Books & Magazines

Book & Magazines resources in the
Madison Area

• The Digital Cardinal - The Daily Cardinal Online.
• The Daily Page - The Isthmus Online, Madison's Weekly Newspaper.
• The ONION - No explanation would do this justice......

Other Selected Web Sites

• The Alternative Bookshop - The Alternative Book Shop specializes in unique and hard to find books from Independent, Small and Self-Publishers. Each book is vividly presented for your review. It's almost like browsing in a bookstore.

In this article I explore the controversial issue of the origin of free indirect style. While its most rigorous analyst, Banfield (1982), claims that the style is purely literary and cannot be found in ordinary spoken discourse, Adamson (1994) has located its origin in everyday linguistic practices, such as empathetic deixis and quotative modality. I add a new dimension to the study of these issues by moving beyond the level of individual sentences. In particular, I focus on referential choices for the designation of characters. My case-study is Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel which Leavis (1948) once characterized with trademark polemic as a ‘dead end’. By way of contrast, Wales’s study of its language claims for it the highest praise by dint of the text’s exemplary Bakhtinian polyphony. I complicate the Bakhtinian reading of Joyce by not taking dialogicity to mean simply a co-existence of different discourse varieties, but by trying to find parallels between the presentation of character consciousness and spoken interaction. My examples of Joyce’s use of pronouns to refer to characters in free indirect style seem to create discourse inconsistencies (often interpreted with regard to the disintegration of the Modernist self), rather than allow readers to interpret pronominal references automatically. I argue that the best way to account for this bizarre strategy is by aligning it to spoken discourse where vague pronominal references, in the form of personal and demonstrative pronouns, are commonly found. The argument advanced by spoken discourse analysts, that the construction and understanding of reference is a joint endeavour of speaker and addressee, allows me to construct Joyce’s text as dialogical in Bakhtinian terms and thus locate once again the origin of free indirect style in everyday discourse.

We read in a linear fashion, page by page, and we seem also to experience the world around us thus, moment by moment. But research on visual perception shows that perceptual experience is not pictorially representational: it does not consist in a linear, cumulative, totalizing process of building up a stream of internal picture-like representations. Current enactive, or sensorimotor, theories describe vision and imagination as operating through interactive potentiality. Kafka’s texts, which evoke perception as non-pictorial, provide scope for investigating the close links between vision and imagination in the context of the reading of fiction. Kafka taps into the fundamental perceptual processes by which we experience external and imagined worlds, by evoking fictional worlds through the characters’ perceptual enaction of them. The temporality of Kafka’s narratives draws us in by making concessions to how we habitually create ‘proper’, linear narratives out of experience, as reflected in traditional Realist narratives. However, Kafka also unsettles these processes of narrativization, showing their inadequacies and superfluities. Kafka’s works engage the reader’s imagination so powerfully because they correspond to the truth of perceptual experience, rather than merely to the fictions we conventionally make of it. Yet these texts also unsettle because we are unused to thinking of the real world as being just how these truly realistic, Kafkaesque worlds are: inadmissible of a complete, linear narrative, because always emerging when looked for, just in time.

Stylistic research on film discourse is growing; however, studies rarely take into consideration cinema’s complex message resulting from the combination of the verbal and visual codes. This article proposes a multimodal analysis of Italian auteur Antonioni’s When Love Fails to show how dialogue artfully interacts with elements of the mise-en-scène. The short film, part of a 1953 compilation, is an inquiry into the reality of suicide through the narratives of five women who at one point of their lives attempted suicide. Introducing and orchestrating the stories is a male voice-over and an invisible journalist/interviewer. The study analyses the women’s recollections from a narrative approach and follows how, through their self-presentation strategies, the five survivors project their identity. Not all narratives and narrators are the same; some are interviewer-orchestrated, while two display a better control of their narratives and stronger authorship, which are interpreted here as signs of greater agency. The narrative styles of the more autonomous narrators are various: the creation of vectors and deictic centres through the use of deixis and gaze accompanied by camera movement, and the use of reported speech that construes a complex double plane narrative revolving around the switch from the verbal to the visual plane. In conclusion, the study demonstrates that a stylistic multimodal approach offers a viable tool for a richer understanding of cinema’s semiotic by providing an interface between the levels of verbal and visual communication.

In this article I explore how the authenticity of the argument in the final section of Ian McEwan’s novella On Chesil Beach is achieved by exploiting the underlying mechanisms of real-life conflict talk. The momentum and coherence of argument structure tends toward automatization in the sense that once a conflict sequence is in progress, disagreement prompts (and makes structurally expectable) further disagreement in the subsequent turns, lending arguments a self-perpetuating quality, and this property lends itself well to the creation of confrontational dialogue in fiction. I first trace the trajectory of Edward and Florence’s argument, showing how the structure of conflict talk apparently leads them along — independent of what their original intentions might have been. I also look at the various kinds of oppositional moves that are employed in the course of the dispute, showing that the argumentative techniques deployed by the characters bear a close resemblance to those found in authentic conflict talk and thus contribute to the realistic texture of the interaction as well as its intensity. Finally, I examine the characters’ various attempts at attenuating and terminating the confrontation and defusing the tension and consider why they fail. It appears that the heatedness of the argument and the significance of its topic have an important influence on the effectiveness of attempts at terminating the dispute, on the efficacy of humour and on the trajectory of the interaction.

Based on the premise that stylisticians who are involved with teaching should be aware of the pedagogical orientation and reading paradigms which inform their practice, this article questions whether critical pedagogy can dialogue with stylistics as an approach to working with literary texts in the classroom. The theoretical claims are illustrated with examples from two Literary Awareness workshops in an EFL situation. The argument leads to the conclusion that irrespective of the political orientation and a rather romantic view of education, some of the ideas proposed by critical pedagogy can still contribute to the area of pedagogical stylistics in the years to come. The article concludes with a recommendation for more empirical research in the area.

This article presents experiential learning outcomes and some data from a pilot study which forms part of a developing doctoral study entitled, ‘Joining the Stylistics Discourse Community: Student Development in Learning Stylistics’. The pilot was designed to assess how information and hard data could be created such that empirical study of student development would be possible, and to gather a small amount of such data for analysis. The article discusses the structuring of the pilot study, the delivery of it and the resulting outcomes. Student groups participating were asked to undertake analysis of a selected text and to complete a questionnaire about their process of learning to analyse.

Over the last few years, researchers have criticized the typical divides between the lower and the higher stages of the mainstream American undergraduate foreign-language curriculum. Roughly speaking, the lower levels are commonly characterized by meaning-focused, sentence-based language instruction with emphasis on oral interaction, whereas the higher levels tend to focus on formal, text-oriented instruction with an emphasis on reading, writing, literature and content-oriented study. This division has clear repercussions for the conceptualization of communication, language, and language learning in the mainstream foreign-language curriculum. One of the most notable consequences is the idea that literature is essentially different from ordinary language, and, therefore, a less ‘authentic,’ ‘real-life’ form of discourse. The present article presents an alternative, integrative, literature-through-language pedagogy founded on a stylistics-based approach to language. The study was implemented with a group of sixth-semester students of Spanish at an American university. This study examines how the learners’ acculturation into the conventional two-tiered curricular configuration shaped their language constructs and the ways they composed meaning in texts. This article also discusses how the alternative course impacted on the learners’ linguistic development, views of language, and learning attitudes.

How can we help our students to think clearly and plan wisely so that they can write better stylistics papers? This article evaluates a set of rhetorical pedagogical guidelines that I made for my own undergraduate stylistics students in an attempt to address this question. The article primarily reproduces the guidelines I designed, but also a questionnaire that I drew up, and, crucially, reports the responses of the subjects in that questionnaire. It is hoped that such data might lead to better testing methods and ultimately an improved set of stylistics guidelines so that students can be empowered to perform better, with increased confidence and motivation, in the undergraduate stylistics classroom.

The Anglo-Saxon poem called Wulf and Eadwacer, a text so deeply embedded in ambiguity as to have achieved canonic status on that account alone, is the subject of this exercise, which reviews briefly the progress of interpretation from the late 19th century to the present time. It then considers methods of study, as orientated from the source-text, which begets translations, or, conversely from various translations leading back to the source. The pedagogic implications of ‘teaching a poem’ arise out of this discussion, which consequently questions the purpose and value of translation as an instructional and imaginative exercise.

Health impact assessments (HIAs) provide an attractive approach for those interested in injecting health issues into planning processes. While HIAs have been mainly employed outside the United States and led by professionals from the public health field, they hold promise for addressing the important dimension of human health in planning. This article describes the history of HIAs and their relationship to other analogous tools, reviews current theory and practice of HIAs, and discusses the role of HIAs in current planning initiatives. The authors suggest it is important to modify existing HIA tools so that they are perceived by planners as a useful supplement to current planning processes rather than a burdensome additional requirement. The authors close by discussing how HIAs present distinct advantages, providing a more specific focus on the important topic of human health and a further opportunity to more closely partner with potential allies from public health and related fields.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are widely accepted as a technology offering an alternative way to tackle complex and dynamic problems in urban studies. The goal of this article is a review of current literature in the field of planning and AI. The aim of this review is to increase the understanding of how AI approaches urban and land dynamics modeling processes and how, as a result, researchers can structure that knowledge and choose the correct approaches to embed in their models. For this purpose, the authors review the applications of AI techniques in urban land dynamics domain as well as the emerging challenges they face. The authors discuss hybrid AI systems as a need resulting from the trend in planning policy to develop more holistic approaches. The authors conclude that, although challenges exist, AI-based approaches offer promising solutions for urban and land dynamics.

From increasing urbanization arises the need for research dealing with urban ecosystems and their specificities. Incorporating of wildlife into urban planning is a challenge. This annotated bibliography identifies and describes literature on avian species response to urbanization and provides some general recommendations for supporting avian diversity within the urban landscape. The bibliography was compiled from the current academic literature that relates to this theme.

This article outlines issues of planning and adaptation for watershed management programs by overlapping three broad bodies of literature: a) social psychology; b) performance management; and c) watershed planning and management. Our specific interest lies within the intersection areas: (ac) individual and socio-economic influences on the adoption of conservation practices; (ab) data utilization by managers; (bc) evaluation and performance measurement of watershed projects; and (abc) learning and adaptation in watershed planning and management. Literature within these intersections suggests several implications: values and individual perceptions are an important basis for environmental decision making; intermediate metrics are needed; metrics can be misleading; data are created but not used; and performance management and evaluation are conflated. More research is needed on adaptive capacity and effectiveness for non-regulatory approaches to environmental management. Research and practice would benefit by recognizing behavior change and environmental change as two discreet areas of learning and adaptation.