Courland is an entity that no longer exists. With the Gulf of Riga to the north, the Baltic to the west and Lithuania at its southern border, and now part of modern Latvia, the region was by occupied by Nazi Germany and returned to Soviet Russia after the war, remaining largely inaccessible until 1991. Once ruled by descendants of the Teutonic Knights, it is now a nowhere land of wide skies and forests, deserted beaches, ruined castles and ex-KGB prisons. For years Jean-Paul Kauffmann has been irresistibly drawn to this place, the buffer between the Germanic and Slav worlds. His digressive travels at the wheel of a Skoda become an investigation into the whereabouts of a former lover, a search for an excavator of tombs, and he follows in the footsteps of Louis XVIII, for whom Courland was once a place of exile. Author of Voyage to Desolation Island and The Dark Room at Longwood, which won six prizes on its publication in France, Kauffmann has come to be known as an erudite and witty observer of the world's most desolate reaches.

Even before it led opposition to the recent war on Iraq, France was considered the most difficult of the United States' major European allies. Each side tends to irritate the other, not least at the negotiating table, where Americans complain of French pretensions and arrogance, and the French fulminate against U.S. hegemonisme and egoisme. But, whether they like it or not, the two nations are going to have to deal with one another for a long time to come. Charles Cogan's timely and insightful study can't guarantee to make those encounters more fruitful, but it will help France's negotiating counterparts understand how and why French officials behave as they do. With impressive objectivity and authority, Cogan first explores the cultural and historical factors that have shaped the French approach and then dissects its key elements. Mixing rationalism and nationalism, rhetoric and brio, self-importance and embattled vulnerability, French negotiators often seem more interested in asserting their country's "universal" mission than in reaching agreement. Three recent case studies illustrate this distinctively French mélange. Yet agreement is by no means always elusive. Cogan offers practical suggestions for making negotiations more cooperative and productive--although he also emphasizes the long-term damage inflicted by the crisis over Iraq. Drawing on candid interviews with many of today's leading players on the French, American, British, and German sides, this engaging volume will inform and stimulate both seasoned practitioners and academics as well as students of France and the negotiating process. This book is the recipient of the Prix Ernest Lémonon from L'Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 2006

Have Western exegetes turned an Eastern book into a Western one? Has our fondness for a fixed printed text capable of being analyzed with precision and exactitude blinded us to other hermeneutic possibilities? Does God require all people to be able to analyze grammar to interpret Scripture? Does God assume all people can interpret Scripture through oral means? The authors recognize the effects of centuries of literacy socialization that produced a blind spot in the Western Christian world—the neglect by most in the academies, agencies, and assemblies of the foundational and forceful role orality had on the biblical text and teaching. From the inspired spoken word of the prophets, including Jesus (pre-text), to the elite literate scribes who painstakingly hand-printed the sacred text, to post-text interpretation and teaching, the footprint of orality throughout the entire process is acutely visible to those having the oral-aural influenced eyes of the Mediterranean ancients. Could oral hermeneutics be the “mother of relational theology”?

Here is an unexpected Gérard Genette, looking back at his life and time with humour, tenderness and lucidity. ‘Bardadrac’ is the neologism a friend of his once invented to name the jumbled contents of her handbag. A way of saying that one finds a little bit of everything in this book: memories of a suburban childhood, a provincial adolescence and early years in Paris marked by a few political commitments; the evocation of great intellectual figures, like Roland Barthes or Jorge Luis Borges; a taste for cities, rivers, women and music, classical or jazz; contingent epiphanies; good or bad ideas; true and false memories; aesthetic biases; geographical reveries; secret or apocryphal quotations; maxims and characters; asides, quips and digressions; reflections on literature and language, with an ironic take on the medialect, or dialect of the media; and other surprises. At the intersection, for instance, of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, Renard’s Journal, Roland Barthes’ Roland Barthes and Perec’s I Remember, this whimsical abecedarium invites you to stroll and gather. Gérard Genette (1930-2018) was research director at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and visiting professor at Yale University. Cofounder of the journal Poétique, he published extensively in the fields of literary theory, poetics and aesthetics, including, in English: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1980), Figures of Literary Discourse (1982), Fiction and Diction (1993), Mimologics (1995), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997), Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997), The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence (1997), The Aesthetic Relation (1999), Essays in Aesthetics (2005).

Discourse and ideology are quintessential, albeit contested concepts in many functionally oriented branches of linguistics, such as linguistic anthropology, critical discourse studies, sociolinguistics, and sociology of language. With many ways of understanding and utilizing the concepts, the line between discourse and ideology can become blurry. This volume explores divergent ways in which the concept of ideology may be applied in different branches of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, critical discourse studies, and applied linguistics. The goal is to provide an overview of the ways in which these two concepts can be used separately or together, emphasizing one or the other depending on the ways in which the concepts and their relationship are defined. The volume is targeted at scholars working in various fields of linguistics in which discourse and ideology are used as theoretical and analytical tools. While the target audience includes both senior and junior scholars, a particular goal is to reach junior scholars, who often struggle with the distinction between discourse and ideology and their theoretical and methodological potential. The volume is suitable for classroom use at the graduate level.

"Grand oral " propose des éléments de réflexion et des exemples commentés en vue des oraux de culture générale. L'ouvrage s'adresse aux étudiants et aux enseignants concernés par la préparation aux épreuves des concours administratifs (notamment celui de l'E.N.A.) et des Instituts d'études politiques. Il complète également les enseignements des classes préparatoires littéraires et commerciales et des écoles de journalisme, ainsi que les programmes des actions de formation menées par des organismes du secteur privé.