From an award-winning writer and linguist, a scientific and personal meditation on the phenomenon of language loss and the possibility of renewal. As a child Julie Sedivy left Czechoslovakia for Canada, and English soon took over her life. By early adulthood she spoke Czech rarely and badly, and when her father died unexpectedly, she lost not only a beloved parent but also her firmest point of connection to her native language. As Sedivy realized, more is at stake here than the loss of language: there is also the loss of identity. Language is an important part of adaptation to a new culture, and immigrants everywhere face pressure to assimilate. Recognizing this tension, Sedivy set out to understand the science of language loss and the potential for renewal. In Memory Speaks, she takes on the psychological and social world of multilingualism, exploring the human brainÕs capacity to learnÑand forgetÑlanguages at various stages of life. But while studies of multilingual experience provide resources for the teaching and preservation of languages, Sedivy finds that the challenges facing multilingual people are largely political. Countering the widespread view that linguistic pluralism splinters loyalties and communities, Sedivy argues that the struggle to remain connected to an ancestral language and culture is a site of common ground, as people from all backgrounds can recognize the crucial role of language in forming a sense of self. Distinctive and timely, Memory Speaks combines a rich body of psychological research with a moving story at once personal and universally resonant. As citizens debate the merits of bilingual education, as the worldÕs less dominant languages are driven to extinction, and as many people confront the pain of language loss, this is badly needed wisdom.

Speaking Memory evokes the complex "language-scapes" that form at the crossroads of culture and history in cities. While engaging with current debates on the nature and role of translation in globalized urban landscapes, the contributors offer a series of detailed and nuanced readings of “translational” cities – their histories, their construction and transformation in memory, and the artistic projects that tell their stories. The three sections of the book highlight historical case studies, conceptual issues, and text-based analyses of city scripts, in particular as they relate to creative literary practices and language interventions on the surface of the city itself. In this volume, translation points to the dissonance of city life, but also to the possibility of a generalized, public discourse – a space vital to urban citizenship, where the convergence of languages can be the source of new conversations. Essays cover a variety of topics and approaches, bringing new voices and insights to discussions on multilingualism and translation in the urban contexts of cities including Dublin, Montevideo, Montreal, Prague, and Vilnius. Defining cities as fields of translational forces where languages are both in conversation and in tension, translation in Speaking Memory is stretched beyond its usual confines, encompassing literary, artistic, and cultural practices that permeate everyday contemporary life. Contributors include Liamis Briedis (Vilnius University), Matteo Colombi (University of Leipzig), Michael Cronin (Dublin City University), Michael Darroch (Windsor University), Roch Duval (Université de Montréal), Andre Furlani (Concordia University), Simon Harel (Université de Montréal), William Marshall (Stirling University), Sarah Mekdjian (Université Paris III), Alexis Nouss (Université d’Aix en Provence), Katia Pizzi (University of London), Sherry Simon (Concordia University), Will Straw (McGill University), and Miriam Suchet (Université Paris III).

Arguing that all human beings are incorrigibly autobiographical and that the most common mode of autobiography is oral and partial, this book maps out the diversity of autobiographical practices and seeks to introduce them to teachers and educators.

Longlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Ryan Chapman’s “gritty, bracing debut” (Esquire) set during a prison riot is “dark, daring, and laugh-out-loud hilarious…one of the smartest—and best—novels of the year” (NPR). A largescale riot rages through Westbrook prison in upstate New York, incited by a poem in the house literary journal. Our unnamed narrator, barricaded inside the computer lab, swears he’s blameless—even though, as editor-in-chief, he published the piece in question. As he awaits violent interruption by his many, many enemies, he liveblogs one final Editor’s Letter. Riots I Have Known is his memoir, confession, and act of literary revenge. His tale spans a childhood in Sri Lanka, navigating the postwar black markets and hotel chains; employment as a Park Avenue doorman, serving the widows of the one percent; life in prison, with the silver lining of his beloved McNairy; and his stewardship of The Holding Pen, a “masterpiece of post-penal literature” favored by Brooklynites everywhere. All will be revealed, and everyone will see he’s really a good guy, doing it for the right reasons. “Fitfully funny and murderously wry,” Riots I Have Known is “a frenzied yet wistful monologue from a lover of literature under siege” (Kirkus Reviews).

The book pursues a usage-oriented strategy of language description by infusing it with the central concept of post-structural semiotics and literary theory - that of intertextual memory. Its principal claim is that all new facts of language are grounded in the speakers' memory of previous experiences of using language. It is a "speech to speech" model: every new fact of speech is seen as emerging out of recalled fragments that are reiterated and manipulated at the same time. By the same token, the new meaning is always superscribed on something familiar and recognizable as its (more or less radical) alteration. The model offers a way to describe the meaning of language as an open-ended process, the way the meaning of literary works is described in modern literary criticism. The basic unit of the intertextual model is the Communicative Fragment (CF). A CF is a fraction of speech of any shape, meaning, and stylistic provenance, which speakers recognize and, as a consequence, treat as a whole. Its chief attributes are a prefabricated shape, an integral meaning (i.e., perceived as a whole whose scope always goes beyond the analyzable), and a specific communicative "texture" alluding at a speech genre, a tangible speech situation, and profiles of the speaker and the implied addressee. Although a CF has a recognizable shape, it is not as definitively set as that of stationary linguistic signs (words and morphemes). A CF can be tempered with, truncated or expanded, adapted to and fused with other CFs. The book describes in detail typical devices by which speakers manipulate their resources of linguistic memory, whose ever-new constellations in speech create infinite possibilities for new variations and shades of meaning. The book is of interest to linguists in such diverse fields as Cognitive Linguistics, discourse analysis, functional linguistics, language pedagogy, translation studies, semiotics, and the philosophy of language.

This is the first of three volumes based on papers given at the conference 'The Fragile Tradition: The German Cultural Imagination Since 1500' in Cambridge, 2002. Together they provide a conspectus of current research on the cultural, historical and literary imagination of the German-speaking world across the whole of the modern period. This volume highlights the ways in which cultural memory and historical consciousness have been shaped by experiences of discontinuity, focusing particularly on the reception of the Reformation, the literary and ideological heritage of the Enlightenment, and the representation of war, the Holocaust, and the reunification of Germany in contemporary literature and museum culture.

"Exploring a wide variety of examples from both the past and present, this collection defines cities as fields of translational forces, of languages in conversation and in tension. From the 19th century multilingual border city to today's metropolis, language fractures and connections shape urban territory, giving the city its distinctive sensibility. Like architecture and urban planning, like the creation of monuments, translation defines the memories which survive, the narratives which tell the story of the city. Choosing what to remember is always a conflictual process, and particularly in cities with histories with internal language strife, acts of translation are a crucial part of this struggle. The essays draw a variegated portrait of the translational city, highlighting spaces of accelerated exchange and heightened language awareness. The contributions discuss cities across Europe (with particular attention to its Eastern borderlands) and the Americas (Canada, the US, Brazil, Uruguay). Emblematic importance is given to the layered memories of the Central European and Habsburg city (Vilnius, Prague, Brody, Trieste) as well as the traumas of passage from empire to nation. Subsequent essays explore the broader fault lines which traverse today's global city: the new ways in which immigrants imprint their presence and their memories in today's material and virtual cities, the obstacles to translation in the experience of the refugee and the exile, the ways in which media networks enhance or limit possibilities of translation, and the active and performative character of hybrid languages as they emerge in the interstices of city life."--