Pre-Texts is a methodology developed for education professionals to stimulate close reading and critical-thinking skills by making art based on challenging texts. Presented in both English and Spanish, this book gathers descriptions and images of dozens of different Pre-Texts activities held across the globe with diverse groups.

This collection of essays in honour of Professor Robert Davidson celebrates a number of notable achievements of this outstanding Scottish churchman and scholar. It is published for the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, but it also marks his retirement from full-time university teaching and nods in the direction of his having been the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (1990-91). The guiding principle governing this collection of essays is the notion of the Bible as the generator of other texts and cultural productions. The contributors are drawn from Davidson's wide range of colleagues and former students and focus on many different aspects of this generative force within the Bible itself and in materials related to it. Contributors include A.G. Auld, J.M.G. Barclay, E. Best, J.C.L. Gibson, W. Johnstone, H.A. McKay, J.K. Riches, and the editor, among others.

Written by a leading researcher in the field, this fascinating examination of the relations between grammar, text, and discourse is designed to provoke critical discussion on key issues in discourse analysis which are not always clearly identified and examined. Written by a leading researcher in the field Continues the enquiry into discourse analysis that Zellig Harris initiated 50 years ago, which raised a number of problematic issues that have remained unresolved ever since Introduces the notion of pretext as an additional factor in the general interpretative process Focuses attention specifically on the work of critical discourse analysis (CDA) in light of the issues discussed

This volume presents Eastern Europe and Russia as a distinctive translation zone, despite significant internal differences in language, religion and history. The persistence of large multilingual empires, which produced bilingual and even polyglot readers, the shared experience of "belated modernity and the longstanding practice of repressive censorship produced an incredibly vibrant, profoundly politicized, and highly visible culture of translation throughout the region as a whole. The individual contributors to this volume examine diverse manifestations of this shared translation culture from the Romantic Age to the present day, revealing literary translation to be at times an embarrassing reminder of the region s cultural marginalization and reliance on the West and at other times a mode of resistance and a metaphor for cultural supercession. This volume demonstrates the relevance of this region to the current scholarship on alternative translation traditions and exposes some of the Western assumptions that have left the region underrepresented in the field of Translation Studies."

Robert Gibbs presents here an ambitious new theory of ethics. Drawing on a striking combination of intellectual traditions, including Jewish thought, continental philosophy, and American pragmatism, Gibbs argues that ethics is primarily concerned with responsibility and is not--as philosophers have often assumed--principally a matter of thinking about the right thing to do and acting in accordance with the abstract dictates of reason or will. More specifically, ethics is concerned with attending to others' questions and bearing responsibility for what they do. Gibbs builds this innovative case by exploring the implicit responsibilities in a broad range of human interactions, paying especially close attention to the signs that people give and receive as they relate to each other. Why Ethics? starts by examining the simple actions of listening and speaking, reading and writing, and by focusing on the different responsibilities that each action entails. The author discusses what he describes as the mutual responsibilities implicit in the actions of reasoning, mediating, and judging. He assesses the relationships among ethics, pragmatics, and Jewish philosophy. The book concludes by looking at the relation of memory and the immemorial, emphasizing the need to respond for past actions by confessing, seeking forgiveness, and making reconciliations. In format, Gibbs adopts a Talmudic approach, interweaving brief citations from primary texts with his commentary. He draws these texts from diverse thinkers and sources, including Levinas, Derrida, Habermas, Rosenzweig, Luhmann, Peirce, James, Royce, Benjamin, Maimonides, the Bible, and the Talmud. Ranging over philosophy, literary theory, social theory, and historiography, this is an ambitious and provocative work that holds profound lessons for how we think about ethics and how we seek to live responsibly.

"In this incisive, original book, S. Williams reads prefaces to German literature and philosophy around 1800 as pretexts for writing, examining three of the most remarkable preface-writers of that era--Goethe, Jean Paul, and Hegel--in the contexts not only of German, but also European print culture, thought, and literature"--