Cultural Graphology

“Cultural Graphology” could be the name of a new human science: this was Derrida’s speculation when, in the late 1960s, he imagined a discipline that combined psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertook the project himself but did leave two brief sketches of how he thought cultural graphology might proceed. In this book, Juliet Fleming picks up where Derrida left off. Using both his early and later thought, and the psychoanalytic texts to which it is addressed, to examine the print culture of early modern England, she drastically unsettles some key assumptions of book history. Fleming shows that the single most important lesson to survive from Derrida’s early work is that we do not know what writing is. Channeling Derrida’s thought into places it has not been seen before, she examines printed errors, spaces, and ornaments (topics that have hitherto been marginal to our accounts of print culture) and excavates the long-forgotten reading practice of cutting printed books. Proposing radical deformations to the meanings of fundamental and apparently simple terms such as “error,” “letter,” “surface,” and “cut,” Fleming opens up exciting new pathways into our understanding of writing all told.

Faced with challenging economic times, contemporary clinicians require assessment tools which can accelerate the therapeutic process and facilitate brief psychotherapy. This text introduces graphology, or handwriting analysis, which has been used clinically in Europe for decades alongside other projective techniques. In Clinical Graphology: An Interpretive Manual for Mental Health Practitioners, this clinical application becomes accessible. The text provides a compelling rationale for the clinical evaluation of handwriting and demonstrates how therapists can access rich personal data by examining clients’ graphic behaviors. The text is designed to systematically present clinical graphology in theory and practice. A review of the literature demonstrates that the clinical use of graphology is consistent with the tenets of clinical practice. Graphological interpretive theory is presented in detail, providing a theoretical understanding of those graphic features which are meaningful indices of psychological phenomena. In this context, the inherent congruity between graphological and psychological theory is explored. Diverse handwriting samples, including many of contemporary public figures, illustrate graphic phenomena while demonstrating and encouraging the graphologist’s unique type of visual acuity. To facilitate the reader’s ability to synthesize graphic traits into a holistic personality profile, an interpretive schedule is provided which summarizes graphic indices and their interpretations. A method of assessing handwritings is provided which permits a degree of standardization and so facilitates research. Using this text, readers can integrate graphological theory and cultivate interpretive skills. Providing a comprehensive treatment of the psychology of handwriting, this volume includes a discussion of caveats which guide the clinical use of graphology as well as research considerations and guidelines for sharing graphological findings with clients. To date, clinicians in North America remain unaware of the merits of graphology usage although they continue to seek out methods of assessment which will facilitate their clinical efforts. This volume will demonstrate graphology as a tool which can be applied by those with virtually any theoretical orientation or practice model, speaking to the interests of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, art therapists, vocational counselors, pastoral counselors, and naturopaths, and paraprofessionals.

All across the humanities fields there is a new interest in materials and materiality. This is the first book to capture and study the “material turn” in the humanities from all its varied perspectives. Cultural Histories of the Material World brings together top scholars from all these different fields—from Art History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Folklore, History, History of Science, Literature, Philosophy—to offer their vision of what cultural history of the material world looks like and attempt to show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. The result is a spectacular kaleidoscope of future possibilities and new perspectives.

A Stanford University Press classic.

Tattoos and graffiti immediately bring to mind contemporary urban life and its inhabitants. But in fact, both practices date back much further than is generally thought—even by scholars. Drawing on a previously unavailable archive, Juliet Fleming reveals the unknown and disregarded literary arts of sixteenth century England. In Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, Fleming argues that our modern assumptions of what constitutes written expression have limited our access to and understanding of early modern history and writing. Fleming combines detailed historical scholarship with intellectual daring in a work that describes how writing practices have not been limited to the boundaries of the page; instead they have included body surfaces, ceramics, ceilings, walls, and windows. Moving beyond what has been preserved in print and manuscript, this book claims the whitewashed wall as the primary textual canvas of the early modern English, explores the tattooing practices of sixteenth-century Europeans, and uncovers the poetics of ceramic cookware. Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England will provide a startling new perspective for scholars of early modern literature and cultural history.

Formerly rooted firmly in the domain of anthropology, the topic of culture has shifted over the last thirty-five years to become an important component of business and management as organisations have become global. As companies outsource some of their work to other countries, or as employees migrate to new locations, culture can impact upon things such as attitudes to authority, differences in communication styles and ethics, which will affect working relationships. Cross-Cultural Management in Work Organisations explores the models and meanings of culture and how these play out in the work environment. The essential introduction to cross-cultural social relations in the workplace, Cross-Cultural Management in Work Organisations provides an evaluation of existing frameworks for understanding cross-cultural differences, examines the inter-cultural competencies such as cultural awareness needed by managers and evaluates how both cultural and non-cultural factors influence social processes at work. This fully updated 3rd edition includes new examples to provide topical and engaging insight into the subject. It is suitable for all postgraduate students studying cross-cultural management or cross-cultural awareness. Online supporting resources include an instructor's manual, lecture slides and seminar activities for tutors and web links and self-assessment exercises for students.

This volume is a collection of texts authored by an international team of linguistic scholars who provide their response to the concept of 21st century holism in language studies. The expertise of its contributors is reflected in the thematic scope of the book; it discusses topics such as the concept of harmony in interpersonal communication, semiotic and cultural phenomena handled by discourse analysis, selected aspects of religious discourse, and the study of proverbs or educational processes, to name but a few. 21st century holism embraces a solid theoretical base in post-Newtonian physics (quantum theory in particular), and departs from materialistic and atomistic perspectives based on Darwinism or cognitivism, however tempted we may be to allow the inertia of these in Western science and culture. Once a scholar decides to shift their paradigmatic perspective, thinking style, and research methodology, they start to co-build a collective mental representation herein referred to as ‘the culture of consciousness’.

Of all the cultural "revolutions" brought about by the development of printing technology during the sixteenth century, perhaps the most remarkable but least understood is the purported rise of European vernacular languages. It is generally accepted that the invention of printing constitutes an event in the history of language that has profoundly shaped modernity, and yet the exact nature of this transformation—the mechanics of the event—has remained curiously unexamined. In The Prosthetic Tongue, Katie Chenoweth explores the relationship between printing and the vernacular as it took shape in sixteenth-century France and charts the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains, from typography, orthography, and grammar to politics, pedagogy, and poetics. Under François I, the king known in his own time as the "Father of Letters," both printing and vernacular language emerged as major cultural and political forces. Beginning in 1529, French underwent a remarkable transformation, as printers and writers began to reimagine their mother tongue as mechanically reproducible. The first accent marks appeared in French texts, the first French grammar books and dictionaries were published, phonetic spelling reforms were debated, modern Roman typefaces replaced gothic scripts, and French was codified as a legal idiom. This was, Chenoweth argues, a veritable "new media" moment, in which the print medium served as the underlying material apparatus and conceptual framework for a revolutionary reinvention of the vernacular. Rather than tell the story of the origin of the modern French language, however, she seeks to destabilize this very notion of "origin" by situating the cultural formation of French in a scene of media technology and reproducibility. No less than the paper book issuing from sixteenth-century printing presses, the modern French language is a product of the age of mechanical reproduction.