular settings and is best understood by both theistic and non-theistic approaches, working together. The ecstatic experience common to both contexts is theorised as 'proto-religious phenomena' - the kernel from which religion may develop.

What makes us what we are? How does our gender affect our identity? Who are our heroes and heroines and how do they mould the decisions we make and the way we live our lives? In what ways does our connection - or lack there of - to our birth religion shape our adult selves? These are just some of the questions which Identity, Heroism and Religion in the Lives of Contemporary Jewish Women addresses. In examining the lives and deaths of various Jewish women during the 20th and 21st centuries this study focuses on the dynamic by which they formed their identities at times of crisis, whether in pre-State Israel, during and after the Holocaust in liberated Europe, or throughout Israel's formative years. As refugees, survivors, new immigrants or veteran citizens of a country these women's lives are probed and analyzed in terms of their relationship to each other, to their surroundings, their past, their future, their ideologies, and their geographic and virtual communities, presenting us with a mosaic of contemporary Jewish women's lives.

This edited collection of essays presents a wide-ranging examination of the nature of scenes and subcultures in contemporary Berlin. It touches upon a number of key debates about cultural life in the city, drawing from examples specific to Berlin itself but germane also to those interested in discussions about broader issues of urban living.

The book brings together current research on the description of English using a range of corpora. It consists of a foreword, a review of the diachronic studies and another of the synchronic studies, twelve research papers, and a subject index. Five of the papers are about diachronic description and seven are about synchronic description.

This book presents a comprehensive study of the subject of text and discourse coherence, integrating some of the traditional trends of discourse analysis and creating new channels of research which help to understand the notion further. Based on the work of leading theoreticians and on the actual consideration of authentic linguistic material, the book identifies the structural and cognitive aspects of standard discourse coherence and, as a variation from other mainstream approaches, it also explores the more subjective and culturally-bound conceptual aspects of coherence construction in creative modes of discourse. To achieve these aims, the study incorporates concepts and analytical practices from cognitive linguistic theories of conceptualisation; additionally, it draws from theories of communication to address the idiosyncratic and socio-cultural aspects which affect the formation of coherent discourse patterns. The intention is to broaden the perspective of the subject and to focus on its complexity, as well as to stress the need to conceive of discourse coherence as a multi-dimensional phenomenon consisting of numerous procedural components.