Testi brevi di accompagnamento. Linguistica, semiotica, traduzione


Book Description

La brevitas non è certo una invenzione recente. Incisioni e graffiti, fin da tempi remoti, rappresentano forme espressive concise, lapidarie, affidate a supporti che, per loro natura, non lasciano spazio a messaggi di ampio respiro: pietra, muro, manufatti. Tuttavia, la brevità non coincide necessariamente con la (poca) lunghezza: essa ha, al contrario, una propria retorica, stilistica e poetica, poiché riguarda le caratteristiche di una scrittura che tende a una concisione formale ottenuta attraverso specifici fattori di condensazione, sintesi ed economia. Di conseguenza, a dispetto della – o grazie alla – concisione, le forme brevi rappresentano unità di informazione ad alto contenuto. L’estetica del corto è insomma caratterizzata da una ricercata densità semantica, per cui la brevità “non è un ripiego, bensì un punto di forza” (A. Abruzzese) grazie alla sua intensità comunicativa. I contributi del libro prendono in considerazione la brevitas nell’interazione tra modi semiotici differenti (linguaggio, immagini, simboli, oggetti, voce) in ambiti di varia natura: espografica, giornalismo, pubblicità, cinema, traduzione, interpretazione.




Translation and Music


Book Description

Popular and multimodal forms of cultural products are becoming increasingly visible within translation studies research. Interest in translation and music, however, has so far been relatively limited, mainly because translation of musical material has been considered somewhat outside the limits of translation studies, as traditionally conceived. Difficulties associated with issues such as the 'musicality' of lyrics, the fuzzy boundaries between translation, adaptation and rewriting, and the pervasiveness of covert or unacknowledged translations of musical elements in a variety of settings have generally limited the research in this area to overt and canonized translations such as those done for the opera. Yet the intersection of translation and music can be a fascinating field to explore, and one which can enrich our understanding of what translation is and how it relates to other forms of expression. This special issue is an attempt to open up the field of translation and music to a wider audience within translation studies, and to an extent, within musicology and cultural studies. The volume includes contributions from a wide range of musical genres and languages: from those that investigate translation and code-switching in North African rap and rai, and the intertextual and intersemiotic translations revolving around Mahler's lieder in Chinese, to the appropriation and after-life of Kurdish folk songs in Turkish, and the emergence of rock'n roll in Russian. Other papers examine the reception of Anglo-American stage musicals and musical films in Italy and Spain, the concept of 'singability' with examples from Scandinavian languages, and the French dubbing of musical episodes of TV series. The volume also offers an annotated bibliography on opera translation and a general bibliography on translation and music.




The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature


Book Description

These 15 essays investigate comic books and graphic novels, beginning with the early development of these media. The essays also place the work in a cultural context, addressing theory and terminology, adaptations of comic books, the superhero genre, and comic books and graphic novels that deal with history and nonfiction. By addressing the topic from a wide range of perspectives, the book offers readers a nuanced and comprehensive picture of current scholarship in the subject area.




The Language of Gestures


Book Description







Fundamentals of Formulaic Language


Book Description

This is the first book to address formulaic language directly and provide a foundation of knowledge for graduates and researchers in early stages of study of this important language phenomenon. It is also suitable for students of linguistics, applied linguistics, and language teacher education. The information that currently exists is scattered throughout articles and book chapters across a range of subfields of linguistics and applied linguistics. Over the past few decades there has been a steadily increasing interest and research focus on the phenomenon of formulaic language in the fields of linguistics and applied linguistics. Slowly, a consistent definition has emerged, centring around the idea that formulaic sequences are multi-word units with specific meanings or functions, and some evidence points to their being processed mentally as wholes. Researchers from diverse backgrounds have identified the nature and roles of formulaic sequences in language acquisition and production, in the construction of text and discourse, in spoken and written language, and in language teaching. The increasing volume, diversity, and complexity of the state of knowledge about this emerging area of study is marshalled by this intelligent and well-written book.




The Floating World


Book Description

“Set in New Orleans, this important and powerful novel follows the Boisdoré family . . . in the months after Katrina. A profound, moving and authentically detailed picture of the storm’s emotional impact on those who lived through it.” —People In this dazzling debut about family, home, and grief, C. Morgan Babst takes readers into the heart of Hurricane Katrina and the life of a great city. As the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora Boisdoré refuses to leave the city. Her parents, Joe Boisdoré, an artist descended from freed slaves who became the city’s preeminent furniture makers, and his white “Uptown” wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, are forced to evacuate without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and Cora catatonic—the victim or perpetrator of some violence mysterious even to herself. This mystery is at the center of Babst’s haunting and profound novel. Cora’s sister, Del, returns to New Orleans from the successful life she built in New York City to find her hometown in ruins and her family deeply alienated from one another. As Del attempts to figure out what happened to her sister, she must also reckon with the racial history of the city and the trauma of a disaster that was not, in fact, some random act of God but an avoidable tragedy visited on New Orleans’s most vulnerable citizens. Separately and together, each member of the Boisdoré clan must find the strength to remake home in a city forever changed. The Floating World is the Katrina story that needed to be told—one with a piercing, unforgettable loveliness and a vivid, intimate understanding of this particular place and its tangled past.




History of Hermeneutics


Book Description

In the following three chapters, Ferraris examines the universalization of the domain of interpretation with Heidegger, the development of Heideggerian philosophical hermeneutics with Gadamer and Derrida, and the relation between hermeneutics and epistemology, on the one hand, and the human sciences, on the other.




Book Was There


Book Description

Andrew Piper grew up liking books and loving computers. While occasionally burying his nose in books, he was going to computer camp, programming his Radio Shack TRS-80, and playing Pong. His eventual love of reading made him a historian of the book and a connoisseur of print, but as a card-carrying member of the first digital generation—and the father of two digital natives—he understands that we live in electronic times. Book Was There is Piper’s surprising and always entertaining essay on reading in an e-reader world. Much ink has been spilled lamenting or championing the decline of printed books, but Piper shows that the rich history of reading itself offers unexpected clues to what lies in store for books, print or digital. From medieval manuscript books to today’s playable media and interactive urban fictions, Piper explores the manifold ways that physical media have shaped how we read, while also observing his own children as they face the struggles and triumphs of learning to read. In doing so, he uncovers the intimate connections we develop with our reading materials—how we hold them, look at them, share them, play with them, and even where we read them—and shows how reading is interwoven with our experiences in life. Piper reveals that reading’s many identities, past and present, on page and on screen, are the key to helping us understand the kind of reading we care about and how new technologies will—and will not—change old habits. Contending that our experience of reading belies naive generalizations about the future of books, Book Was There is an elegantly argued and thoroughly up-to-date tribute to the endurance of books in our ever-evolving digital world.




Medici Money


Book Description

The Medici are famous as the rulers of Florence at the high point of the Renaissance. Their power derived from the family bank, and this book tells the fascinating, frequently bloody story of the family and the dramatic development and collapse of their bank (from Cosimo who took it over in 1419 to his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent who presided over its precipitous decline). The Medici faced two apparently insuperable problems: how did a banker deal with the fact that the Church regarded interest as a sin and had made it illegal? How in a small republic like Florence could he avoid having his wealth taken away by taxation? But the bank became indispensable to the Church. And the family completely subverted Florence's claims to being democratic. They ran the city. Medici Money explores a crucial moment in the passage from the Middle Ages to the Modern world, a moment when our own attitudes to money and morals were being formed. To read this book is to understand how much the Renaissance has to tell us about our own world. Medici Money is one of the launch titles in a new series, Atlas Books, edited by James Atlas. Atlas Books pairs fine writers with stories of the economic forces that have shaped the world, in a new genre - the business book as literature.




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