Nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Award, 2014. Paul Erik returns to Nuuk after spending the summer in his hometown of Uummannaq, Greenland. In Nuuk he attends high school where people from all over the country are housed in dormitories. But the school systems are Danish – and not adapted to the life and circumstances in Greenland, and the young grow increasingly frustrated. The story takes place in 1969, and we gain an insight into a significant period of Greenlandic history, as well as the dominating worldly cultural influences of the times. First English translation.

In April 1994, two as-yet-unreleased letters by Sartre and one by Merleau-Ponty were published in the "Magazine Littéraire". Their publication sparked new interpretative hypotheses on the political and philosophical motivations behind the break of the relationship of mutual esteem, friendship, and fruitful intellectual collaboration between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. The bright tone of their personal contrasts testified the profound theoretical differences between the two thinkers, both at philosophical level and political praxis. This volume covers the period between the launch of the magazine "Les Temps Moderns" in 1945 and Sartre’s decision to no longer accept Merleau-Ponty’s contributions in 1953, offering a detailed analysis of the respective position of the two philosophers and of an irreducible intellectual distance between them.

Foundations of a Free Society brings together some of the most knowledgeable Ayn Rand scholars and proponents of her philosophy, as well as notable critics, putting them in conversation with other intellectuals who also see themselves as defenders of capitalism and individual liberty. United by the view that there is something importantly right—though perhaps also much wrong—in Rand’s political philosophy, contributors reflect on her views with the hope of furthering our understandings of what sort of society is best and why. The volume provides a robust elaboration and defense of the foundation of Rand’s political philosophy in the principle that force paralyzes and negates the functioning of reason; it offers an in-depth scholarly discussion of Rand’s view on the nature of individual rights and the role of government in defending them; it deals extensively with the similarities and differences between Rand’s thought and the libertarian tradition (to which she is often assimilated) and objections to her positions arising from this tradition; it explores Rand’s relation to the classical liberal tradition, specifically with regard to her defense of freedom of the intellect; and it discusses her views on the free market, with special attention to the relation between these views and those of the Austrian school of economics.

In Codrescu’s own words: “I wrote my first book of poems, License to Carry a Gun (Big Table, 1970), when I first lived in New York City, 1967–1970. Those were troubled times and I was 21 years-old. Decades later the city has changed and the times are still troubled. These poems, 2016–2018, try to find out just how changed my dear city and how troubled my days.”

The Journal of Language Relationship is an international periodical publication devoted to the issues of comparative linguistics and the history of the human language. The Journal contains articles written in English and Russian, as well as scientific reviews, discussions and reports from international linguistic conferences and seminars.

Writing begins with unconscious feelings of something that insistently demands to be responded to, acted upon, or elaborated into a new entity. Writers make things that matter—treaties, new species, software, and letters to the editor—as they interact with other humans of all kinds. As they write, they also continually remake themselves. In The Animal Who Writes, Cooper considers writing as a social practice and as an embodied behavior that is particularly important to human animals. The author argues that writing is an act of composing enmeshed in nature-cultures and is homologous with technology as a mode of making.

In preparation for this book, and to better understand our screen-based, digital world, Miller only accessed information online for seven years.On the End of Privacy explores how literacy is transformed by online technology that lets us instantly publish anything that we can see or hear. Miller examines the 2010 suicide of Tyler Clementi, a young college student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after he discovered that his roommate spied on him via webcam. With access to the text messages, tweets, and chatroom posts of those directly involved in this tragedy, Miller asks: why did no one intervene to stop the spying? Searching for an answer to that question leads Miller to online porn sites, the invention of Facebook, the court-martial of Chelsea Manning, the contents of Hillary Clinton’s email server, Anthony Weiner’s sexted images, Chatroulette, and more as he maps out the changing norms governing privacy in the digital age.

Five substantial letters written from 1989 to 1991 bring readers into conversation with Hugo and Nebula Award winning-author Samuel Delany. With engaging prose, Delany shares details about his work, his relationships, and the thoughts he had while living in Amherst and teaching as a professor at the UMASS campus just outside of town, in contrast to the more chaotic life of New York City. Along with commentary on his own work and the work of other writers, he ponders the state of America, discusses friends who are facing AIDS and other ailments, and comments on the politics of working in academia. Two of the letters, which tell the story of his meeting his life partner Dennis, became the basis of his 1995 graphic novel, Bread & Wine. Another letter describes the funeral of his uncle Hubert T. Delany, former judge and well-known civil rights activist, and leads to reflections on his family's life in 1950s Harlem. Another details a visit from science fiction writer and critic Judith Merril, and in another he gives a portrait of his one-time student Octavia E. Butler, who by then has become his colleague. In addition, an appendix shares ten letters Delany sent to his daughter while she attended summer camp between 1984 and 1988. These letters describe Delany's daily life, including visitors to his upper-west-side apartment, his travels for work and pleasure, lectures attended, movies viewed, and exhibits seen.

Over the course of nearly a decade (1983–1991), author Lyn Hejinian visited the USSR seven times, staying frequently with her friends the poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and his wife Zina in Leningrad. During this period, she embarked on translating into English several volumes of Dragomoshcheko's poetry, and the two poets began an extensive correspondence, exchanging hundreds of letters until Dragomoshchenko's death in 2012. During her fifth visit, in conversation with Dragomoshchenko and other poets, she decided to write a novel reflecting her experiences of literary and lived life in Leningrad and Moscow. Cognizant of a general sense that the Russian novel is stereotypically "long," she determined that hers would be "short." What resulted is an experimental novel whose structure (284 chapters, each 14 lines long) pays homage to Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is generally regarded to be the first Russian novel: a verse novel composed in 14-line stanzas. From time to time, various members of Dragomoshchenko's circle of friends offered suggestions for the novel, as readers will note. There's abundant narrative content, but anecdotes and events are presented in non-linear form, since they unfolded over extended periods of time and thus came to Hejinian's attention piecemeal. Oxota (which means variously "huntress," "hunt," and "desire" in Russian) is a novel in which contexts, rather than contents, are kept in the foreground. Allen Ginsberg, who himself visited the USSR, did not like Oxota. He said that it wasn't realistic; Hejinian thinks that it is.

The concept of memory has always been a crucial topic in philosophical discourse. This book re-traces the thought of major philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Paul Ricoeur, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, William James, José Luis Borges and Sigmund Freud to provide an indepth exploration around several aspects of this timely issue. How is a memory formed? How can we bring into existence what has sunk into oblivion? What is the role of our instincts and inner drives in the constitution of memory? What is the connection between memory and forgetfulness, as well as that between mercy and remembrance? Focusing on these fundamental questions, the author presents a rich interconnection of concepts and ideas that build a signifi cant work on the great theme of memory.

For most early pragmatists, including the founder C.S. Peirce and L. Wittgenstein, vagueness was a real and universal principle and not a mere defect of our knowledge or thought. This volume begins by exploring this pragmatist notion of vagueness and the way it was tied to their basic opposition to various kinds of reductionism and nominalism. It then develops towards an analysis of Peirce’s original and wide views on vagueness, as seen through the angles of logic, semiotics, epistemology and metaphysics. In the final part of this book, the reader is presented with a case for the contemporary relevance of such a realistic pragmaticism for the ongoing debate on semantic, epistemic and ontic vagueness.

As Chinese philosophy absorbs Western influences, it need not deny its own unique sources and methods. Chen Lai argues that the introduction of Western thought to modern China in the past one hundred years will lead to the birth of a new philosophy with typical Chinese cultural features. Although an anti-traditional attitude prevails among younger intellectuals today, Confucianism is by no means dead and gone. Philosophers are re-examining the Confucian classics with a modern critical perspective, reaffirming the ideological value of Confucianism to the spiritual life of contemporary Chinese society. This book analyses the central issues involved in the Confucian renewal and details the relevance of neo-Confucian and modern philosophers who were influenced by Confucius.

In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Aleut descent, addresses the lives disrupted by US Indian boarding school policy. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great grandfather, Michael, who was taken from the Baptist Orphanage, Wood Island, Alaska, and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Incorporating extracts from Michael's boarding school records and early Russian ethnologies—while engaging Alutiiq language, storytelling motifs, and traditional practices—the poems form an act of witness and reclamation. In uncovering her own family records, Chabitnoy works against the attempted erasure, finding that while legislation such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act reconnects her to community, through blood and paper, it could not restore the personal relationships that had already been severed.

Focusing on the work of the Argentine authors César Aira, Marcelo Cohen, and Ricardo Piglia, The Polyphonic Machine conducts a close analysis of the interrelations between capitalism and political violence in late twentieth-century Argentina. Taking a long historical view, the book considers the most recent Argentine dictatorship of 1976–1983 together with its antecedents and its after-effects, exploring the transformations in power relations and conceptions of resistance which accompanied the political developments experienced throughout this period. By tracing allusive fragments of Argentine political history and drawing on a range of literary and theoretical sources Geraghty proposes that Aira, Cohen and Piglia propound a common analysis of Argentine politics during the twentieth century and construct a synergetic philosophical critique of capitalism and political violence. The book thus constitutes a radical reappraisal of three of the most important authors in contemporary Argentine literature and contributes to the philosophical and historical understanding of the most recent Argentine military government and their systematic plan of state terrorism.

In Reforming Women, Lisa Shaver locates the emergence of a distinct women’s rhetoric and feminist consciousness in the American Female Moral Reform Society. Established in 1834, the society took aim at prostitution, brothels, and the lascivious behavior increasingly visible in America’s industrializing cities. In particular, female moral reformers contested the double standard that overlooked promiscuous behavior in men while harshly condemning women for the same offense. Their ardent rhetoric resonated with women across the country. With its widely-read periodical and auxiliary societies representing more than 50,000 women, the American Female Moral Reform Society became the first national reform movement organized, led, and comprised solely by women. Drawing on an in-depth examination of the group’s periodical, Reforming Women delineates essential rhetorical tactics including women’s strategic use of gender, the periodical press, anger, presence, auxiliary societies, and institutional rhetoric—tactics women’s reform efforts would use throughout the nineteenth century. Almost two centuries later, female moral reformers’ rhetoric resonates today as our society continues to struggle with different moral expectations for men and women.

No contemporary development underscores the transnational linkage between the United States and Spanish-language América today more than the wave of in-migration from Spanish-language countries during the 1980s and 1990s. This development, among others, has made clear what has always been true, that the United States is part of Spanish-language América. Translation and oral communication from Spanish to English have been constant phenomena since before the annexation of the Mexican Southwest in 1848. The expanding number of counter-national translations from English to Spanish of Latinx fictional narratives by mainstream presses between the 1990s and 2010 is an indication of significant change in the relationship. A Translational Turn explores both the historical reality of Spanish to English translation and the “new” counter-national English to Spanish translation of Latinx narratives. More than theorizing about translation, this book underscores long-standing contact, such as code-mixing and bi-multilingualism, between the two languages in U.S. language and culture. Although some political groups in this country persist in seeing and representing this country as having a single national tongue and community, the linguistic ecology of both major cities and the suburban periphery, here and in the global world, is bilingualism and multilingualism.