Title: The Languages of psyche: mind and body in Enlightenment thought: Clark Library lectures, 1985-1986 
Author: Rousseau, G. S. (George Sebastian)
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Medicine | History and Philosophy of Science | European History | European Literature
Publisher's Description: The Languages of Psyche traces the dualism of mind and body during the "long eighteenth century," from the Restoration in England to the aftermath of the French Revolution. Ten outstanding scholars investigate the complex mind-body relationship in a variety of Enlightenment contexts - science, medicine, philosophy, literature, and everyday society. No other recent book provides such an in-depth, suggestive resource for philosophers, literary critics, intellectual and social historians, and all who are interested in Enlightenment studies.   [brief]
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Title: The language war
Author: Lakoff, Robin Tolmach
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Language and Linguistics | Sociology | Literature | Media Studies
Publisher's Description: Robin Lakoff gets to the heart of one of the most fascinating and pressing issues in American society today: who holds power and how they use it, keep it, or lose it. In a brilliant and vastly entertaining discussion of news events that have occupied an enormous amount of media space--political correctness, the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, Hillary Rodham Clinton as First Lady, O. J. Simpson's murder trial, the Ebonics controversy, and the Clinton sex scandal--Lakoff shows that the struggle for power and status at the end of the century is being played out as a war over language. Controlling language is a basis for all power, she says, and therefore it is worth fighting for. As a result, newly emergent groups, especially blacks and women, are contending with middle- to upper-class white men for a share in "language rights." Lakoff's introduction to linguistic theories and the philosophy of language lays the groundwork for an exploration of news stories that meet what she calls the UAT (Undue Attention Test). As the stories became the subject of talk-show debates, late-night comedy routines, Web sites, and magazine articles, they were embroidered with additional meanings, depending on who was telling the story. Race, gender, or both are at the heart of these stories, and each one is about the right to construct meanings from languagein short, to possess power. Because language tells us how we are connected to one another, who has power and who does not, the stories reflect the language war. We use language to analyze what we call "reality," the author argues, but we mistrust how language is used today--witness the "politics of personal destruction" following the Clinton impeachment. Yet Lakoff sees in the struggle over language a positive goal: equality in the creation of our national discourse. Her writing is accessible and witty, and her excerpts from the media are used to great effect.   [brief]
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Title: Passions of the tongue: language devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970 
Author: Ramaswamy, Sumathi
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Asian Studies | History | South Asia | Language and Linguistics | Asian History | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic, "language devotion." She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion. She considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language.   [brief]
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Title: Hellenistic philosophy of mind
Author: Annas, Julia
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Classics | Social and Political Thought | Intellectual History | Classical Philosophy | Philosophy | Rhetoric
Publisher's Description: Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind is an elegant survey of Stoic and Epicurean ideas about the soul - an introduction to two ancient schools whose belief in the soul's physicality offer compelling parallels to modern approaches in the philosophy of mind. Annas incorporates recent thinking on Hellenistic philosophy of mind so lucidly and authoritatively that specialists and nonspecialists alike will find her book rewarding.In part, the Hellenistic epoch was a "scientific" period that broke with tradition in ways that have an affinity with the modern shift from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the present day. Hellenistic philosophy of the soul, Annas argues, is in fact a philosophy of mind, especially in the treatment of such topics as perception, thought, and action.   [brief]
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Title: Unsnarling the world-knot: consciousness, freedom, and the mind-body problem 
Author: Griffin, David Ray 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Philosophy | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: The mind-body problem, which Schopenhauer called the "world-knot," has been a central problem for philosophy since the time of Descartes. Among realists - those who accept the reality of the physical world - the two dominant approaches have been dualism and materialism, but there is a growing consensus that, if we are ever to understand how mind and body are related, a radically new approach is required.David Ray Griffin develops a third form of realism, one that resolves the basic problem (common to dualism and materialism) of the continued acceptance of the Cartesian view of matter. In dialogue with various philosophers, including Dennett, Kim, McGinn, Nagel, Seager, Searle, and Strawson, Griffin shows that materialist physicalism is even more problematic than dualism. He proposes instead a pan-experientialist physicalism grounded in the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Answering those who have rejected "pan-psychism" as obviously absurd, Griffin argues compellingly that pan-experientialism, by taking experience and spontaneity as fully natural, can finally provide a naturalistic account of the emergence of consciousness - an account that also does justice to the freedom that we all presuppose in practice.   [brief]
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Title: Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics
Author: Thomason, Sarah Grey
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Language and Linguistics | Linguistic Theory | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Ten years of research back up the bold new theory advanced by authors Thomason and Kaufman, who rescue the study of contact-induced language change from the neglect it has suffered in recent decades. The authors establish an important new framework for the historical analysis of all degrees of conta . . . [more]
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Title: The missing Spanish creoles: recovering the birth of plantation contact languages
Author: McWhorter, John H
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Language and Linguistics | Linguistic Theory | African Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: John McWhorter challenges an enduring paradigm among linguists in this provocative exploration of the origins of plantation creoles. Using a wealth of data--linguistic, sociolinguistic, historical--he proposes that the "limited access model" of creole genesis is seriously flawed. That model maintains that plantation creole languages emerged because African slaves greatly outnumbered whites on colonial plantations. Having little access to the slaveholders' European languages, the slaves were forced to build a new language from what fragments they did acquire. Not so, says McWhorter, who posits that plantation creole originated in West African trade settlements, in interactions between white traders and slaves, some of whom were eventually transported overseas. The evidence that most New World creoles were imports traceable to West Africa strongly suggests that the well-established limited access model for plantation creole needs revision. In forcing a reexamination of this basic tenet, McWhorter's book will undoubtedly cause controversy. At the same time, it makes available a vast amount of data that will be a valuable resource for further explorations of genesis theory.   [brief]
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Title: Symbols, computation, and intentionality: a critique of the computational theory of mind 
Author: Horst, Steven W 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | Psychology
Publisher's Description: The computational theory of mind - the belief that the mind can be likened to a computer and that cognitive states possess the generative and compositional properties of natural languages - has proven enormously influential in recent philosophical studies of cognition. In this carefully argued critique, Steven Horst pronounces the theory deficient. He refutes its claims and assumptions, particularly the assertion that symbolic representations need not have conventional meaning. Horst goes on to sketch a new methodology for looking at the philosophy of psychology, one that provides a more fruitful way of comparing computational psychology with rival views emerging from connectionism and neuroscience. Original and comprehensive, his book is certain to provoke controversy and stimulate debate.   [brief]
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Title: The language of inquiry
Author: Hejinian, Lyn
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Literature | Poetry | Language and Linguistics
Publisher's Description: Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address. Central to these essays are the themes of time and knowledge, consciousness and perception. Hejinian's interests cover a range of texts and figures. Prominent among them are Sir Francis Bacon and Enlightenment-era explorers; Faust and Sheherazade; Viktor Shklovsky and Russian formalism; William James, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. But perhaps the most important literary presence in the essays is Gertrude Stein; the volume includes Hejinian's influential "Two Stein Talks," as well as two more recent essays on Stein's writings.   [brief]
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Title: Guardians of language: the grammarian and society in late antiquity 
Author: Kaster, Robert A
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Language and Linguistics | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: What did it mean to be a professional teacher in the prestigious "liberal schools" - the schools of grammar and rhetoric - in late antiquity? How can we account for the abiding prestige of these schools, which remained substantially unchanged in their methods and standing despite the political and religious changes that had taken place around them?The grammarian was a pivotal figure in the lives of the educated upper classes of late antiquity. Introducing his students to correct language and to the literature esteemed by long tradition, he began the education that confirmed his students' standing in a narrowly defined elite. His profession thus contributed to the social as well as cultural continuity of the Empire. The grammarian received honor - and criticism; the profession gave the grammarian a firm sense of cultural authority but also placed him in a position of genteel subordination within the elite.Robert A. Kaster provides the first thorough study of the place and function of these important but ambiguous figures. He also gives a detailed prosopography of the grammarians, and of the other "teachers of letters" below the level of rhetoric, from the middle of the third through the middle of the sixth century, which will provide a valuable research tool for other students of late-antique education.   [brief]
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Title: The mind's past
Author: Gazzaniga, Michael S
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Science | Psychology | Cognitive Science | Neuroscience
Publisher's Description: Why does the human brain insist on interpreting the world and constructing a narrative? In this ground-breaking work, Michael S. Gazzaniga, one of the world's foremost cognitive neuroscientists, shows how our mind and brain accomplish the amazing feat of constructing our past - a process clearly fraught with errors of perception, memory, and judgment. By showing that the specific systems built into our brain do their work automatically and largely outside of our conscious awareness, Gazzaniga calls into question our everyday notions of self and reality. The implications of his ideas reach deeply into the nature of perception and memory, the profundity of human instinct, and the ways we construct who we are and how we fit into the world around us.Over the past thirty years, the mind sciences have developed a picture not only of how our brains are built but also of what they were built to do. The emerging picture is wonderfully clear and pointed, underlining William James's notion that humans have far more instincts than other animals. Every baby is born with circuits that compute information enabling it to function in the physical world. Even what helps us to establish our understanding of social relations may have grown out of perceptual laws delivered to an infant's brain. Indeed, the ability to transmit culture - an act that is only part of the human repertoire - may stem from our many automatic and unique perceptual-motor processes that give rise to mental capacities such as belief and culture.Gazzaniga explains how the mind interprets data the brain has already processed, making "us" the last to know. He shows how what "we" see is frequently an illusion and not at all what our brain is perceiving. False memories become a part of our experience; autobiography is fiction. In exploring how the brain enables the mind, Gazzaniga points us toward one of the greatest mysteries of human evolution: how we become who we are.   [brief]
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Title: A marriage made in heaven: the sexual politics of Hebrew and Yiddish 
Author: Seidman, Naomi
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Gender Studies | Religion | Language and Linguistics
Publisher's Description: With remarkably original formulations, Naomi Seidman examines the ways that Hebrew, the Holy Tongue, and Yiddish, the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews, came to represent the masculine and feminine faces, respectively, of Ashkenazic Jewish culture. Her sophisticated history is the first book-length exploration of the sexual politics underlying the "marriage" of Hebrew and Yiddish, and it has profound implications for understanding the centrality of language choices and ideologies in the construction of modern Jewish identity.Seidman particularly examines this sexual-linguistic system as it shaped the work of two bilingual authors, S.Y. Abramovitsh, the "grand-father" of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature; and Dvora Baron, the first modern woman writer in Hebrew (and a writer in Yiddish as well). She also provides an analysis of the roles that Hebrew "masculinity" and Yiddish "femininity" played in the Hebrew-Yiddish language wars, the divorce that ultimately ended the marriage between the languages.Theorists have long debated the role of mother and father in the child's relationship to language. Seidman presents the Ashkenazic case as an illuminating example of a society in which "mother tongue" and "father tongue" are clearly differentiated. Her work speaks to important issues in contemporary scholarship, including the psychoanalysis of language acquisition, the feminist critique of Zionism, and the nexus of women's studies and Yiddish literary history.   [brief]
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Title: Language and colonial power: the appropriation of Swahili in the former Belgian Congo, 1880-1938
Author: Fabian, Johannes
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Postcolonial Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Language and Linguistics | African History | African Studies
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Title: The shadows of poetry: Vergil in the mind of Augustine
Author: MacCormack, Sabine
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Ancient History | Christianity | Poetry
Publisher's Description: Imperial ceremony was a vital form of self-expression for late antique society. Sabine MacCormack examines the ceremonies of imperial arrivals, funerals, and coronations from the late third to the late sixth centuries A.D., as manifest in the official literature and art of the time. Her study offers . . . [more]
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Title: Mind games: American culture and the birth of psychotherapy 
Author: Caplan, Eric 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | United States History | American Studies | Science | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: Eric Caplan's fascinating exploration of Victorian culture in the United States shatters the myth of Freud's seminal role in the creation of American psychotherapy. Resurrecting the long-buried "prehistory" of American mental therapeutics, Mind Games tells the remarkable story of how a widely assorted group of actors - none of them hailing from Vienna or from any other European city - compelled a reluctant medical profession to accept a new role for the mind in medicine. By the time Freud first set foot on American soil in 1909, as Caplan demonstrates, psychotherapy was already integrally woven into the fabric of American culture and medicine.What came to be known as psychotherapy emerged in the face of considerable opposition, much - indeed most - of which was generated by the medical profession itself. Caplan examines the contentious interplay within the American medical community, as well as between American physicians and their lay rivals, who included faith-healers, mind-curists, Christian Scientists, and Protestant ministers. These early practitioners of alternative medicine ultimately laid the groundwork for a distinctive and much heralded American type of psychotherapy. Its grudging acceptance by both medical elites and rank and file physicians signified their understanding that reliance on physical therapies to treat nervous and mental symptoms compromised their capacity to treat - and compete - effectively in a rapidly expanding mental-medical marketplace. Mind Games shows how psychotherapy came to occupy its central position in mainstream American culture.   [brief]
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Title: Language in time of revolution
Author: Harshav, Benjamin 1928-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Jewish Studies | History | Literature
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Title: Language, charisma, and creativity: the ritual life of a religious movement 
Author: Csordas, Thomas J
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Christianity
Publisher's Description: Thomas Csordas's eloquent analysis of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, part of the contemporary cultural and media phenomenon known as conservative Christianity, embraces one of the primary tasks of anthropology: to stimulate critical reflection by making the exotic seem familiar and the familiar appear strange. This story, unlike an ethnography of a little-known tribal society, is about people who are quite like everybody else but at the same time inhabit a substantially different phenomenological world.Csordas has observed and studied Charismatic groups throughout the United States. He begins with an introduction to the Charismatic Renewal and a history of its development during the roughly thirty years of its existence. He describes the movement's internal diversity as well as its international extent, emphasizing Charismatic identity and the transformation of space and time in Charismatic daily life. Language, Charisma, and Creativity extends and builds on the ideas of self-transformation that Csordas introduced in his earlier book on Charismatic healing. This work makes an original, important contribution to anthropology, studies of religion and ritual, linguistic-semiotic and rhetorical studies, the multidisciplinary study of social movements, and American studies.   [brief]
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Title: Out of our minds: reason and madness in the exploration of Central Africa: the Ad. E. Jensen lectures at the Frobenius Institut, University of Frankfurt
Author: Fabian, Johannes
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | African History | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Explorers and ethnographers in Africa during the period of colonial expansion are usually assumed to have been guided by rational aims such as the desire for scientific knowledge, fame, or financial gain. This book, the culmination of many years of research on nineteenth-century exploration in Central Africa, provides a new view of those early European explorers and their encounters with Africans. Out of Our Minds shows explorers were far from rational--often meeting their hosts in extraordinary states influenced by opiates, alcohol, sex, fever, fatigue, and violence. Johannes Fabian presents fascinating and little-known source material, and points to its implications for our understanding of the beginnings of modern colonization. At the same time, he makes an important contribution to current debates about the intellectual origins and nature of anthropological inquiry. Drawing on travel accounts--most of them Belgian and German--published between 1878 and the start of World War I, Fabian describes encounters between European travelers and the Africans they met. He argues that the loss of control experienced by these early travelers actually served to enhance cross-cultural understanding, allowing the foreigners to make sense of strange facts and customs. Fabian's provocative findings contribute to a critique of narrowly scientific or rationalistic visions of ethnography, illuminating the relationship between travel and intercultural understanding, as well as between imperialism and ethnographic knowledge.   [brief]
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Title: The sacrificed generation: youth, history, and the colonized mind in Madagascar
Author: Sharp, Lesley Alexandra
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | African History | Postcolonial Studies | Geography
Publisher's Description: Youth and identity politics figure prominently in this provocative study of personal and collective memory in Madagascar. A deeply nuanced ethnography of historical consciousness, it challenges many cross-cultural investigations of youth, for its key actors are not adults but schoolchildren. Lesley Sharp refutes dominant assumptions that African children are the helpless victims of postcolonial crises, incapable of organized, sustained collective thought or action. She insists instead on the political agency of Malagasy youth who, as they decipher their current predicament, offer potent, historicized critiques of colonial violence, nationalist resistance, foreign mass media, and schoolyard survival. Sharp asserts that autobiography and national history are inextricably linked and therefore must be read in tandem, a process that exposes how political consciousness is forged in the classroom, within the home, and on the street in Madagascar. Keywords: Critical pedagogy   [brief]
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Title: The flight of the mind: Virginia Woolf's art and manic-depressive illness 
Author: Caramagno, Thomas C
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Autobiographies and Biographies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this major new book on Virginia Woolf, Caramagno contends psychobiography has much to gain from a closer engagement with science. Literary studies of Woolf's life have been written almost exclusively from a psychoanalytic perspective. They portray Woolf as a victim of the Freudian "family romance," reducing her art to a neurotic evasion of a traumatic childhood.But current knowledge about manic-depressive illness - its genetic transmission, its biochemistry, and its effect on brain function - reveals a new relationship between Woolf's art and her illness. Caramagno demonstrates how Woolf used her illness intelligently and creatively in her theories of fiction, of mental functioning, and of self structure. Her novels dramatize her struggle to imagine and master psychic fragmentation. They helped her restore form and value to her own sense of self and lead her readers to an enriched appreciation of the complexity of human consciousness.   [brief]
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