TLC Highlights… Publications in Languages, Literature, and Linguistics
Seeing Red, Hearing the Revolution: The Multi-Sensory Appeal of Shuresh
Type: Book
Author: Neda Bolourchi
Editor: M. Mehdi Khorrami and Amir Moosavi
Compiler: Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses Sensory Readings of Persian Literature and Culture
Date of Publication: Summer 2021
Publishing Company: Leiden University Press
City: Leiden
ISBN: https://www.lup.nl/product/losing-our-minds-coming-to-our-senses/
URL: https://www.lup.nl/product/losing-our-minds-coming-to-our-senses/
Brief Description: In "Seeing Red, Hearing the Revolution," Neda Bolourchi argues that the infamous Shuresh newspaper, published in Iran from 1951-53, should be seriously considered by scholars in the fields of literature, history, and anthropology to understand more deeply some of the societal emotions and actions of this pivotal period. Shuresh was published during Iran’s oil nationalization crisis and the premiership of Mohamad Mossadeq. Rather than see Shuresh as unprofessional or illegal, the text should be understood for its ability to engage multiple literacies and multiple religious communities across the political spectra in Iran. Shuresh was able to do so by engaging the senses of sight and sound. Bolourchi shows how the appeal to these senses not only helped Shuresh generate consumers of its pages but also helped foment and deepen emotional ties to Iran as a nation-state. By increasing the depth and breadth of these emotional bonds to Iran, Shuresh hoped to change the course of national history. No revolution for Prime Minister Mossadeq or against the imperial British-feudal Iranian relationship, the desired outcomes of Shuresh, would succeed without the riots and revolts of most Iranians. In trying to shape history, Shuresh contributed to the transformative discourse on Iran as a sacred and generated more co-religionists of the Iranian nation-state. "Seeing Red, Hearing the Revolution'' shows the importance of Shuresh not just for the content of its ideas but also through its deployment of sensory aesthetics that enabled its broad spectrum of readers to relate to those ideas on different levels.
Morphological processing and individual frequency effects in L1 and L2 Spanish
Type: Article in Periodical
Author: Ezequiel M. Durand-López
Periodical Title: Lingua
Year of Publication: 2021
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2021.103093
Volume: 257
Inclusive Pages: 103093
Brief Description: Surface frequency and proficiency modulate visual morphological processing in second language (L2) learners, but less is known about auditory morphological processing. Moreover, working memory (WM) affects morphosyntactic processing, but it is unclear whether it also modulates word structure processing. In the present study, Spanish monolinguals and beginner and advanced L2 learners of Spanish completed an auditory lexical decision task in Spanish containing verbs varying in morphological complexity, an individual lexical frequency task, and a working memory task. Beginner L2 learners needed more time to process infrequent morphologically complex words, but monolinguals and advanced L2 learners were unaffected by morphological complexity or surface frequency. Also, WM did not modulate morphological processing. Taken together, the findings suggest a dual-route mechanism at initial stages of L2 acquisition and a whole-word route for Spanish monolinguals and advanced L2 learners. The findings also support the extension of dual-route models to L2 populations and suggest that the selection of a morphological processing route results from linguistic rather than cognitive reasons.
Lidiya Ginzburg
Type: Article in Periodical
Author: Emily Van Buskirk
Periodical Title: Filosofia: An Encyclopedia of Russian Thought
Year of Publication: 2021
URL: https://filosofia.dickinson.edu/encyclopedia/ginzburg-lidiya/
Inclusive Pages: online only
Brief Description: An entry on writer and scholar Lidiya Ginzburg (1902-1990) for an online Encyclopedia of Russian Thought.
Literal is not always easier: Literal and default translation, cognitive effort, and comparable corpora
Type: Article in Periodical
Author: Miguel A. Jiménez-Crespo
Co-Author(s): Joseph V. Casillas
Periodical Title: Translation, Cognition & Behavior
Year of Publication: 2021
URL: https://doi.org/10.1075/tcb.00048.jim
Volume: 4
Number: 1
Inclusive Pages: 98-123
Brief Description: “Literal translation” is a popular construct in Translation Studies. Research from computational approaches has consistently shown that non-literal translations, i.e., renderings semantically and syntactically different or not close to the source text, are more difficult or effortful to produce than literal ones. This paper researches whether literal translations are systematically less effortful to process than non-literal ones using comparable corpus data. The effort incurred in processing literal translations from a parallel corpus is compared to that of processing the most frequent non-literal renderings found in previous comparable corpus studies. Ten professional translators edited a text using a mock translation environment setup using the keylogger Inputlog. The task was presented as a regular editing process with a full cohesive text presented segment pair by segment pair. Time served as a proxy for overall cognitive effort. We analyzed time from presentation to type (TTP) and time to completion of segment edit (TC), or complete editing events. Results showed that processing efforts are indistinguishable between categories, suggesting that cognitive effort to edit non-literal default translation candidates is not always higher when compared to the most frequent literal translations from a parallel corpus.
How the Bible Is Written
Type: Book
Author: Gary A. Rendsburg
Date of Publication: 2019
Publishing Company: Hendrickson
City: Peabody, MA
ISBN: 978-1-68307-197-6
URL: https://www.hendricksonrose.com/p/how-the-bible-is-written/9781683071976
Brief Description: The book focuses on the nexus between language and literature in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), with specific attention to how the former is used to create the latter. Topics include wordplay, alliteration, repetition with variation, dialect representation, intentionally confused language, marking closure, and more. Readers typically approach the Bible for its moral teachings, theological insights, historical information, and the like, without giving much thought to the literary aspects of the text. The result is that while the contents of the Bible are well known, the careful and often sophisticated manner in which those contents have been crafted is too often underappreciated. As a result, readers frequently miss out on a great deal of the richness that the Bible has to offer. The goal of the present volume is to bring interested readers – scholars and laypeople alike – closer to the original text of the Hebrew Bible and to provide them with a greater appreciation of its literary artistry and linguistic virtuosity. In short, this book focuses not so much on what the Bible says as how the Bible says it.
Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel
Type: Book
Author: Chloë Kitzinger
Date of Publication: Sept. 2021
Publishing Company: Northwestern University Press
City: Evanston, IL
ISBN: 978-0-8101
URL: https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810143975/mimetic-lives/
Brief Description: What makes some characters seem so real? Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel explores this question through readings of major works by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Working at the height of the Russian realist tradition, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky each discovered unprecedented techniques for intensifying the aesthetic illusion that Chloë Kitzinger calls mimetic life—the reader’s sense of a character’s autonomous, embodied existence. At the same time, both authors tested the practical limits of that illusion by extending it toward the novel’s formal and generic bounds: philosophy, history, journalism, theology, myth. Through new readings of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and other novels, Kitzinger traces a productive tension between mimetic characterization and the author’s ambition to transform the reader. She shows how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky create lifelike characters and why the dream of carrying the illusion of “life” beyond the novel consistently fails. Mimetic Lives challenges the contemporary truism that novels educate us by providing enduring models for the perspectives of others, with whom we can then better empathize. Seen close, the realist novel’s power to create a world of compelling fictional persons underscores its resources as a form for thought and its limits as a direct source of spiritual, social, or political change.
Yiddish: Biography of a Language
Type: Book
Author: Jeffrey Shandler
Date of Publication: 2020
Publishing Company: Oxford University Press
City: New York
ISBN: 978-0-19-065196-1
URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/yiddish-9780190651961?cc=us&lang=en&#
Description: Yiddish: Biography of a Language presents the story of the foundational vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, from its origins to the present, spoken around the world. This book examines the uses of Yiddish and values invested in it to trace the dynamic interrelation of the language, its speakers, and their cultures.
Dictionary of Latin American Identities
Type: Book
Author: John T. Maddox IV
Co-Author(s): Thomas M. Stephens
Date of Publication: 2021
Publishing Company: University of Florida Press
City: Gainesville, FL
ISBN: 978-1683402008
URL: https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9781683402008
Additional Information: This co-authored book is available on Amazon
