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"A linguistically informed look at how our digital world is transforming the English language. Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities...
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English
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How do we know a cat is a cat . . . and why do we call it a cat? In Kant and the Platypus, the renowned semiotician, philosopher, and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum explores the question of how much of our perception of things is based on cognitive ability, and how much on linguistic resources. In six remarkable essays, Umberto Eco explores in depth questions of reality, perception, and experience. Basing his...
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English
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Mankind has a distinct advantage over other terrestrial species: we talk to one another. But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a "bombshell" linguist and "instant folk hero" (Tom Wolfe, Harper's), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than seven thousand languages that exist...
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English
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"With an abandoned degree behind her and a thirtieth birthday approaching, amateur writer Bonnie Falls moves out of her parents' home into a nearby flat. Her landlady, Sylvia Slythe, takes an interest in Bonnie, encouraging her to finish one of her stories, in which a young woman moves to the seaside, falling under strange influences. As summer approaches, Sylvia suggests to Bonnie that, as neither of them has anyone else to go on holiday with, they...
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Appears on these lists
Books About Libraries/Librarians (Adult)
Challenging Reads
Classics - St. Charles Public Library
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Challenging Reads
Classics - St. Charles Public Library
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Description
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. His delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths that take place in seven days and nights of apocalyptic terror. The body of one monk is found in a cask of pigs' blood, another is floating in a bathhouse, still another is crushed at the foot of a cliff.
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English
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"This is an illustrated dictionary of over 850 gestures from around the world. Gestures often convey meanings that transcend borders, but sometimes they bear vastly different meanings from one continent to another. A dictionary, then, of bodily signs made voluntarily in order to communicate in a open manner: not sign language, no involuntary psychoanalytic "tells," no dance moves, and no secret means of exchange (for example, the recent appropriation...
7) Mythologies
Author
Language
English
Description
"No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis," Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies. There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book?one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way readers and philosophers view the world around them.
Author
Language
English
Description
A “scintillating collection” of essays on Disneyland, medieval times, and much more, from the author of Foucault’s Pendulum (Los Angeles Times).
Collected here are some of Umberto Eco’s finest popular essays, recording the incisive and surprisingly entertaining observations of his restless intellectual mind. As the author puts it in the preface to the second edition: “In these pages, I...
Collected here are some of Umberto Eco’s finest popular essays, recording the incisive and surprisingly entertaining observations of his restless intellectual mind. As the author puts it in the preface to the second edition: “In these pages, I...
Author
Language
English
Description
Theory of Mind is what enables us to "put ourselves in another's shoes." It is mindreading, empathy, creative imagination of another's perspective: in short, it is simultaneously a highly sophisticated ability and a very basic necessity for human communication. Theory of Mind is central to such commercial endeavors as market research and product development, but it is also just as important in maintaining human relations over a cup of coffee. Not...
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English
Description
Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at Harvard University and Director of Harvard's Humanities Center in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The author of ten books, most recently Quotation Marks and The Medusa Reader, she is also the editor of many collections of essays and a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, and other publications.
In this lively and provocative book, cultural critic Marjorie...
Author
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English
Description
In late-capitalist Western society, cross-ethnic cultural transactions are an inevitable daily routine. Yet, according to acclaimed cultural critic Rey Chow, the notion of ethnicity as it is currently used is theoretically ambivalent, confusing, indeed self-contradictory, straddling as it does an uneasy boundary between a universalist rhetoric of inclusion on the one hand, and actual, lived experiences of violence and intolerance on the other. To...
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English
Description
Bringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture. Scholars have largely understood modernism as an American and European phenomenon. Those parameters have expanded in recent decades, but the incorporation of multiple origins and influences has often been tied to older conceptual frameworks that make...
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English
Description
Eco's treatment demonstrates his mastery of the field of semiotics. It focuses on the twin problems of the doctrine of signs-communication and signification-and offers a highly original theory of sign production, including a carefully wrought typology of signs and modes of production.
Author
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English
Description
Why were white bourgeois gay male writers so interested in spies, espionage, and treason in the twentieth century? Erin G. Carlston believes such figures and themes were critical to exploring citizenship and its limits, requirements, and possibilities in the modern Western state. Through close readings of Marcel Proust's novels, W. H. Auden's poetry, and Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, which all reference real-life espionage cases involving...
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English
Description
Minima Philologica brings together two essays by Werner Hamacher that are meant to revitalize philology as a practice beyond its restriction to the restoration of linguistic data and their meanings. In these two texts, "95 Theses on Philology" and "For-Philology," Hamacher propounds a notion of generalized philology that is equivalent to the real production of linguistic utterances, and indeed utterances not limited to predicative or even discursive...
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English
Description
Timothy Bewes is associate professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Cynicism and Postmodernity and Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism.
In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription of inequality? How to process the colonial past without reverting to a pathology...
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Español
Description
El futuro llegó hace rato. Y aunque el mercado de los libros siga existiendo como en el siglo pasado, porque compramos en librerías, leemos reseñas, identificamos proyectos editoriales, vamos a presentaciones y charlas con escritores, lo cierto es que la irrupción de las redes sociales y el acceso a plataformas para escribir y publicar textos lo han modificado todo. De pronto importa poco la obra y gana protagonismo el personaje que escritoras...
Author
Language
Español
Description
En este libro, Óscar Quezada, "tocando el instrumento" de los modelos teóricos, interpreta las Prosas apátridas de Julio Ramón Ribeyro, tal como lo haría un "músico ejecutante" que conectase las trazas o pistas dejadas por un "músico compositor" en una partitura literaria y, por qué no, filosófica. Encuentra así, en esta escritura libre que desplaza lúdicamente los límites de los géneros convencionales, un renovado sonido/sentido. Lejos...
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English
Description
"Winner of the 2016 Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture, Media Ecology Association" "Winner of the 2015 James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association" "One of Flavorwire's 10 Best Books by Academic Publishers in 2015" Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author of The Serious Pleasures of Suspense and Provoking Democracy.
A radically...
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English
Description
By investigating the relationship between acoustical technologies and twentieth-century experimental poetics, this collection, with an accompanying compact disc, aims to 'turn up the volume' on printed works and rethink the way we read, hear, and talk about literary texts composed after telephones, phonographs, radios, loudspeakers, microphones, and tape recorders became facts of everyday life.
The collection's twelve essays focus on earplay in...
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