Books published by Verlag Peter Lang

Divorce is a conspicuous character trait of modernity, commonly portrayed in texts and on screen, with its moral and social rationalisation firmly rooted in Enlightenment and Romantic thought. The aim of this volume is to bring into focus this contemporary cultural fascination by assembling the variety of academic responses it has started to create. Bringing together the reflections of scholars from the UK and North America who have worked in this domain, this study offers for the first time a genuinely wide-ranging account of the depiction of divorce across the northern hemisphere in a number of media (fiction, journalism, film and television). It reaches historically from the intellectual and legal aftermath of the Enlightenment right up to the present day. As such, the collection shows both the roots of this apparently contemporary phenomenon in nineteenth-century literary practice and the very particular ways in which divorce characterises the different narrative media of modernity.

Freed from direct political constraints, many sociologists from former Communist countries have sought to maintain a clear distinction between research and politics through an attachment to objectivity, conceptual clarity and methodological rigour. Yet they have often sidestepped the critique of epistemological certainties which has become orthodoxy in much ¿Western¿ thinking, and which has implicated sociology in the very structures of power it describes. This collection of writings, based on the 2002 Critical Sociology Conference held at Tbilisi State University in Georgia, was produced by sociologists working as members of or visitors to post-Communist states. As such, it reflects the tension between the desire for scholarly distance and an acknowledgement that the construction of knowledge is always a political act and a product of hierarchical social relations. Whether considering the issue of political legitimacy in Kyrgyzstan, the political nature of discourse about Eastern Europe, or problems of institutionalisation in Georgia, the authors all seek to avoid the scepticism about the effects and ethics of sociology common in much Western social theory without falling back upon the positivist approaches apparent in much of the former Communist bloc and in important pockets of Western academia.

This is a reissue of an influential text that was first published in 1987, to which the author has added an introduction reflecting on the work twenty years after publication. The grounding assumption of the book is that an element of utopianism is a necessity in any political thinking, and that a self-conscious utopianism can generate a richer level of theory and practice. The text then follows the chequered career of utopianism in the Marxist tradition, arguing that Marxism has been unable to do without a utopian dimension but for various reasons has often resisted acknowledging this fact. It examines the origins of the Marxist critique of utopianism, and the various ways, either covertly or overtly, in which the utopian was reinserted into the tradition. It looks at the utopian socialist predecessors of Marxism, the ambiguous critique of the utopian developed by Marx and Engels, the complex debate over utopianism in the Second International, the authoritarian socialism that emerged in the Soviet bloc, and the consciously utopian thought of Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Bahro, and André Gorz. Throughout, the book seeks to combine rigorous scholarship with a commitment to a utopian frame of mind.

This textbook provides a syntactic analysis of the four basic types of sentences in English: declarative, interrogative, exclamative and imperative. It establishes a systematic comparison between such sentence-types in English and their counterparts in Spanish. This volume is intended for students of linguistics at intermediate to upper-intermediate level and has the following goals: firstly, to describe and analyse the grammar of English (and correspondingly of Spanish) simple sentences in order to increase the reader¿s knowledge and competence. Secondly to introduce Government and Binding theory or Principles and Parameters theory with regard to the domain of simple sentences. Thirdly, to provide the reader with a tool that enables him or her to understand the goals of linguistic theory and the ways in which linguistic hypotheses can be formulated and justified. Each chapter of this volume contains an exercise section that emphasises the main points presented in the text.

This book presents the European language teacher of tomorrow. It deals with recent trends and future developments in the training of second language teachers in Europe. Based on an EU-commissioned study of thirty-two countries, the book sets out the current provision of language teacher training across the age phases. Both pre-service and in-service teacher training is covered. Fifteen case studies of innovation and good practice are also presented. This detail is used to provide a needs analysis of training, on the basis of which a series of policy-orientated recommendations is developed. Finally, a professional profile of the European language teacher is constructed which lists the likely range of training and experience of tomorrow¿s teachers. These features are described in terms of organisation, content and structure. The book is framed by coverage of the contextual background to the study, both in terms of national priorities and EU policies, and a theoretical consideration of the issues in language teacher training.

The papers comprising this volume are selected from presentations made at the 2001 Conference of the British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes, which was held at the University of Strathclyde (in Glasgow, Scotland). The role of EAP (English for Academic Purposes) is increasingly important, as higher education institutions consider their linguistic support strategies (both for native and non-native speakers of English), and confront the potential of the world wide web as a scholarly and pedagogic resource. The articles collected consider EAP ¿ as an international profession ¿ from a number of vital and relevant perspectives including practical pedagogy, research, and the impact of new technology.

Explores the multifaceted concepts of otherness, barbarism and exteriority. This book examines some major twentieth-century poetic responses to the violent denial of otherness and difference in modern Europe. It focuses on three twentieth-century poets who experienced barbarism in some way and whose work constitutes a poetic counter-attack.

Awarded the 2007 National Research Prize SAES/AEFA. This study is a reappraisal of John Bunyan in the light of the dissenting religious culture of the late-seventeenth century. Charges of schism and fanaticism were repeatedly levelled against Bunyan, both from within the dissenting community and without, but far from being chastened by these accusations, Bunyan responded with a religious discourse marked by a rhetoric of excess. The focus of this book is therefore upon Bunyan¿s overwhelming spiritual experiences, especially the representation of torment, in his literary and polemical works. The believers¿ suffering was an obsessive concern of dissenting ministers, even to the point where their writings are often remembered today for little else. Hitherto, most scholars have termed all the mental states that they invoke ¿despair¿, but this simplifies the experiences at issue. A wealth of contemporary material helps to restore the nuances of seventeenth-century physical and spiritual conditions, from enthusiasm to melancholy and madness; from fear to desertion and sloth. These chapters explore fresh ways in which this subtle typology of torment and its extreme manifestations form the core of the literary expression of Restoration dissent, challenging Bunyan to represent spiritual equilibrium as the ultimate quest of the earthly pilgrimage.