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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