New Books in Language and Translation

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Malcolm Keating, "Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy" (Bloomsbury, 2019) Sep 20, 2019

Show notes

Philosophy of Language was a central concern in classical Indian Philosophy. Philosophers in the tradition discussed testimony, pragmatics, and the religious implications of language, among other topics. In his new book, Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Mukula's 'Fundamentals of the Communicative Function'(Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Malcolm Keating looks at the views of the philosopher Mukula Bhatta, whose innovative position on meaning aimed to capture the differences between meaning in everyday speech and meaning in poetry. As Keating explains, Mukula “sets out a framework for how communication happens, from what words mean to how sentences are constructed to how people use language beyond its ordinary meanings” (p. 2). Keating offers a translation and interpretation of Mukula’s text, and also discusses numerous ways that Mukula’s thought (and classical Indian discussions of language in general) can be helpful for contemporary philosophers.

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Jonathan G. Kline, "Keep Up Your Biblical Greek in 2 Minutes a Day" (Hendrickson, 2017) Aug 13, 2019

Show notes

The last few years have seen a proliferation of helps for those of us who struggle to consolidate and develop our knowledge of ancient languages. But here is one of the most helpful of these new resources. Jonathan G. Kline, who is academic editor at Hendrickson, and the author of Allusive soundplay in the Hebrew Bible (SBL, 2017), has published a series of books that provide one-sentence daily readings in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, and which then parse these sentences in an imaginative and memorable format. In today’s podcast, we talk to Jonathan about the first volume in this series, Keep Up Your Biblical Greek in 2 Minutes a Day (Hendrickson, 2017), and learn more about the ways in which it can help us.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Anne A. Cheng, "Ornamentalism" (Oxford UP, 2019) Jun 21, 2019

Show notes

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an almost revolutionary work of theory and critique: Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019). Ornamentalism offers arguably the first sustained theory of the yellow woman and, beyond that, a nuanced reflection on the way in which women of color are subjects-turned-into-things but that not every woman of color becomes-thing in the same way. Cheng insists on the term ornamentalism as both a lever of critique and of emancipation, resisting the easy distinction between person/thing and skin/substance to investigate how a theory of radical style offers ontological possibilities for thriving among injury.

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Sharon Kirsch, "Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric" (U Alabama Press, 2014) Jun 17, 2019

Show notes

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Sharon Kirsch (she/hers)--Associate Prof. of English and rhetorical studies in the New College at Arizona State University--on the scintillating and beautifully written Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric from University of Alabama Press (2014).

This book is truly a must-read for lovers of language; through Stein, Kirsch redelivers the “rules” of language and persuasion (organization, clarity, grammar) as heuristics or starting points for thinking about what language might be made to do. Stein re-emerges as a major twentieth-century rhetorician, not a spin doctor, as the word might suggest to some, but as someone who follows as sure as she remakes the rules of writing, expression, and language.

Readers are also encouraged to learn more about the important work that Kirsch is doing with Save Our Schools Arizona.

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Derek Gaunt, "Ego, Authority, Failure: Using Emotional Intelligence Like a Hostage Negotiator to Succeed as a Leader" (New Degree Press, 2019) Jun 13, 2019

Show notes

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo—is joined by co-host and recent Geneseo Graduate Haley Wigsten to interview Derek Gaunt (he/his)expert trainer and coach at the Black Swan Group--on his thrilling new book Ego, Authority, Failure: Using Emotional Intelligence Like a Hostage Negotiator to Succeed as a Leader (New Degree Press, 2019). Gaunt is a lecturer and author who trained for 29 years in law enforcement; for 20 of those years, he was leader, then commander, of a hostage negotiations team. Ego, Authority, Failure uses the fundamentals of hostage negotiations leadership (HNL) to teach readers practical strategies for increasing their leadership potential and negotiating uncomfortable situations. Gaunt uses real-life stories of successes and failures in leadership and negotiations which are both compelling and pragmatic to readers’ own lives. The book is a must-read for anyone who has felt that they could improve on their own tactical empathy, emotional intelligence, and negotiation skills. Learn more about Gaunt and his team at the Black Swan Group website.

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Richard Averbeck, "Paradigm Change in Pentateuchal Research" (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019) Jun 04, 2019

Show notes

For some two hundred years now, Pentateuchal scholarship has been dominated by the Documentary Hypothesis, a paradigm made popular by Julius Wellhausen. Recent decades, however, have seen mounting critiques of the old paradigm, from a variety of specializations, not only in Biblical Studies, but also in the fields of Assyriology, Legal History, and Linguistics. In a recent international meeting, scholars across these fields came together and presented papers, each one calling for a paradigm change in Pentateuchal research. Join us as we speak with one of those scholars, Richard Averbeck, about his contribution to Paradigm Change in Pentateuchal Research, edited by M. Armgardt, B. Kilchör, M. Zehnder (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019)—his chapter is titled ‘Reading the Torah in a Better Way.’

Richard Averbeck teaches at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. His areas of expertise include Old Testament, especially the Pentateuch, ancient Near Eastern history and languages, Old Testament criticism, Hebrew, and biblical counseling. He is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society, the Institute for Biblical Research, the American Oriental Society, the American Schools of Oriental Research, and the Society of Biblical Literature.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

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Mary Kate McGowan, "Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm" (Oxford UP, 2019) May 31, 2019

Show notes

We’re all familiar with the ways in which speech can cause harm. For example, speech can incite wrongful acts. And I suppose we’re also familiar with contexts in which a person who occupies a position of authority can harm others simply by speaking – as when a boss announced and thereby institutes a discriminatory office policy. In such cases, the announcement is itself a harm in addition to the harm of the instituted policy – the boss’s announcement constitutes a harm and does not only cause harm. Once we’ve see the ways in which authoritative speech can constitute harm, we might look for mechanisms other than speaker authority by means of which speech can be constitutively harmful.

In her new book, Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm (Oxford University Press, 2019), Mary Kate McGowan identifies a previously overlooked mechanism by which speech can be harm. On her analysis, one needn’t be positioned in an authoritative role to speak in ways that constitute harm. Rather, everyday communicative acts can constitute – and not simply cause – harm.

Mary Kate is the Margaret Capp Distinguished Alumna Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. She works primarily in metaphysics, philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of law.

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John Pat Leary, "Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism" (Haymarket Books, 2019) May 28, 2019

Show notes

John Pat Leary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2019) chronicles the rise of a new vocabulary in the twenty-first century. From Silicon Valley to the White House, from kindergarten to college, and from the factory floor to the church pulpit, we are all called to be innovators and entrepreneurs, to be curators of an ever-expanding roster of competencies, and to become resilient and flexible in the face of the insults and injuries we confront at work. In the midst of increasing inequality, these keywords teach us to thrive by applying the lessons of a competitive marketplace to every sphere of life. What’s more, by celebrating the values of grit, creativity, and passion at school and at work, they assure us that economic success is nothing less than a moral virtue.

Organized alphabetically as a lexicon, Keywords explores the history and common usage of major terms in the everyday language of capitalism. Because the words in this book have successfully infiltrated everyday life in the English-speaking world, their meanings often seem self-evident, even benign. Who could be against empowerment, after all? Keywords uncovers the unexpected histories of words like innovation, which was once synonymous with “false prophecy” before it became the prevailing faith of Silicon Valley. Other words, like best practices and human capital, are relatively new coinages that promise us a kind of freedom within a marketplace extending its reach across the public sector and into our private lives. The new language of capitalism burnishes hierarchy, competition, and exploitation as leadership, collaboration, and sharing, modeling for us the habits of the economically successful person: be visionary, be self-reliant, and never, ever stop working.

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Donnel Stern, "The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal" (Routledge, 2019) May 15, 2019

Show notes

Donnel Stern has been a key figure in the advancement of interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis since his initial writings on unformulated experience in the 1980s, in which he offered a fresh perspective on what constitutes the unconscious. Since then, he has consistently been on the cutting edge of theoretical developments in the unconscious and dissociation, and he continues such innovation in his new book, The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal (Routledge, 2019). In the book, he addresses the place of nonverbal meaning in unformulated experience and psychoanalytic practice. In our interview, we discuss the inspiration for this evolution in his theory and its implications for our understanding of how psychotherapy works. This episode will be of interest to anyone that is fascinated by the workings talk therapy and the unconscious mind.

Donnel Stern is a training and supervising analyst at William Alanson White Institute in New York City and adjunct clinical professor of psychology and clinical consultant at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is the founder and editor of the Routledge book series Psychoanalysis in a New Key and author and editor of many articles and books. His most recent authored book is Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field (Routledge, 2015), and his landmark book, which started it all, is Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2003).

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is also a university psychologist at Florida International University’s Counseling and Psychological Services Center, where he coordinates the eating disorders service. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (Routledge, 2018).

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A. M. Ruppell, "The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit" (Cambridge UP, 2017) May 01, 2019

Show notes

Why would anyone want to study Sanskrit, an ancient complex tongue? What’s the best way to go about doing so? Sanskrit is the highly sophisticated language of ancient India which remained in vogue for Millennia as a medium of philosophy, ritual, poetry – indeed every facet of Indian culture. Above and beyond Indian culture, it affords deep insight into the grammatical structures of language. Join us as we talk to Antonia Ruppel (Oxford University) about her Sanskrit textbook, The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (Cambridge University Press, 2017), a much-needed accessible, comprehensive tool for learning this ancient tongue, complete with online handouts, flash cards, and videos. We delve into the unique attributes of the Sanskrit language – for example, 3 numbers, 3 genders, special case endings, sophisticated rules for combinations of sounds (elision) – and the extent to which knowledge of the Hindu ‘language of the gods’ grants us access to millennia of human enterprise that is simultaneously foreign and familiar to our own.

For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com.

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