New Books In Language

How does a language develop? What are the factors and processes that shape a language and reflect the changes it undergoes? These seemingly routine questions entail a conversation that involves not only linguistic phenomena, but historical, sociological, and literary issues as well. Andrii Danylenko’s From the Bible to Shakespeare: Pantelejmon Kuliš (1819-1897) and the Formation of Literary Ukrainian (Academic Studies Press, 2016) offers a compelling investigation of the development of the Ukrainian language and discusses how the creative input of an individual writer and a translator may engage with the process of language creation. Pantelejmon Kuliš, as Danylenko emphasizes, is a controversial figure in the history of Ukrainian literature: he is attributed with persistent resistance against linguistic rigidity and stagnation. As From the Bible to Shakespeare demonstrates, Kuliš was driven by his passion for writing and translation that provided space for creative interactions, filled with a strong potential

In this episode, I speak with Steven Alvarez about his book, Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning From Bilingual After-School Programs (National Council of Teachers of English, 2017). This book highlights effective bilingual after-school programs and how their models can be applied to the traditional classroom contexts. We discuss the role of relationships and trust in fostering learning as well as emerging Latinx identities in the South. Alvarez recommends the following books for listeners interested in his work and our conversation: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World by Django Paris Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race by H. Samy Alim The Translanguaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning by Ofelia García Alvarez joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @chastitellez and on Instagram at @stevenpaulalvarez and @tacolit

For anyone with an interest in Korean studies, the study of diaspora and globalization, and indeed in broader questions around transnational identities and encounters in East Asia and beyond, Homing will prove an invaluable text. In it Ji-Yeon Jo, Associate Professor of Korean language and culture at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, weaves together an array of fascinating and often moving personal accounts from members of the longstanding Korean communities in China, the former-Soviet Union and the United States who have moved ‘back’ (a complicated term as she explains in this podcast) to South Korea, mostly since the 1990s. Basing her work largely on personal interviews, Professor Jo also offers rich background on how the Chinese, Soviet and US Korean diaspora communities became established in the first place, and how and why it was that many of them elected to return to the Korean peninsula in recent decades. But this book is much more than just a historical summary or collection of interview

In An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (University of California Press, 2018), Rosina Lozano details the entangled relationship between language and notions of individual, community, and national belonging in the U.S. Through an innovative analysis of Spanish-language newspapers, territorial and municipal records, federal officials’ correspondence, Senate hearings, election results, and so much more, Dr. Lozano eloquently explains how the Spanish language moved from one essential to the governance of the Southwest during the transition from Mexican to U.S. rule in the mid-to-late 19th  century to one of foreignness by the mid-20th century. Whereas much of the existing scholarship on the U.S. Southwest narrates the history of the region through the lenses of conquest and ethno-racial conflict and marginalization, Lozano provides new insight into the central role played by treaty citizens—the former residents of Mexico in California, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona—as, they press

To find out what Americans really think about their government, University of Texas-Austin Professor Roderick P. Hart read and analyzed approximately 10,000 letters to the editor, from 12 “ordinary” cities, written between 1948 and the present. In Civic Hope: How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Hart argues these letter writers are essential because “[c]reating and sustaining a culture of argument at the grassroots level” is what makes “democracy flourish.” Despite the sometimes cantankerous nature of letter writers, Hart praises their commitment to participating in a public dialogue. He notes the importance of sharing opinions in local newspapers in one’s own name, where neighbors can see them and respond to them, aiding communal understanding. But Hart also sees in his research a decline over the past several decades in “Oppositional Literacy,” the understanding of opposing views, possibly fed by “hyper-partisanship” in non-local online discourse. Nevertheless, “Ci

Kant famously asked the question, how is knowledge possible? In her new book, Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information (Oxford University Press, 2018), Ruth Garrett Millikan responds to this question from a naturalistic, and specifically evolutionary, perspective. Millikan, who is distinguished professor emerita at the University of Connecticut, has long been a leading figure in theorizing about language and thought. Her latest work considers the “clumpy” world that organisms confront and the problem of how we recognizing the same distal objects and properties again, as well as their kinds and categories. Our cognizing machinery includes unitrackers, whose job it is to track these items and channel information of the same item to one place, called a unicept. Although each of us has distinct unitrackers and unicepts, they can be attached to the same word in a public language, which itself is a lineage of reproduced signs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For many people language is a central characteristic of their social identity. In modern South Asia, the production of Urdu and Hindi as national languages was intricately tied to the hardening of religious identities. South Asian lexicographers, those folks who were most intimately working with language, were at the center of this political realignment. In Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia (Columbia University Press, 2016), Walter N. Hakala, Associate Professor of South Asian languages and literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, traces the long history of the construction of Urdu as a language of cultural and national identity. Dictionaries are the key source for understanding the changing social and political landscape of South Asia. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Negotiating Languages offers an episodic genealogy of the ideological underpinnings and political consequences of dictionary production. In our conversation we discuss South Asia’s multilingu

In Unconventional, Partisan, and Polarizing Rhetoric: How the 2016 Election Shaped the Way Candidates Strategize, Engage, and Communicate (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), Jeanine Kraybill, assistant professor of political science at Cal State University, Bakersfield, has edited a timely book on the 2016 election. From all accounts, the 2016 election was unusual, and the role of political communication was no different. Using a variety of methods, the chapter authors examine how rhetoric and political communication shaped the tone of campaigns and ultimate outcomes of the election. They study how candidates primed voters for an anti-establishment candidate. They also examine how political communication influenced key campaign issues such as climate change, immigration, national security, religion, and gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Kapust‘s book, Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art (Cambridge University Press, 2018), is a rich and fascinating exploration of political thought through the complex lens of the question or concept of flattery. The book traces this complicated concept through both many of the “expected” writers and thinkers in the western political theory canon while also integrating some unexpected thinkers. Kapust positions many of these thinkers in encounters with each other—exploring the kinds of conversations these thinkers might have with each other. The encounters between authors and texts tease out the differing understandings of flattery and the way that it can be used in political contexts as well as within the affective webs in which humans live and engage with one another on a personal level. Thus, Kapust situates flattery within politics, provides the reader with different definitions of flattery, and also teases out the differences between flattery and friendship. The boo

What is the significance of Jew? How has this word come to have such varied and charged meanings? Who has (and has not) used it, and why? Cynthia Baker explores these questions and more in her new book Jew, part of the “Key Words in Jewish Studies” series at Rutgers University Press. In a set of absorbing case studies, Baker tracks the history of the word Jew from antiquity to the present. Among other topics, she writes about the debates concerning the terms Jews, Ioudaioi, and Judeans; the uses of yid in Yiddish; the emerging discourses about new Jews; and the genealogics of the twentiethcentury. In the course of her study, Baker exposes a number of problems that pertain to this key word, including the troubled relation between ethnicity and religion, the implications and impasses of translation, and the responsibility of the scholar in the face of the complex and often painful history of Jew. A compelling intervention in Jewish Studies, the book also opens provocative new avenues for research across the hu

Kathryn Woolard is Professor Emerita and Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She has authored seminal works on language ideology and the sociolinguistic situation in Catalonia, including the present book Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in Twenty-First Century Catalonia (Oxford University Press, 2016) which won the 2017 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Edward Sapir Book Prize. Bringing together two of her longstanding areas of research interest in this book, Woolard develops a framework for analyzing ideologies of linguistic authority and applies it to the evolving political situation in Catalonia. In this interview, Woolard discusses the key theoretical and contextual elements of the book, broadly following its three-part structure. First, the concepts of linguistic authenticity, anonymity, sociolinguistic naturalism are introduced, and Woolard sets out the changing ideological grounding of linguistic authority there over the course of twe

The two biggest problems of understanding the mind are consciousness and intentionality. The first doesn’t require introduction. The latter is the problem of how we can have thoughts and perceptions that about other things for example, a thought about a tree, or a perception of a tree. How can mental states be about other things? A naturalistic theory of intentionality is one that explains intentionality using just those resources available from the natural sciences, such as causal relationships or elements of evolutionary theory. In A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics (MIT Press, 2017), Karen Neander synthesizes a number of such elements into a causal-informational version of teleosemantics to explain sensory-perceptual content: for example, the content of a toad’s perception when it perceives what we would call a fly. Neander is a leader in the philosophy of mind, and this accessible yet precisely written book is the culmination of much of her work to date on the theory of inten

John Corvino is Professor of Philosophy at the Wayne State University in Detroit. His academic work focuses on topics in moral, social, and legal philosophy surrounding sexuality, gender, marriage, religious conviction, and discrimination. But John is also an active public philosopher who frequently participates in public debates over these topics. He produces and appears in a popular YouTube series of short videos devoted to the philosophical discussion of controversial topics. He is the author of What’s Wrong with Homosexuality?, co-author (with Maggie Ghallagher) of Debating Same Sex Marriage, and.co-author (with Ryan Anderson and Sherif Girgis) of Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination, all published with Oxford University Press. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member!

Sandy Goldberg is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He specializes in epistemology and philosophy of language, with particular interest in the social aspects of knowledge and speech; these foci converge in his ongoing work on testimony. Sandy has written several books including Relying on Others (Oxford 2010) and, more recently, Assertion (Oxford 2015); his forthcoming book is titled To the Best of Our Knowledge, and is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Who do people turn to when they want to talk about serious issues in their life? Do they end up confiding in people they list as confidants? In his new book, Someone to Talk To (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mario Luis Small uses in-depth interviews with first-year graduate students to uncover how intimate conversations are executed in real time. This book is interesting in the way that the interviews unfold; readers will find themselves nodding in agreement and thinking about social networks in new ways. A common theme throughout the book is how our behavior differs from what we may answer on a survey and under what circumstances it does so. For instance, weak ties, not strong ties, are relied upon more often than previous research would suggest. At the end of the book Small turns to empirical and theoretical generalizability finding many examples and surveys of non-graduates students echoing his study. In an era of big data Small encourages us to not lose sight of the human behavior we are studying and th

In Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (Oxford University Press, 2017), Princeton University English Associate Professor Sarah Rivett studies how colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages, and the significance of these languages for theological and cosmological issues such as the origins of Amerindian populations, their relationship to Eurasian and Biblical peoples, and the origins of language itself. Through a close analysis of previously overlooked texts, Unscripted America places American Indian languages within transatlantic intellectual history, while also demonstrating how American letters emerged in the 1810s through 1830s via a complex and hitherto unexplored engagement with the legacies and aesthetic possibilities of indigenous words. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis,

In A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-Up Comedy (The University Press of Mississippi, 2014), Ian Brodie, an associate professor of folklore at Cape Breton University, brings a folkloristic approach to the study of stand-up comedy. By focusing on comedic performance, Brodie shows stand-up comedy to be a collaborative act between comedian and audience similar to folk performance around the world, even as mediatization sees professional comedians transcend the initial performance to reach mass audiences. Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and modernity in China’s Tibet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, Politics, Media and Campaign Language: Australia’s Identity Anxiety (Anthem Press, 2017), Stephanie Brookes, a Lecturer in Journalism at Monash University, explores the power of election campaign language to offer a window into the Australian national mood and national identity. Using a variety of political and media sources, including speeches, interviews, press conferences, and debates, Brookes investigates how campaign communication can help us understand Australia’s identity security: what kind of country Australia is and ought to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Language is one of the complex systems facilitating communication; language is a system producing the inside and the outside of the individual’s awareness of self and other. However, language is also a tool for and of ideological battles, shaping states and nations. A multifaceted nature of language is emphasized and explored in an interdisciplinary collection of articles The Battle for Ukrainian: A Comparative Perspective (Harvard University Press/Ukrainian Research Institute, 2017), edited by Michael S. Flier and Andrea Graziosi. This collection developed with the crucial contribution of Lubomyr Hajda, who highlighted the importance of the comparative aspect that goes beyond specific historical contexts. As the editors mention in their introduction, The Battle for Ukrainian presents the proceedings of the conference States, Peoples, Languages: A Comparative Political History of Ukrainian, 1863-2013. One of the starting points for the scholarly discussion was the history of the Ukrainian language, which hap

In his monumental new book, Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Language, and Scripture in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017), Kristian Petersen, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the layers and complexities of Sino-Muslim intellectual and social history. On the way readers meet the major scholars and texts that played a formative role in the development of the Han Kitab tradition, and revel in navigating the terms and stakes of their discourses and debates on critical questions of pilgrimage, scriptural interpretation, and the sanctity of the Arabic language. In addition to constituting a field turning contribution to the study of Islam in China, this book is also among the most dazzling interventions in translation studies. All students and scholars of Islam, Religion, Asian Studies, and Translation Studies will have much to benefit from this brilliant study. It will also make an excellent te