This book features the full scope of Susan Petrilli's important work on signs, language, communication, and of meaning, interpretation, and understanding. Although readers are likely familiar with otherness, interpretation, identity, embodiment, ecological crisis, and ethical responsibility for the biosphere-Petrilli forges new paths where other theorists have not tread. This work of remarkable depth takes up intensely debated topics, exhibiting in their treatment of them what Petrilli admires-creativity and imagination. Petrilli presents a careful integration of divergent thinkers and diverse perspectives. While she abandons hope of attaining a final synthesis or an unqualifiedly comprehensive outlook, there remains a drive for coherence and detailed integration. The theory of identity being advocated in this book will provide the reader with an aid to appreciating the identity of the theorizing undertaken by Petrilli in her confrontation with an array of topics. Her theory differentiates itself from other offerings and, at the same time, is envisioned as a process of self-differentiation. Petrilli's contribution is at once historical and theoretical. It is historical in its recovery of major figures of language; it is theoretical in its articulation of a comprehensive framework. She expertly combines analytic precision and moral passion, theoretical imagination and political commitment.

Translation Translation contributes to current debate on the question of translation dealt with in an interdisciplinary perspective, with implications not only of a theoretical order but also of the didactic and the practical orders. In the context of globalization the question of translation is fundamental for education and responds to new community needs with reference to Europe and more extensively to the international world. In its most obvious sense translation concerns verbal texts and their relations among different languages. However, to remain within the sphere of verbal signs, languages consist of a plurality of different languages that also relate to each other through translation processes. Moreover, translation occurs between verbal languages and nonverbal languages and among nonverbal languages without necessarily involving verbal languages. Thus far the allusion is to translation processes within the sphere of anthroposemiosis. But translation occurs among signs and the signs implicated are those of the semiosic sphere in its totality, which are not exclusively signs of the linguistic-verbal order. Beyond anthroposemiosis, translation is a fact of life and invests the entire biosphere or biosemiosphere, as clearly evidenced by research in “biosemiotics”, for where there is life there are signs, and where there are signs or semiosic processes there is translation, indeed semiosic processes are translation processes. According to this approach reflection on translation obviously cannot be restricted to the domain of linguistics but must necessarily involve semiotics, the general science or theory of signs. In this theoretical framework essays have been included not only from major translation experts, but also from researchers working in different areas, in addition to semiotics and linguistics, also philosophy, literary criticism, cultural studies, gender studies, biology, and the medical sciences. All scholars work on problems of translation in the light of their own special competencies and interests.

Food represents an unalienable component of everyday life, encompassing different spheres and moments. What is more, in contemporary societies, migration, travel, and communication incessantly expose local food identities to global food alterities, activating interesting processes of transformation that continuously reshape and redefine such identities and alterities. Ethnic restaurants fill up the streets we walk, while in many city markets and supermarkets local products are increasingly complemented with spices, vegetables, and other foods required for the preparation of exotic dishes. Mass and new media constantly provide exposure to previously unknown foods, while “fusion cuisines” have become increasingly popular all over the world. But what happens to food and food-related habits, practices, and meanings when they are carried from one foodsphere to another? What are the main elements involved in such dynamics? And which theoretical and methodological approaches can help in understanding such processes? These are the main issues addressed by this book, which explores both the functioning logics and the tangible effects of one of the most important characteristics of present-day societies: eating the Other.

This book introduces and provides commentary on a selection of published and unpublished works by Victoria Welby and exponents of the Signific Movement in the Netherlands. Beyond offering an important contribution to the reconstruction of a neglected phase in the history of ideas, it evidences the theoretical topicality of significs, in particular the focus on the relation of signs to value, meaning, and understanding, on verbal and nonverbal behavior, and on language and communication.

Although Mikhail Bakhtin's study of the novel does not focus in any systematic way on the role that translation plays in the processes of novelistic creation and dissemination, when he does broach the topic he grants translation'a disproportionately significant role in the emergence and constitution of literature. The contributors to this volume, from the US, Hong Kong, Finland, Japan, Spain, Italy, Bangladesh, and Belgium, bring their own polyphonic experiences with the theory and practice of translation to the discussion of Bakhtin's ideas about this topic, in order to illuminate their relevance to translation studies today. Broadly stated, the essays examine the art of translation as an exercise in a cultural re-accentuation (a transferal of the original text and its characters to the novel soil of a different language and culture, which inevitably leads to the proliferation of multivalent meanings), and to explore the various re-accentuation devices employed over the span of the last 100 years in translating modern texts from one language to another. Through its contributors, The Art of Translation in Light of Bakhtin's Re-accentuation brings together different cultural contexts and disciplines (such as literature, literary theory, the visual arts, pedagogy, translation studies, and philosophy) to demonstrate the continued international relevance of Bakhtin's ideas to the study of creative practices, broadly understood.

"The Benevolent American in the Heart of Darkness" is a trilogy of Albert Russos award-winning African novels set in the former Belgian Congo and Rwanda-Urundi. In The Black Ancestor, the reader will find, as in the two other novels, Eclipse over Lake Tanganyika and Mixed Blood or your son Lopold, many poignant and delightful passages, especially in the journeys across the magnificent Kivu province, which today, along with bordering Rwanda and Burundi, has been scarred by fratricidal wars. That Leodine, in the opening novel, happens to be an adolescent, as was Leopold in Mixed Blood, isnt fortuitous, for it is at that vulnerable period of ones life that ones personality takes form. In Albert Russos Africa you will find humankinds infinite diversity and, amid such richness, a quest for the deep self. Eric Tessier. Albert Russo has recreated through a young African boys joys and struggles many of the tensions of modern life, straight and gay, black and white, third world and first ... all of these tensions underlie this story of a biracial child adopted by a benevolent American. Mixed Blood or Your son Leopold is a non-stop, gripping read!" Edmund White.