After Babel

When it first appeared in 1975, After Babel created a sensation, quickly establishing itself as both a controversial and seminal study of literary theory. In the original edition, Steiner provided readers with the first systematic investigation since the eighteenth century of the phenomenology and processes of translation both inside and between languages. Taking issue with the principal emphasis of modern linguistics, he finds the root of the "Babel problem" in our deep instinct for privacy and territory, noting that every people has in its language a unique body of shared secrecy. With this provocative thesis he analyzes every aspect of translation from fundamental conditions of interpretation to the most intricate of linguistic constructions.For the long-awaited second edition, Steiner entirely revised the text, added new and expanded notes, and wrote a new preface setting the work in the present context of hermeneutics, poetics, and translation studies. This new edition brings the bibliography up to the present with substantially updated references, including much Russian and Eastern European material. Like the towering figures of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, Steiner's work is central to current literary thought. After Babel, Third Edition is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the debates raging in the academy today.

A study of the theory and processes of language translation since the eighteenth century.

"The Lord confused the language of all the earth," so the Tower of Babel story in the Hebrew Bible's book of Genesis tells us to explain why the world's people communicate in countless languages while previously they all spoke only one. This book argues that the biblical confusion reallyhappened in the ancient Near East, not in speech, however, but in writing. It examines the millennia-long history of writing in the region and shows a radical change from the third and second millennia to the first millennium BC.Before "Babel" any intellectual who wrote did so as a participant in a cosmopolitan tradition with its roots in Babylonia, its language, and its cuneiform script. After "Babel" scribes from all over the eastern Mediterranean, including Greece, used a profusion of vernacular languages and scripts toexpress themselves. Yet they did so in dialogue with the Babylonian cuneiform tradition still maintained by the successive Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires that controlled their world, oftentimes as acts of resistance, aware of cosmopolitan ideas and motifs but subverting them. In order toframe the rich intellectual history of this region in the ancient past Before and after Babel describes and analyzes the Babylonian cosmopolitan system, how ancient Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and other vernacular systems interacted with it in multiple and intricate ways, and their consequences.

In The Bible after Babel John J. Collins considers the effect of the postmodern situation on biblical, primarily Old Testament, criticism over the last three decades. Collins examines the quest of historical criticism to objectively establish a text's basic meaning. Accepting that the Bible may no longer provide secure "foundations" for faith, Collins still highlights its ethical challenge to be concerned for "the other"--A challenge central both to Old Testament ethics and to the teaching of Jesus. --from publisher description.

The untimely death of Robert Smithson in 1973 at age 34 robbed postwar American art of an unusually creative practitioner and thinker. Smithson's pioneering earthworks and installations of the 1960s and '70s anticipated concerns with environmentalism and site-specific artistic production. Gary Shapiro's insightful study of Smithson's career is the first book to address the full range of the artist's dazzling virtuosity.

English is the language of science today. No matter which languages you know, if you want your work seen, studied, and cited, you need to publish in English. But that hasn’t always been the case. Though there was a time when Latin dominated the field, for centuries science has been a polyglot enterprise, conducted in a number of languages whose importance waxed and waned over time—until the rise of English in the twentieth century. So how did we get from there to here? How did French, German, Latin, Russian, and even Esperanto give way to English? And what can we reconstruct of the experience of doing science in the polyglot past? With Scientific Babel, Michael D. Gordin resurrects that lost world, in part through an ingenious mechanism: the pages of his highly readable narrative account teem with footnotes—not offering background information, but presenting quoted material in its original language. The result is stunning: as we read about the rise and fall of languages, driven by politics, war, economics, and institutions, we actually see it happen in the ever-changing web of multilingual examples. The history of science, and of English as its dominant language, comes to life, and brings with it a new understanding not only of the frictions generated by a scientific community that spoke in many often mutually unintelligible voices, but also of the possibilities of the polyglot, and the losses that the dominance of English entails. Few historians of science write as well as Gordin, and Scientific Babel reveals his incredible command of the literature, language, and intellectual essence of science past and present. No reader who takes this linguistic journey with him will be disappointed.

'The most thorough and persuasive attempt to date to take account of the multiplicity of moral standpoints in our culture and to argue that it does not threaten coherent moral discourse.... An unusually lucid and penetrating book.' J.B. Schneewind, Canadian Philosophical Reviews

"Not many living artists would be sufficiently brave or inspired to attempt reflecting in art what Borges constructs in words. But the detailed, evocative etchings by Erik Desmazieres provide a perfect counterpoint to the visionary prose. Like Borges, Desmazieres has created his own universe, his own definition of the meaning, topography and geography of the Library of Babel. Printed together, with the etchings reproduced in fine-line duotone, text and art unite to present an artist's book that belongs in the circle of Borges's sacrosanct Crimson Hexagon - "books smaller than natural books, books omnipotent, illustrated, and magical.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved