Textual Silence

Textual Silence
Author: Jessica Lang
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2017-08-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813589924

There are thousands of books that represent the Holocaust, but can, and should, the act of reading these works convey the events of genocide to those who did not experience it? In Textual Silence, literary scholar Jessica Lang asserts that language itself is a barrier between the author and the reader in Holocaust texts—and that this barrier is not a lack of substance, but a defining characteristic of the genre. Holocaust texts, which encompass works as diverse as memoirs, novels, poems, and diaries, are traditionally characterized by silences the authors place throughout the text, both deliberately and unconsciously. While a reader may have the desire and will to comprehend the Holocaust, the presence of “textual silence” is a force that removes the experience of genocide from the reader’s analysis and imaginative recourse. Lang defines silences as omissions that take many forms, including the use of italics and quotation marks, ellipses and blank pages in poetry, and the presence of unreliable narrators in fiction. While this limits the reader’s ability to read in any conventional sense, these silences are not flaws. They are instead a critical presence that forces readers to acknowledge how words and meaning can diverge in the face of events as unimaginable as those of the Holocaust.

Articulate Silences

Articulate Silences
Author: King-Kok Cheung
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501721127

In this pathbreaking book, King-Kok Cheung sheds new light on the thematic and rhetoncal uses of silence in fiction by three Asian American women: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and JoyKogawa. Boldly articulating the unspeakable, these writers break the silence imposed by families or ethnic communities and defy the dominant culture that suppresses the voicing of minority experiences. Yet at the same time, they demonstrate how silences—voiceless gestures, textual ellipses, authorial hesitations—can themselves be articulate. Drawing on theoretical works on women's writing, on ethnicity and race, and on postmodernism and history, Cheung takes issue with Anglo-American feminists who valorize speech unequivocally and with revisionist Asian American male critics who attempt to refute Orientalist stereotypes by renouncing silence. She challenges Eurocentric views of speech and silence as polarized, hierarchical, and gendered, and proposes an approach to Asian American literature which overturns the "East-West" or "dual personality" model. Yamamoto, Kingston, and Kogawa interweave speech and silence, narration and ellipses, autobiography and fiction as they adapt and recast Asian and Euro-American precursors. Drawing freely from both traditions, they reinvent the past by decentering, disseminating, and interrogating authority-but not by reappropriating it. A fresh and subtle response to issues relating to cultural diversity, Articulate Silences will be important reading for scholars and students in the fie,4s of literary theory and criticism, women's studies, Asian American studies, and ethnic studies.

Reverberations of Silence

Reverberations of Silence
Author: Márta Pellérdi
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2014-08-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1443865850

Whether a conscious choice or constraint, silence has always been the result of oppression, censorship, trauma, and mental or physical handicap. Its provocative and mysterious nature has always motivated readers and critics towards interpretation. The present volume offers to read and interpret silence – unexpressed emotions, thoughts, hesitations and gestures – on mainly a textual and verbal level. How is the pervasive presence of silence explained in literature and linguistics? The collected scholarly essays in this volume offer a wide range of answers. The majority of the writings are literary critical in nature, focusing on major and less well-known literary texts from the Renaissance until the twentieth century. The authors approach the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, Shelley, Dickinson, Wright, Auster, Tan and Ishiguro among others, as well as less well-known, silent or silenced authors and their texts with equal dedication. Other essays included in the volume either deal with the problem of translating gaps and hiatuses or focus on capturing the phenomenon of silence in speech, through analyzing ellipsis, emptiness and hesitations in spoken language. The controversial and manifold aspects of silence are captured and interpreted in this volume.

James Joyce's Silences

James Joyce's Silences
Author: Jolanta Wawrzycka
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-05-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350036730

In this landmark book, leading international scholars from North America, Europe and the UK offer a sustained critical attention to the concept of silence in Joyce's writing. Examining Joyce's major works, including Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake, the critics present intertextual and comparative interpretations of Joyce's deployment of silence as a complex overarching narratological strategy. Exploring the many dimensions of what is revealed in the absences that fill his writing, and the different roles – aesthetic, rhetorical, textual and linguistic – that silence plays in Joyce's texts, James Joyce's Silences opens up important new avenues of scholarship on the great modernist writer. This volume is of particular interests to all academics and students involved in Joyce and Irish studies, modernism, comparative literature, poetics, cultural studies and translation studies.

Trauma, Taboo, and Truth-Telling

Trauma, Taboo, and Truth-Telling
Author: Nancy J. Gates-Madsen
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2016-07-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299307603

Silences, taboos, and "public secrets" carry their own deep meaning about Argentina's painful legacy of repression.

Vagueness in Normative Texts

Vagueness in Normative Texts
Author: Vijay K. Bhatia
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2005
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9783039106530

Normative texts are meant to be highly impersonal and decontextualised, yet at the same time they also deal with a range of human behaviour that is difficult to predict, which means they have to have a very high degree of determinacy on the one hand, and all-inclusiveness on the other. This poses a dilemma for the writer and interpreter of normative texts. The author of such texts must be determinate and vague at the same time, depending upon to what extent he or she can predict every conceivable contingency that may arise in the application of what he or she writes. The papers in this volume discuss important legal and linguistic aspects relating to the use of vagueness in legal drafting and demonstrate why such aspects are critical to our understanding of the way normative texts function.

The End of Genre

The End of Genre
Author: Brenton Faber
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2022-11-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 303108747X

This book explores early new critical debates about intention, tracing how and why intention was dismissed across much humanities scholarship, and how it can be revisited and made relevant as a key formative, evaluative, and ethical concept. The author argues that the academic disinterest in intention occurred simultaneously as genre criticism and later the rhetorical interest in genre came into its own. Genre became a way to simultaneously elide and naturalize intention. The book elaborates on the pedagogical, ethical, and empirical consequences naturalizing intention through genre has had for rhetorical studies and it offers a new term, “curations” to identify discursive forms, actions, and intentions working simultaneously. Finally, he also examines the gap between the humanities and STEM fields and shows specific ways scientists and engineers have called for the humanities to become more invested in intention as both a critical and an operational concept. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of discourse studies and critical discourse analysis, rhetoric and professional communication, including those in fields such as medicine, engineering, STS and business studies.

The Silences of Science

The Silences of Science
Author: Felicity Mellor
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2016-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317055039

Over the last half century scholars from a range of disciplines have attempted to theorise silence. Naively we tend to think of silence negatively, as a lack, an emptiness. Yet silence studies shows that silence is more than mere absence. All speech incorporates silence, not only in the gaps between words or the pauses that facilitate turn taking, but in the omissions that result from the necessary selectivity of communicative acts. Thus silence is significant in and of itself; it is a sign that has socially-constructed (albeit context -dependent and ambiguous) meanings. To date, studies of science communication have focussed on what is said rather than what is not said. They have highlighted the content of communication rather than its form, and have largely ignored the gaps, pauses and lacunae that are an essential, and meaningful, part of any communicative act. Both the sociology of science and the history of science have also failed to highlight the varied functions of silence in the practice of science, despite interests in tacit knowledge and cultures of secrecy. Through a range of case studies from historical and contemporary situations, this volume draws attention to the significance of silence, its different qualities and uses, and the nature, function and meaning of silence for science and technology studies.

The Silence Between Us

The Silence Between Us
Author: Alison Gervais
Publisher: Blink
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-08-13
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0310766303

Faced with the challenges of transitioning from a Hard of Hearing School to a Hearing high school, Maya has more than a learning curve. But what if she has more to learn about herself and how far she is willing to push for what she believes in? Perfect for contemporary fiction fans, The Silence Between Us is a novel that doesn’t shy away from the real-life struggles of high school, heart break, and d/Deaf culture. Schneider Family Book Award, Best Teen Honor Book 2020 Torn from her Hard of Hearing school when her mother's job takes them across the country, Deaf teen Maya must attend a hearing school for the first time since her hearing loss. As if that wasn’t hard enough, she also has to adjust to the hearing culture, which she finds frustrating. When her new friends and classmates start pushing into Maya’s thoughts about what it means to be Deaf, it clashes with her idea of self-worth and values. Looking past graduation towards a future medical career, Maya knows nothing, not even an unexpected romance, will derail her pursuits or cause her to question her integrity. Wattpad sensation Alison Gervais writes a stunning portrayal of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing culture in this clean YA contemporary romance. Drawing from her own deaf experience and relationship with the HoH community, Gervais provides a personal interview and commentary on cochlear implants. The Silence Between Us mixes lighthearted romance with deeper social issues facing minority groups. “The Silence Between Us?is eminently un-put-down-able.” (NPR) “Gervais deftly renders both the nuanced, everyday realities of life with disability and Maya’s fierce pride in her Deafness, delivering a vibrant story that will resonate with Deaf and hearing audiences alike.” –?Booklist “A solid addition to middle/high school fiction that allows for deep discussion about stereotypes concerning disabilities.”?School Library Journal “This is a great YA contemporary (clean) romance that follows Maya as she navigates a new school and plans for her future. The addition of representation by a Deaf character was really beautifully done. Highly recommend for people looking for a sweet, engaging, and educational romantic read.” (YA and Kids Book Central)

Traditions of Writing Research

Traditions of Writing Research
Author: Charles Bazerman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2009-10-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 113584996X

Traditions of Writing Research reflects the various styles of work offered at the Writing Research Across Borders conference. This volume, like the conference that it grew out of, will bring new perspectives to the rich dialogue of contemporary research on writing and advance understanding of this complex and important human activity.