Books published by Verlag Peter Lang

This book explores the property of co-reference within various texts as a possible means of distinguishing genre types. Based on observed rather than invented material, it supplies empirical data on co-reference as a cohesive mechanism within authentic English texts. Co-referential form and frequency are identified in nine texts representing three genres: academic journals, news magazine articles and fictional narrative texts. This study offers not only quantitative but also qualitative information regarding co-reference in three individual text types, thereby laying the foundation for a comparative study of the three different genres. Focusing on the property of co-reference in this way singles out differences in language use and allows for some pertinent statements to be made regarding modes of co-reference as an indicator of text variety.

This volume synthesizes the work accomplished at the 5 International Security Forum (ISF) in Zurich from 14 to 16 October 2002. It presents a thematic overview of 150 academic presentations distributed over 6 workshop tracks, 30 workshops, 15 side-bar presentations, and 3 plenary sessions. The book contains a timely overview of 21 century international security topics and challenges. Special emphasis is placed on the impact of new information and communications technologies and knowledge management in the conduct of security and defense policy, and on a wide range of issues in the field of security sector reform and the democratic and parliamentary control of armed forces. The contributions also offer a fresh perspective on traditional regional and human security issues in the light of 11 September 2001, notably asymmetric war, Islam, gender, small arms, Russia, and Europe, including NATO, ESDP, and peace support operations. The 5 ISF was organized by the Center for Security Studies and Conflict Research at the ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) in Zurich in cooperation with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, and the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva.

In this study the author elaborates a comparative framework for analysing literary texts from the Third Reich and the GDR in terms of the extent of assent and/or dissent expressed through them towards the National Socialist and SED regimes. The author maps out areas of similarity and difference in the workings of cultural policy in the two dictatorships. In the second part of the study, Günter Eich¿s work for the Nazi radio system and Bertolt Brecht¿s cultural activities in the GDR act as case studies to illuminate the patterns of interdependent assent and dissent generated under the conditions of dictatorship.

In 2002, Expo. 02 ¿ the Swiss National Exhibition ¿ celebrated the modern identity of the Swiss Confederation and the electorate approved a historic change in relations with other countries by voting to join the United Nations. Yet, despite bilateral agreements regulating areas of common interest between Switzerland and the European Union, there are still strong fears that Swiss identity could be jeopardised by full membership, and that, within a wider framework, her quadrilingual composition could not be sustained. The experience which the Swiss have accumulated in dealing pragmatically and largely peacefully with different languages is detailed in the six essays of this volume. The special contemporary characteristics of German, French and Italian within Switzerland, the pressures on Romansh, the role played by Switzerland in integrating gender-neutral language into standard usage and the dominance of English as a means of communication between different language groups are amongst the topics discussed.

The ideas underlying Benn¿s Ausdruckswelt not only anticipate and parallel many of the assumptions now current in recent trends in literary criticism; they also disclose their ultimate limitations. Benn¿s poetics were founded on the intellectual crises of the early years of the twentieth century. Following Nietzschean leads, Benn sought to achieve in his person and his work a return to a primitive, archetypal mode of perception which he felt would restore a purer, more natural mentality to modern man, whom he portrayed as being ¿far ahead of his syntax¿. By focusing on Benn¿s early Expressionist prose and what this study calls his ¿fictive self¿, the author traces the relationship between Benn¿s Weltanschauung and later critical theory. Building upon the latest scholarship, she analyses Benn¿s poetics as precursor of certain postmodernist ideas concerning language, meaning and polysemy, aesthetics, personal identity, authorial intention versus reader reception, intertextuality, and the role of art in society. By paying specific attention to the concept of the autonomous self and its relation to language, this study demonstrates that Gottfried Benn¿s aesthetic theories do not represent the end of German Expressionism, but rather the beginning of the present post-modernist period.

This book is an analysis and study of postmodernism, political theatre, and the politics of representation. Traversing a wide span of twentieth-century political theatre and performance practices in the West, the author analyses and questions the performance practices of the historical and neo-avant-gardes, modernist political theatre, and postmodern performance in order to explore the relationships between politics, performance and postmodernism. Chinna contends that it is the provisional and contingent strategies of performance which set the model for the postmodern. Drawing on the poststructuralist theories of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, among others, the postmodern is defined as a performance model ¿ like deconstruction, endlessly deferring unequivocal meaning and final closure. It is argued that historical avant-garde performance practices such as Dada, as well as the neo-avant-gardes from the 1950s onward, were always trapped within a dialectic of representation and the ¿real¿ in their quest for a merging of art and life.

This collection of essays, inspired by André Breton¿s concept of the limites non-frontières of Surrealism, focuses on the crossings, intersections and margins of the surrealist movement rather than its divides and exclusion zones. Some of the essays originated as papers given at the colloquium ¿Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers¿ held at the Institute of Romance Studies, University of London, in November 2001. Surrealism is foregrounded as a trajectory rather than a fixed body of doctrines, radically challenging the notion of frontiers. The essays explore real and imaginary journeys, as well as the urban dérives of the surrealists and situationists. The concept of crossing, central to a reading of the dynamics at work in Surrealism, is explored in studies of the surrealist object, which eludes or elides genres, and explorations of the shifting sites of identity, as in the work of Joyce Mansour or André Masson. Surrealism¿s engagement with frontiers is further investigated through a number of revealing cases, such as a political reading of 1930s photography, the parodic rewriting of the popular ¿locked room¿ mystery, or the surrealists¿ cavalier redrawing of the map of the world. The essays contribute to our understanding of the diversity and dynamism of Surrealism as an international and interdisciplinary movement.

The articles in this volume are the proceedings of a conference on ¿Translation in Second Language Teaching and Learning¿ that took place at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, in March 2008. The papers delivered at the conference, the subsequent discussions in Maynooth and the articles in this volume have clearly demonstrated that, after some decades of marginalising or even excluding translation from second/foreign language methodologies and classroom practices, the time is ripe for a re-evaluation of the benefits translation can bring to the process of learning a second language and its cultural context. Translation exercises are interpreted as processes of negotiation, as constitutive acts for identities and (inter-)actions, based on increasingly emerging ¿third spaces¿ between the dominant conceptualisations, values, norms, beliefs, rules, traditions and discourses of the languages and cultures involved. The enterprise of translating between languages, cultures, individuals, societies and discourses thus assumes a central place of relevance for anyone involved in the complex project of interculturality, including, and foremost, foreign language learners.

William of Orange's invasion destroyed the king's plans, but given the time, could James have nurtured these 'green shoots' of religious pluralism in what was still a fiercely Protestant nation? This title reveals an endorsement of the general concept of religious toleration.