Language, Culture, and Hegemony in Modern France

Language, Culture, and Hegemony in Modern France
Author: Freeman G. Henry
Publisher: Summa Publications, Inc.
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2008
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9781883479596

In this panoramic study, Freeman Henry chronicles the rise to prominence of French language and culture. He meticulously analyzes the protracted government-sponsored efforts to foster and maintain that status and--ultimately--the latter-day challenges to France's national linguistic identity posed by Anglocentric globalization and a multicentric European Union. The internal history of the language is closely intertwined with its external history: phonology, morphology, lexicography, and orthography come alive against a backdrop of political, cultural, and institutional manifestations. A felicitous blend of documentary evidence and critical analysis serves to elucidate crucial stages, events, and concepts: 16th-century exuberance, 17th-century foundations, 18th-century expansionism, Revolutionary ideology. Restoration restructuring and commercialization, the advent of linguistic science, the coming of the media age, encroaching technocracy, and clamors for linguistic parity. Individual chapter focus on the plight of minority linguistic communities such as the blind and the deaf, language monitoring policies and legislation such as the Loi Toubon, as well as the feminization project legitimizing Madame la ministre. --Publisher description.

Language, Culture and Communication in Contemporary Europe

Language, Culture and Communication in Contemporary Europe
Author: Charlotte Hoffmann
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
Total Pages: 186
Release: 1996
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781853593604

"This book offers a multidisciplinary approach to the consideration of aspects of Europe's linguistic and cultural heritage. The ten contributions explore the relationship between language, culture and modern communication, either taking Europe as a whole or looking at specific countries. The authors' backgrounds and expertise span a number of disciplines, from linguistics, sociolinguistics and translation studies to information technology and cultural studies."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Modern France

Modern France
Author: Michael F. Leruth
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2022-10-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1440855498

This volume offers perspective on modern French society and culture through thematic chapters on topics ranging from geography to popular culture. Ideal for students and general readers, this book includes insightful, current information about France's past, present, and future. France is the country most visited by international tourists. Aside from clichéd images of baguettes and the Eiffel Tower, however, what is French society and culture really like? Modern France is organized into thematic chapters covering the full range of French history and contemporary daily life. Chapter topics include: geography; history; government and politics; economy; religion and thought; social classes and ethnicity; gender, marriage, and sexuality; education; language; etiquette; literature and drama; art and architecture; music and dance; food; leisure and sports; and media and popular culture. Each chapter contains an overview of the topic and alphabetized entries on examples of each theme. A detailed historical timeline covers prehistoric times to the presidency of Emmanuel Macron. Special appendices offer profiles of a typical day in the life of representative members of French society, a glossary, key facts and figures about France, and a holiday chart. The volume will be useful for readers looking for specific topical information and for those who want to develop an informed perspective on aspects of modern France.

The Language Question under Napoleon

The Language Question under Napoleon
Author: Stewart McCain
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2017-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319549367

This book offers a new perspective on the cultural politics of the Napoleonic Empire by exploring the issue of language within four pivotal institutions - the school, the army, the courtroom and the church. Based on wide-ranging research in archival and published sources, Stewart McCain demonstrates that the Napoleonic State was in reality fractured by disagreements over how best to govern a population characterized by enormous linguistic diversity. Napoleonic officials were not simply cultural imperialists; many acted as culture-brokers, emphasizing their familiarity with the local language to secure employment with the state, and pointing to linguistic and cultural particularism to justify departures from which what others might have considered desirable practice by the regime. This book will be of interest to scholars of the Napoleonic Empire, and of European state-building and nationalisms.

The Prosthetic Tongue

The Prosthetic Tongue
Author: Katie Chenoweth
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2019-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812251490

Of all the cultural "revolutions" brought about by the development of printing technology during the sixteenth century, perhaps the most remarkable but least understood is the purported rise of European vernacular languages. It is generally accepted that the invention of printing constitutes an event in the history of language that has profoundly shaped modernity, and yet the exact nature of this transformation—the mechanics of the event—has remained curiously unexamined. In The Prosthetic Tongue, Katie Chenoweth explores the relationship between printing and the vernacular as it took shape in sixteenth-century France and charts the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains, from typography, orthography, and grammar to politics, pedagogy, and poetics. Under François I, the king known in his own time as the "Father of Letters," both printing and vernacular language emerged as major cultural and political forces. Beginning in 1529, French underwent a remarkable transformation, as printers and writers began to reimagine their mother tongue as mechanically reproducible. The first accent marks appeared in French texts, the first French grammar books and dictionaries were published, phonetic spelling reforms were debated, modern Roman typefaces replaced gothic scripts, and French was codified as a legal idiom. This was, Chenoweth argues, a veritable "new media" moment, in which the print medium served as the underlying material apparatus and conceptual framework for a revolutionary reinvention of the vernacular. Rather than tell the story of the origin of the modern French language, however, she seeks to destabilize this very notion of "origin" by situating the cultural formation of French in a scene of media technology and reproducibility. No less than the paper book issuing from sixteenth-century printing presses, the modern French language is a product of the age of mechanical reproduction.

New Media, Old Regimes

New Media, Old Regimes
Author: Lyombe Eko
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 458
Release: 2012
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0739167898

New Media, Old Regimes: Case Studies in Comparative Communication Law and Policy, by Lyombe S. Eko, is a collection of novel theoretical perspectives and case studies in comparative communication law. Through these cases, Eko describes, explains and illustrates how a number of nation-states, transnational, and international organizations employ culture-specific "distillations" of universal principles to resolve tensions between freedom of expression and other societal interests in real space and cyberspace. This study provides essential scholarship on comparative communication law and policy.

Theorization and Representations in Linguistics

Theorization and Representations in Linguistics
Author: Viviane Arigne
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2018-11-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 152752115X

This book addresses some issues of theorization in linguistics having to do with the systems of representation used in linguistics and the relation between linguistics and cognition. The essays gathered in the first part question the very concept of metalanguage, comparing the metalanguage used in formalised languages and that of natural languages, or examining Chomsky’s theory of mental representations in relation to semantic description and analysis. In the same line of thought, another contribution endeavours to show how the notational system of a linguistic theory is part and parcel of both conceptualisation and theorisation, in an analysis based on the early development of phonetics and phonology. The second part of the volume studies the relations between linguistics and cognition seen under different angles. The first study examines how the relation between cognitive linguistics and other disciplines is conducive to confusion and divergences in the interpretation of the terminology, and is followed by a discussion of the origins and development of prototype theory in psychology and its transfer in linguistics by cognitive semanticists. The last two chapters study how mental operations are expressed in language, analysing the cognitive processes of deductive vs. abductive inference on the one hand, and the metarepresentation of utterance acts by assertive shell-nouns on the other hand.

The Finger

The Finger
Author: Angus Trumble
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2010-05-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1429945613

FROM THE AUTHOR OF A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SMILE, A COMPLETE INDEX OF THE DIGIT In this collision between art and science, history and pop culture, the acclaimed art historian Angus Trumble examines the finger from every possible angle. His inquiries into its representation in art take us from Buddhist statues in Kyoto to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, from cave art to Picasso's Guernica, from Van Dyck's and Rubens's winning ways with gloves to the longstanding French taste for tapering digits. But Trumble also asks intriguing questions about the finger in general: How do fingers work, and why do most of us have five on each hand? Why do we bite our nails? This witty, odd, and fascinating book is filled with diverse anecdotes about the silent language of gesture, the game of love, the spinning of balls, superstitions relating to the severed fingers of thieves, and systems of computation that were used on wharves and in shops, markets, granaries, and warehouses throughout the ancient Roman world. Side by side with historical discussions of rings and gloves and nail polish are meditations on the finger's essential role in writing, speech, sports, crime, law, sex, worhsip, memory, scratching politely at eighteenth-century French doors (instead of crudely knocking), or merely satisfying an itch—and, of course, in the eponymous show of contempt.

When The World Spoke French

When The World Spoke French
Author: Marc Fumaroli
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2011-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1590173759

A New York Review Books Original During the eighteenth century, from the death of Louis XIV until the Revolution, French culture set the standard for all of Europe. In Sweden, Austria, Italy, Spain, England, Russia, and Germany, among kings and queens, diplomats, military leaders, writers, aristocrats, and artists, French was the universal language of politics and intellectual life. In When the World Spoke French, Marc Fumaroli presents a gallery of portraits of Europeans and Americans who conversed and corresponded in French, along with excerpts from their letters or other writings. These men and women, despite their differences, were all irresistibly attracted to the ideal of human happiness inspired by the Enlightenment, whose capital was Paris and whose king was Voltaire. Whether they were in Paris or far away, speaking French connected them in spirit with all those who desired to emulate Parisian tastes, style of life, and social pleasures. Their stories are testaments to the appeal of that famous “sweetness of life” nourished by France and its language.

Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought

Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought
Author: Christopher John Murray
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 748
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135455643

In this wide-ranging guide to twentieth-century French thought, leading scholars offer an authoritative multi-disciplinary analysis of one of the most distinctive and influential traditions in modern thought. Unlike any other existing work, this important work covers not only philosophy, but also all the other major disciplines, including literary theory, sociology, linguistics, political thought, theology, and more.