The Sinitic lan­guages: a con­tri­bu­tion to sino­log­i­cal lin­guis­tics
The Sinitic Lan­guages is the quin­tes­sence of Mieczys­law Jerzy Künstler’s thir­ty years of research into the Chi­nese lan­guages. Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Pol­ish in 2000 as Jezy­ki chin­skie, this work col­lect­ed Künstler’s var­i­ous lec­tures on the fas­ci­nat­ing world of this branch of the Sino-Tibetan lan­guage fam­i­ly. It marked the apogee of lin­guis­tic research of Chi­nese lan­guages in Poland. With a keen, intu­itive under­stand­ing of the work­ings of these lan­guages, Kün­stler intro­duces his read­er­ship to the his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment of spo­ken Sinitic lan­guages. Besides ana­lyz­ing the var­i­ous stages of Stan­dard Chi­nese, he also makes a con­vinc­ing case for clas­si­fy­ing Can­tonese, Pekinese, Nanki­nese, Min­nanese, Wu, and oth­er so-called „dialects“ as dis­tinct lan­guages. Künstler’s work offers an insight­ful and detailed overview about syn­chron­ic and diachron­ic research on the major lan­guage groups of Chi­nese, a fast grow­ing aca­d­e­m­ic field until today.
The present Eng­lish ver­sion was begun by Kün­stler him­self before his untime­ly demise in 2007. How­ev­er, it is not mere­ly a trans­la­tion of the Pol­ish work, but a revised edi­tion that intro­duces a shift in Sino­log­i­cal lin­guis­tics from a genet­ic to an are­al descrip­tion of Mod­ern Chi­nese lan­guages. A joint effort of the Pol­ish lin­guist Alfred Fran­ciszek Majew­icz and the Sinol­o­gists Ewa Zajdler and Maria Kur­pas­ka helped to bring the orig­i­nal man­u­script to its com­ple­tion. Thus, The Sinitic Lan­guages is now final­ly acces­si­ble for a larg­er read­er­ship. Both ama­teurs and experts inter­est­ed in this top­ic are invit­ed to fol­low Kün­stler on his intel­lec­tu­al jour­ney into Sino­log­i­cal lin­guis­tics.
Kün­stler inten­tion­al­ly exclud­ed Chi­nese char­ac­ters from his work because he viewed the Sinitic lan­guages pri­mar­i­ly as spo­ken lan­guages. In order to pro­vide read­ers with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to com­pare spo­ken and writ­ten lan­guage, the edi­tors added an index with glos­sary to the Eng­lish ver­sion.
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Bor­ders, ter­ri­to­ries, and ethics: Hebrew lit­er­a­ture in the shad­ow of the Intifa­da
Bor­ders, Ter­ri­to­ries, and Ethics: Hebrew Lit­er­a­ture in the Shad­ow of the Intifa­da by Adia Mendel­son-Maoz presents a new per­spec­tive on the mul­ti­fac­eted rela­tions between ide­olo­gies, space, and ethics man­i­fest­ed in con­tem­po­rary Hebrew lit­er­a­ture deal­ing with the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict and the occu­pa­tion. In this vol­ume, Mendel­son-Maoz ana­lyzes Israeli prose writ­ten between 1987 and 2007, relat­ing main­ly to the first and sec­ond intifadas, writ­ten by well-known authors such as Yehoshua, Gross­man, Mat­alon, Cas­tel-Bloom, Gov­rin, Kravitz, and Levy. Mendel­son-Maoz rais­es crit­i­cal ques­tions regard­ing mil­i­tarism, human­ism, the nature of the State of Israel as a democ­ra­cy, nation­al iden­ti­ty and its bor­ders, sol­diers as moral indi­vid­u­als, the nature of Zion­ist edu­ca­tion, the acknowl­edg­ment of the Oth­er, and the sov­er­eign­ty of the sub­ject. She dis­cuss­es these issues with­in two frame­works. The first draws on the­o­ries of ethics in the human­ist tra­di­tion and its crit­i­cal exten­sions, espe­cial­ly by Lev­inas. The sec­ond applies the­o­ries of space, and in par­tic­u­lar deter­ri­to­ri­al­iza­tion as put for­ward by Deleuze and Guat­tari and their suc­ces­sors. Over­all this vol­ume pro­vides an inno­v­a­tive the­o­ret­i­cal analy­sis of the col­lage of voic­es and artis­tic direc­tions in con­tem­po­rary Israeli prose writ­ten in times of polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al debate on the occu­pa­tion and its intifadas.
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