The evolution and manipulation of language from the celebrated author of After Babel. “A keenly discriminating literary mind at work on what it loves” (The New York Times Book Review). Language and Silence is a book about language—and politics, meaning, silence, and the future of literature. Originally published between 1958 and 1966, the essays that make up this collection ponder whether we have passed out of an era of verbal primacy and into one of post-linguistic forms—or partial silence. Steiner explores the idea of the abandonment of contemporary literary criticism, from the classics to the works of William Shakespeare, Lawrence Durell, Thomas Mann, Leon Trotsky, and more.
Silence is a key pedagogical issue in language education. Seen by some as a space for thinking and reflection during the learning process, for others silence represents a threat, inhibiting target language interaction which is so vital during second language acquisition. This book eschews stereotypes and generalisations about why so many learners from East Asia seem either reluctant or unable to speak in English by providing a state-of-the art account of current research into the complex and ambiguous issue of silence in language education. The innovative research included in this volume focuses on silence both as a barrier to successful learning and as a resource that may in some cases facilitate language acquisition. The book offers a fresh perspective on ways to facilitate classroom interaction while also embracing silence and it touches on key pedagogical concepts such as teacher cognition, the role of task features, classroom interactional approaches, pedagogical intervention and socialisation, willingness to communicate, as well as psychological and sociocultural factors. Each of the book’s chapters include self-reflection and discussion tasks, as well as annotated bibliographies for further reading.
Silencing is not only a physically coercive act. It is also an act of language involving forms of selection, representation and compliance. Discourse and Silencing weaves together theories and examples of discourse from different disciplines in order to put forward a theory of silencing in language: that discursive systems filter, represent and displace types of knowledge into other forms of expression. Each chapter of the book analyses examples of silencing through discourse in various social and political fields. The examples cover courtroom trials, government censorship, domestic violence, marital conversations, penal institutions, news media, and political rhetoric. They cover societies ranging from Eastern and Central Europe, Canada and the U.S. to New Zealand and Japan. The contributors clarify the difference between chosen silences and the silencing that, as a practice, seeks to limit, alter or de-legitimise another’s discourse. The book also examines the continuous resistances and shifts in discourse and silencing within the social and political frameworks in which interlocutors negotiate their relations to each other.
In Expressing Silence: Where Language and Culture Meet in Japanese, Natsuko Tsujimura discusses how silence is conceptualized and linguistically represented in Japanese. Languages differ widely in the specific linguistic and rhetorical modes through which vivid depictions of silence are achieved. In Japanese, sounds in nature evoke silence, and onomatopoeia plays an important role in simulating silent scenes. These linguistic mechanisms mediate the perception of the symbiotic relationship between sound and silence, a perception deeply embedded in the Japanese cultural experience. Expressing Silence brings the tools of both linguistic and cultural analysis in examining the remarkably rich array of representations of silence in Japanese language and culture, finding that depictions of silence through language cannot be understood without exploring what sound or silence mean to the speakers.
What is the state of that which is not spoken? This book presents empirical research related to the phenomenon of reticence in the second language classroom, connecting current knowledge and theoretical debates in language learning and acquisition. Why do language learners remain silent or exhibit reticence? In what ways can silence in the language learning classroom be justified? To what extent should learners employ or modify silence? Do quiet learners work more effectively with quiet or verbal learners? Looking at evidence from Australia, China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, the book presents research data on many internal and external forces that influence the silent mode of learning in contemporary education. This work gives the reader a chance to reflect more profoundly on cultural ways of learning languages.
Your Silence Will Not Protect You collects the essential essays and poems of Audre Lorde for the first time, including the classic 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House'. A trailblazer in intersectional feminism, Lorde's luminous writings have inspired a new generation of thinkers and writers charged by the Black Lives Matter movement. Her lyrical and incisive prose takes on sexism, racism, homophobia, and class; reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope that remain ever-more trenchant today. Also a celebrated poet, Lorde was New York State Poet Laureate until her death; her poetry and prose together produced an aphoristic and incomparably quotable style, as evidenced by her constant presence on many Women's Marches against Trump across the world. This beautiful edition honours the ways in which Lorde's work resonates more than ever thirty years after they were first published.
This text examines the under-researched and often troubling phenomenon of silence in second language learning through a triangulation of SLA research, memoirs and language learner diaries, and psychoanalytic concepts of anxiety, ambivalence, conflict and loss. It moves beyond the view of silence as the mere absence of speech, inviting the reader to consider it as both a psychical event and a linguistic moment in the continuous process of identity formation.
The quest for solitude with God runs through the entire Christian tradition. Peter-Damian Belisle shows us its biblical origins, through the age of the early desert monastics and the rise of monastic orders. He surveys those orders, like the Camaldolese, Carthusians, and Cistercians who maintained the hermit ideal. He continues on to examine such twentieth-century figures as Charles de Foucauld, Dorothy Day, and the Trappist martyrs of Algeria.
Focusing on individual authors from Heinrich Boll to Gunther Grass, Hermann Lenz to Peter Schneider, The Language of Silence offers an analysis of West German literature as it tries to come to terms with the Holocaust and its impact on postwar West German society. Exploring postwar literature as the barometer of Germany's unconsciously held values as well as of its professed conscience, Ernestine Schlant demonstrates that the confrontation with the Holocaust has shifted over the decades from repression, circumvention, and omission to an open acknowledgement of the crimes. Yet even today a 'language of silence' remains since the victims and their suffering are still overlooked and ignored. Learned and exacting, Schlant's study makes an important contribution to our understanding of postwar German culture.