Communication has become more complex as businesses compete globally. This book explores corporate communication as both a professional practice and as an academic discipline. The essays and case studies provide numerous perspectives on topics such as diversity, sexual harassment, global corporate communications, and communicating corporate culture. These essays are meant to stimulate thought and encourage additional research.

This book aims at refocusing critical reflection on thematics in the arts, a topic that has been neglected recently. The volume is divided into four sections: theoretical essays, applications to literature, reflections on thematics in music and the visual arts, and a conclusion.

The contributors, of international reputation, include Jean-Yves Bosseur, Claude Bremond, Menachem Brinker, Peter Cryle, Lubomir Dolezel, Francoise Escal, Thomas Pavel, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Georges Roque, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Cesare Segre, and Werner Sollars. In the theoretical section, the authors assess the...

This book addresses the question of human uniqueness at a time when academic discourse has all but abandoned its long-held commitment to the value of individuality. Through an appraisal of the works of Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault, the author establishes the ways in which the current critique of the self has grossly distorted the nature of the debate by reducing it to a simple choice between essential or constructed selves. Hans argues that the tradition that emerges from Emerson's work is based on a relational sense of the individual as much as it is devoted to the...

Epic Grandeur: Toward a Comparative Poetics of the Epic proposes a new concept of the epic. The book is based on the belief that the genre has been transforming itself throughout its history from conventional, war-oriented types to a new kind that promotes peace without having recourse to violent motifs. To prove this point, the book takes a new thematic approach which centers on the three elements of epic grandeur: the hero's attitude toward his mortality, his commitment to the community, and the dual dimension of time and space.

The book also examines two relatively recent works: John...

Growing out of the author's anthropological fieldwork in Syria, these nine short stories explore love and loss in contemporary Damascus. Available here together for the first time in English, they confound popular stereotypes of Arab women and men as fundamentalists, terrorists, and victims of the Gulf War. The stories touch on such themes as tyranny, good and bad fortune in marriage, exile, the snobbery of old wealth, the ambition of new money, and much else. In a postscript, "The Pirates' Socks," Lindisfarne discusses why she chose to write about her fieldwork through the medium of fiction,...

In Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, Dorothy M. Figueira provides a fascinating account of the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. The myth concerns a race that inhabits a utopian past and gives rise first to Brahmin Indian culture and then to European culture. In India, notions of the Aryan were used to develop a national identity under colonialism, one that allowed Indian elites to identify with their British rulers. It also allowed non-elites to set up a counter identity critical of their position in the caste system....