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Literary Studies: General
Louis Fantasia (eds.)
Playing Shakespeare’s Rebels and Tyrants New York, 2021. X, 120 pp. Playing Shakespeare’s Characters. Vol. 4 hb. • ISBN 978-1-4331-9042-1 CHF 93.– / €D 80.95 / €A 82.50 / € 75.– / £ 60.– / US-$ 89.95
Chomskyan analysis—we trace the origins of generative grammar from the fields of child language acquisition (of the 1960s), to psycholinguistics (of the 1970s), to where we stand today within the Minimalist Program. Various spin-off proposals have been spawned by envisioned analyses which treat syntactic movement as the quintessential human processing—a processing which would give rise to human language. Such spin-offs include ‘Proto-language’ and a new treatment of the socalled morpho-syntactic ‘Dual Mechanism Model’.
eBook (SUL) • ISBN 978-1-4331-9039-1 CHF 93.– / €D 80.95 / €A 82.50 / € 75.– / £ 60.– / US-$ 89.95
Playing Shakespeare’s Rebels and Tyrants is the fourth volume in the Peter Lang series, Playing Shakespeare’s Characters. As in the previous volumes, a broad range of contributors (actors, directors, scholars, educators, etc.) analyze the concepts of rebellion, tyranny, leadership, empathy with not only references to Elizabethan and Jacobean studies, but also to Donald Trump, the social justice movement, and the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Shakespeare’s rebels occupy space in both the personal and political, and often quickly turn from rebel to tyrant once in power. How can Shakespeare’s text inform current conversations about race, equity, representation, rebellion and tyranny? Who gets to define the power dynamics in Shakespeare’s plays? This volume looks at the Henrys, Hotspurs, Richards, Lears, Brutuses and Caesars, as well as the Juliets, Rosalinds and Cordelias who make up the panoply of Shakespeares rebels and t yrants.
Joseph Galasso
Reflections on Syntax Lectures in General Linguistics, Syntax, and Child Language Acquisition New York, 2021. XXXVI, 278 pp., 15 b/w ill., 3 tables. Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics. Vol. 101 hb. • ISBN 978-1-4331-8432-1 CHF 98.– / €D 84.95 / €A 87.10 / € 79.20 / £ 64.– / US-$ 94.95 eBook (SUL) • ISBN 978-1-4331-8433-8 CHF 98.– / €D 84.95 / €A 87.10 / € 79.20 / £ 64.– / US-$ 94.95
The lectures in this book are immensely Chomskyan in spirit, recursive-syntactic in nature, and tethered to a framework which takes as the null hypothesis the notion that language is an innate, pre-determined biological system—a system which by definition is multi-complex, human-specific, and analogous to a philosophy highly commensurate of Descartes’ great proverbial adage which announces the calling for a ‘ghost-in-the-machine’. The book begins with a gradual assessment of the kinds of complex constructs students of syntax need to work-up. Leading to the classic ‘Four-Sentences’—each of which bears as a kind of post-mark its own decade of
Debora Holler
Crossing, Trespassing, and Subverting Borders in Chicana Writing Berlin, 2021. 436 pp., 18 fig. b/w. Mainzer Studien zur Amerikanistik. Vol. 75 hb. • ISBN 978-3-631-83446-6 CHF 93.– / €D 79.95 / €A 82.20 / € 74.80 / £ 61.– / US-$ 90.95 eBook (SUL) • ISBN 978-3-631-83983-6 CHF 93.– / €D 79.95 / €A 82.30 / € 74.80 / £ 61.– / US-$ 90.95
The border and border-crossing and its significance for the Chicana in a cultural, social, gendered, and spiritual sense are at the core of this book. The three oeuvres selected—Helena Viramontes’ The Moths and Other Stories, Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters, and Norma Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera— are eloquent examples of feminist Chicana writers who refuse to allow their lives to be restricted by the gender, social, racial, and cultural border and who portray how Chicana women rebel against the unfair treatment they receive from their fathers, husbands and lovers. Crossing and deconstructing the man-made borders means to leave behind the known territory and discover an unknown land, in the hope of finding a new world in which Chicana women have the same rights as white women and in which they can realize their self, develop a new mestiza consciousness and liberate themselves from patriarchal constraints and religious beliefs. The author shows how the newly won self-confidence empowers the Chicana to explore the opportunities this freedom offers.
