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Language The Fascist party came to power in Italy in 1922. It remained in power until the middle of 1943 when Italy was invaded by a joint American and British force that landed in Sicily from North Africa and progressed from there, across the straits of Messina, to the Italian mainland. Effectively, fascist power came to an end in September 1943 as the Allies fought their way north first to Naples, then to Rome and then, in 1944, ‘liberated’ the whole of Italy from both Italian fascist rule and the Italians’ allies the Germans who had become, with the surrender
13 Maria Stoicheva ‘Neighbour languages’: Europeanisation and language borders The chapter aims to explore EU/Eastern neighbourhood relations in the area of languages and language policies, with a focus on processes of Europeanisation and the reinforcement of European identity. It covers not only issues related to language management but demonstrates the importance of language practices, beliefs about language varieties, and the impact of Europeanisation on language in the Eastern neighbourhood. In many aspects, these are issues related to ‘neighbour languages
3 Prosthetic language Some of the most powerful myths underlying the idea of monolingualism have to do with ideas of the ‘native speaker’ and the ‘mother tongue’. For the ‘native speaker’, language – the language – is assumed to be something organic, interior, possessed as by right, and used without impediment. The ‘mother tongue’, meanwhile, holds the idea of being born into a language, ‘the site of nativity and pure origin’ from which we come and to which we belong.1 Operating far below the level of consciously held belief, these ideas about language work so
4147 Inglis–Are the Irish different_BB_Layout 1 29/07/2014 09:27 Page 177 17 Irish language, Irish nation Iarfhlaith Watson Nearly half the country speaks Irish. Erroneous as this statement may appear, results from the 2011 Census indicate that 42 per cent of the population of the Republic of Ireland can speak Irish.1 The figure has been this high since the 1990s and had doubled since the 1970s.2 Most people in Ireland would suspect the accuracy of this figure and would believe that few people can speak Irish. Why then do so many people claim to be able to
Scholars concerned with examining the ethnic identities of migrants have pointed to the importance of language as a key component in formulating a sense of belonging, though migrants can still consider themselves part of a particular ethnic group despite not necessarily sharing a distinctive language. 1 Yet language has also been analysed in terms of its abandonment as migrants seek to adjust to
To ask whether reality is intelligible is to ask about the relation between thought and reality. In considering the nature of thought one is led also to consider the nature of language. Inseparably bound up with the question of whether reality is intelligible, therefore, is the question of how language is connected with reality, of what it is to say something. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (1953
7 Music, language and literature Language and music The divergent interpretations of the relationship between music and language in modernity are inseparable from the main divergences between philosophical conceptions of language. The attempt to explain language in representational terms in the empiricist tradition that eventually leads to analytical philosophy, and the understanding of language as a form of social action and as constitutive of the world we inhabit in the hermeneutic tradition give rise to very different conceptions of music. One paradigmatic
The reader of realism naturally focuses on content, not style. (Spector in Bloom 1987 : 231) I have made repeated reference to the importance of language in discussions of realism, and in this chapter we look at the different ways in which language is conceptualised in relation to discussion of realism. As I pointed out at the end of Chapter 8 , such a discussion cuts across both literary critical concerns and philosophy. The title ‘The language of Realism’ is not intended to suggest that there is a single aspect to the use of language in realism, but
This article examines James Baldwin’s late text The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) as one of his substantial attempts at “forging a new language,” which he tentatively mentions in his late essays and interviews. As an unpopular and difficult text in Baldwin’s oeuvre, Evidence carries the imprint of a new economy of time, casting the past into the present, and a new economy of space, navigating across other geographies in appraising the serial killings of children in one of Atlanta’s poorest Black neighborhoods. This article suggests that a new economy of time emerges earlier in No Name in the Street (1972), as a result of Baldwin’s self-imposed exile in Europe. The article then analyzes his spatiotemporal logic in the specifics of Evidence with reference to a Black middle class, urbanization, the ghetto, gentrification, and other colonized spaces.
In 1974 the British Board of Film Censors refused to grant a certificate to the Swedish documentary More About the Language of Love (Mera ur Kärlekens språk, 1970, Torgny Wickman, Sweden: Swedish Film Production), due to its explicit sexual content. Nevertheless, the Greater London Council granted the film an ‘X’ certificate so that it could be shown legally in cinemas throughout the capital. This article details the trial against the cinema manager and owners, after the film was seized by police under the charge of obscenity, and explores the impact on British arguments around film censorship, revealing a range of attitudes towards sex and pornography. Drawing on archival records of the trial, the widespread press coverage as well as participants’ subsequent reflections, the article builds upon Elisabet Björklund’s work on Swedish sex education films and Eric Schaefer’s scholarship on Sweden’s ‘sexy nation’ reputation to argue that the Swedish films’ transnational distribution complicated tensions between educational and exploitative intentions in a particularly British culture war over censorship.