The Powers Of Speech

In this definitive study, David Bathrick examines East German culture both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Bathrick argues that dissident East German writers were unique among East European literary intellectuals in that they attempted “to open up alternative spaces for public speech from within [the] framework” of Marxism and state socialism. According to Bathrick, “the fact that some of them had been censored, hunted, questioned, and ridiculed does not belie the fact that they were also—and sometimes even simultaneously—privileged, nurtured, courted, and coddled. . . . It was precisely their function on ‘both sides’ of the power divide, as official and nonofficial voices within the whole, which defined a particular kind of intellectual in the GDR.” Bathrick applies his insights into this “particular kind of intellectual” to a wide range of topics. He compares oppositional culture in East Germany to radical cultures elsewhere, examines the complex political and cultural relations of East and West Germany, traces the anguished history of the East German avant-garde, and describes the troubled effort to develop a revolutionary theatrical tradition in East Germany. The book also includes nuanced insights into the collapse of the East German political order in the late 1980s and more recent revelations about the collaboration of allegedly oppositional writers with the Stasi (state police). In his treatment of these and other issues, Bathrick enters hotly contested territory. Yet he brings clarity and scrupulous fairness to these issues that are still very much alive in Germany—and elsewhere—today.

Lifelong liberal Kirsten Powers blasts the Left's forced march towards conformity in an exposé of the illiberal war on free speech. No longer champions of tolerance and free speech, the "illiberal Left" now viciously attacks and silences anyone with alternative points of view. Powers asks, "What ever happened to free speech in America?"

Eilenberg's subject is the relationship between tropes of literary property and signification in the writings and literary politics of Wordsworth and Coleridge. She argues that a complex of ideas about property, propriety, and possession informs the images of literary authority, textual identity, and poetic figuration found in the two writers' major work. During the period of their closest collaboration as well as at points later in their careers, Wordsworth and Coleridge took as their primary material the images of property and propriety upon which definitions of meaning and figuration have traditionally depended, grounding these images in writings about landed and spiritual property, material and intellectual theft, dispossession by banks and possession by demons. The writings and the politics generated by the literalization of such images can be read as allegorical of the structures and processes of signification. Each such gesture addresses in some way the fundamental question - who owns language, or who controls meaning?; Eilenberg's approach brings to bear a combination of deconstructive, psychoanalytic, and both new and literary historical methods to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between two of the major figures of English Romanticism as well as fresh insight into what is at stake in the analogy between the verbal and the material or the literary and the economic.

Emphasizing the esthetic concerns of the Islamic civilization as well as underlining the true nature of the religion, this insightful opus contains a collection of essays on the art of language from a revered contemporary scholar of Islam. Written separately as lead articles for the Turkish literary magazine, Yagmur, the volume eloquently articulates the author’s approach to speech as well as his definitions of poetry, history, and beauty, all of which are deeply embroidered around the lacework of Islam. With powerful emphasis on belief in God, each essay addresses an important matter of language that aptly relates to the current state of affairs in the Muslim world and the nature of human existence in the 21st century as a whole.

The essays in this volume portrays the public debates concerning freedom of speech in the 18th century in France and Britain as well as Austria, Denmark, Russia, and Spain and its American territories. The economic integration of Europe and its offshoots over the past three centuries into a distinctive cultural product, 'the West,' has given rise to a triumphant universalist narrative that masks these disparate national contributions to freedom of speech and other liberal rights.

The POWERS provides a quantitative means of measuring an individual's ability to produce meaningful words in natural conversation. It provides guidelines for collection of the conversation, and for analysis of the sample, scoresheets to be completed based on the analyzed sample, and worked examples of conversation data, including audio-files provided on CD. This is a versatile tool that can be used in both research and the clinical setting to analyze whether word-finding improves after a period of therapy.