Death inhabits our collective imaginary, even though sometimes, like a squatter, it hides discretely in order to avoid conflicts. It is undoubtedly a multi-faceted subject of study, which requires consideration from an interdisciplinary perspective. This book deals with this phenomenon, and more specifically with the discourses that surround – and construct our perspectives and understanding of – death and dying. Of course, the present volume does not attempt to be exhaustive, and considers the subject from several standpoints, including linguistics, anthropology, history of medicine, and importantly, literary studies. It combines various points of view and different methodologies of knowledge, in the hope that they come together to constitute a written dialogue –or more precisely, a polylogue. The ordering of the texts in this volume provides readers with an itinerary that begins with more general approaches, such as a historical presentation of the medicalisation of death and an in-depth reflection on the best way to die, and ends with studies of specific literary works from different periods. The itinerary that this book provides is framed by a discourse analysis-based overview that explores how different approaches to death and dying intersect and complement each other in an interdisciplinary endeavour. This analysis focuses on literary and non-literary genres in order to shed some new light on a topic that is inexhaustible because of its sociocultural relevance.

Death inhabits our collective imaginary, even though sometimes, like a squatter, it hides discretely in order to avoid conflicts. It is undoubtedly a multi-faceted subject of study, which requires consideration from an interdisciplinary perspective. This book deals with this phenomenon, and more specifically with the discourses that surround - and construct our perspectives and understanding of - death and dying. Of course, the present volume does not attempt to be exhaustive, and considers the subject from several standpoints, including linguistics, anthropology, history of medicine, and importantly, literary studies. It combines various points of view and different methodologies of knowledge, in the hope that they come together to constitute a written dialogue -or more precisely, a polylogue. The ordering of the texts in this volume provides readers with an itinerary that begins with more general approaches, such as a historical presentation of the medicalisation of death and an in-depth reflection on the best way to die, and ends with studies of specific literary works from different periods. The itinerary that this book provides is framed by a discourse analysis-based overview that explores how different approaches to death and dying intersect and complement each other in an interdisciplinary endeavour. This analysis focuses on literary and non-literary genres in order to shed some new light on a topic that is inexhaustible because of its sociocultural relevance.

Is culture simply a more or less set text we can learn to read? Since the early 1970s, the notion of culture-as-text has animated anthropologists and other analysts of culture. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban present this stunning collection of cutting-edge ethnographies arguing that the divide between fleeting discursive practice and formed text is a constructed one, and that the constructional process reveals "culture" to those who can interpret it. Eleven original essays of "natural history" range in focus from nuptial poetry of insult among Wolof griots to case-based teaching methods in first-year law-school classrooms. Stage by stage, they give an idea of the cultural processes of "entextualization" and "contextualization" of discourse that they so richly illustrate. The contributors' varied backgrounds include anthropology, psychiatry, education, literary criticism, and law, making this collection invaluable not only to anthropologists and linguists, but to all analysts of culture.

The acclaimed novel of Spain's economic crisis - a timely masterpiece. Under a weak winter sun in small-town Spain, a man discovers a rotting corpse in a marsh. It’s a despairing town filled with half-finished housing developments and unemployment, a place defeated by the burst of the economic bubble. Stuck in the same town is Esteban, his small factory bankrupt, his investments gone, the sole carer to his mute, invalid father. As Esteban’s disappointment and fury lead him to form a dramatic plan to reverse financial ruin, other voices float up from the wreckage. Stories of loss twist together to form a kaleidoscopic image of Spain’s crisis. And the corpse in the marsh is just one. Chirbes’s rhythmic, torrential style creates a Spanish masterpiece for our age.

Discourses of Helping Professions brings together cutting-edge research on professional discourses from both traditional helping contexts such as doctor-patient interaction or psychotherapy and more recent helping contexts such as executive coaching. Unlike workplace, professional and institutional discourse – by now well established fields in linguistic research – discourses of helping professions represent an innovative concept in its orientation to a common communicative goal: solving patients’ and clients’ physical, psychological, emotional, professional or managerial problems via a particular helping discourse. The book sets out to uncover differences, similarities and interferences in how professionals and those seeking help interactively tackle this communicative goal. In its focus on professional helping contexts and its inter-professional perspective, the current book is a primer, intended to spark off more interdisciplinary and (applied) research on helping discourses, a socio-cultural phenomenon that is of growing importance in our post-modern society. As such, it is of great relevance for discourse researchers and discourse practitioners, caretakers and social scientists of all shades as well as for everybody interested in helping professions.

What do biologists study when they study "life" today? Drawing on tools from rhetoric and poststructuralist theory, the author argues that the ascent of molecular biology, with its emphasis on molecules such as DNA rather than organisms, was enabled by crucial rhetorical "softwares." Metaphors such as the genetic "code" made possible a transformation of the very concept of life, a transformation that often casts organisms as information systems. With careful readings of key texts from the history of molecular biology—such as those of Erwin Schrödinger, George Gamow, Jacques Monod, and François Jacob—the author maps out the complex relations between the practices of rhetoric and the technoscientific triumphs they accompanied, triumphs that bolstered a "postvital" biology that increasingly elides and questions the boundary between organisms and machines. There have been many popular books, and a few academic ones, on the Human Genome Initiatives. On Beyond Living is a genealogy of these initiatives, a map of how we have come to equate human beings with "information." Melding contemporary theory with scientific discourse, it is certain to provoke discussion (and controversy) in the fields of cultural studies, theory, and science with its penetrating inquiries into the relations between rhetoric and technoscience.