Author: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald File Type: pdf ReviewClassifiers is a superbly realized work of typology, remarkable for its encyclopedic breadth, its analytic precision, and especially its wealth of data... This book will surely prove to be an essential, invaluable reference for the future research on the principles of noun categorization--General LinguisticsThis is a major contribution to the field. ... I recommend Aikhenvalds book to linguists in general, and especially anyone interested in language typology or cognition.--Linguist ListAbout the AuthorAlexandra Aikhenvald has been Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University since 1994. She was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR 198089, and Professor of Linguistics at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, until 1994. Her books include A Structural and Typological Classification of Berber (Moscow 19867, in 3 parts) and Modern Hebrew (Moscow 1990).

Author: James Simpson File Type: pdf The evidence is everywhere fundamentalist reading can stir passions and provoke violence that changes the world. Amid such present-day conflagrations, this illuminating book reminds us of the sources, and profound consequences, of Christian fundamentalism in the sixteenth century. James Simpson focuses on a critical moment in early modern England, specifically the cultural transformation that allowed common folk to read the Bible for the first time. Widely understood and accepted as the grounding moment of liberalism, this was actually, Simpson tells us, the source of fundamentalism, and of different kinds of persecutory violence. His argument overturns a widely held interpretation of sixteenth-century Protestant reading--and a crucial tenet of the liberal tradition. After exploring the heroism and achievements of sixteenth-century English Lutherans, particularly William Tyndale, Burning to Read turns to the bad news of the Lutheran Bible. Simpson outlines the dark, dynamic, yet demeaning paradoxes of Lutheran reading its demands that readers hate the biblical text before they can love it that they be constantly on the lookout for unreadable signs of their own salvation that evangelical readers be prepared to repudiate friends and all tradition on the basis of their personal reading of Scripture. Such reading practice provoked violence not only against Lutheranisms stated enemies, as Simpson demonstrates it also prompted psychological violence and permanent schism within its own adherents. The last wave of fundamentalist reading in the West provoked 150 years of violent upheaval as we approach a second wave, this powerful book alerts us to our peril. (20080207)From Publishers WeeklyThe traditional interpretation of the Protestant Reformations translation of the Scriptures into various vernacular languages is that it liberated common folk from the prisons of authoritarian readings of these writings by priests. While the translations of William Tyndale and Martin Luther, among others, most certainly had such an effect, they also, according to Harvard English professor Simpson, encouraged a literal reading of Scripture that gave rise to violence against those who refused to read the Bible in the same way. Far from a liberating process, reading Scripture involved recognition of ones unworthinessreinforced by Scriptureand the knowledge that ones salvation had already been determined. Thus, as Simpson points out, Protestants readings of the Scriptures put them in a double bind the Bible they loved induced in them a self-loathing because they knew they could never live up to the many laws it required of them. Simpsons style can be workmanlike and repetitious, summarizing information at the end of each chapter and informing readers what to expect in the next. Drawing deeply on the history of biblical translation and of English literature from Tyndale through Thomas More to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Simpsons story often challenges conventional readings of the history of biblical interpretation. (Nov.) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. ReviewBurning to Read is a landmark in the study of fundamentalism. In James Simpsons radical reassessment, the Protestant Reformation appears not as a parent of the Enlightenment, but rather as a progenitor of the extreme and intolerant literalism that has seized every major world religion today. Written with passion as well as scholarly authority, this is a compellingly readable and utterly persuasive study of a critical moment in world history.--Amitav Ghosh (20070910)How do we read religious books, what meanings do we take from them, and how did we come by these meanings? The history of reading scriptural texts has a renewed public importance. No period is more in need of fresh appraisal and insight than the Reformation. The way people read then informs how we read now. James Simpsons book could not be more timely passionate, controversial, uncompromisingly frank, it partakes of the same energies as the sixteenth-century debates at the same time as it illuminates them. It is a book that demands to be read, and ruminated upon, as religious belief once again rages around us.--Brian Cummings, Professor of English, University of Sussex (20071214)Drawing deeply on the history of biblical translation and of English literature from Tyndale through Thomas More to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Simpsons story often challenges conventional readings of the history of biblical interpretation. (Publishers Weekly 20080404)A polemic of incandescent force.--Boyd Tonkin (The Independent 20080501)James Simpsons unremittingly clever new book suggests we re-examine the early 16th century in order to make sense of contemporary culture. His aim, however, is to disabuse us of the assumption that modern liberalism can lay claim to unproblematic origins in the Protestant Reformation.--Marcus Nevitt (Daily Telegraph 20080725)The English Reformation is commonly held to have provided the intellectual basis for modern liberalism. James Simpsons fascinating revisionist account turns that traditional picture on its head. Here, the Lutherans appear as the forerunners of a dangerous fundamentalism, and the traditionalists display far more intellectual sophistication than is usually supposed. (London Review of Books )What makes this study distinctive is its alertness to connections between past and present, and its sympathetic re-evaluation of church traditions as a force that moderates the divisive effects of uncontrolled scriptural interpretation, drawing on such classic studies as George Tavards Holy Writ or Holy Church?...One hopes its message will be heard well beyond Reformation studies.--Alison Shell (Church Times )Simpson explores a familiar subject--the early-16th-century debate over vernacular scripture--from a surprising angle.--E. D. Hill (Choice )James Simpson has dug up a large, complicated truffle, which he examines in precise, revealing detail. In Burning to Read, this erudite and original student of later medieval and Renaissance literature focuses on a single, well-defined episode the role of books, and more particularly the reading of the Bible, in the English Reformation...His subtle, intense, beautifully written essay helps the reader to understand, historically and existentially, why seemingly reasonable people end up burning books and executing readers. Burning to Read is a book that matters, not only for specialists in the Renaissance and Reformation, but also for the general reader. All of us, after all, now inhabit a world that uses some of Sir Basil Blackwells beloved, beneficent books as weapons, and punishes others as if they were rebels and heretics.--Anthony Grafton (Times Literary Supplement )

Author: Sven Lütticken File Type: pdf

Author: Ashraf H. A. Rushdy File Type: pdf After Injury explores the practices of forgiveness, resentment, and apology in three key moments when they were undergoing a dramatic change. The three moments are early Christian history (for forgiveness), the shift from British eighteenth-century to Continental nineteenth-century philosophers (for resentment), and the moment in the 1950s postwar world in which British ordinary language philosophers and American sociologists of everyday life theorized what it means to express or perform an apology. The debates that arose in those key moments have largely defined our contemporary study of these practices.