In the 18th century the appearance of the poems ascribed to Ossian triggered a great interest in national literatures and inspired the imagination and ultimately the productive reception of generations of (pre)romantic poets worldwide. Ossian was instrumental in the appreciation of folk poetry and instrumentalized in the creation of national literature. In the aftermath of Macpherson s Ossianic publications several nation states as well as stateless nations rediscovered and glorified their own -barbaric- past with -national epics-. This volume attempts to reconstitute partly the philological...

This work presents, elaborates, and illustrates what is arguably the most important concept in the social sciences: power. It focuses particularly on a major class of power phenomena, meta-power, that is, power over power, transformative and structuring power. This encompasses powers to establish, reform, and transform social systems (institutions, power hierarchies, cultural formations, and socio-technical and infrastructural systems). Understanding meta-power is essential to the effective analysis of the formation of societal structures, their dynamics and evolution. This collection...

The term globalization arouses different feelings. Some people regard it with fear; others consider it the incarnation of a new time a time when the relations between different cultures and parts of the world intensify increasingly. Consequently, the term is not only used to explain highly diverse phenomena but also to shed light on the alleged darkness of a world in change. In this collective volume, scientists from different academic disciplines and regions of the world wanted to make available their perceptions of this ample term to a broader audience. Twenty contributions comprising nine...

Despite the efforts of the international community, most of the armed conflicts triggered by the breakup of the Soviet Union have not been resolved. This volume strives to cast a fresh look at the protracted conflicts and to identify factors promoting or preventing their settlement or transformation. The authors analyze the conflicts from the vantage point of critical citizens of their home countries and draw on their experience as participants in the peace process. The lessons learned from successes and failures of the international community are galvanized into a package of policy...

In the last three decades the field of language teaching and learning has undergone a paradigm shift towards Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), which has put an emphasis on meaningful interaction and implied an abrupt departure from an extensive study of learner errors. Although learners in CLT classes are expected to be competent, yet not perfectly accurate communicators, the impact of the CLT paradigm on learner errors has not been investigated thoroughly. This study examines the extent to which the CLT paradigm shift has left its mark on learner errors. Written production is analyzed...

The demise of the modern self-centred subject does not engender a waning but a politicisation of affect: The site of passion is now no longer the individual s interiority but the contact zone of intersubjective encounters. The public and political status of the emotions thus becomes apparent, making visible how affects are embedded in and shaped by discursive regimes. Neither spontaneous nor overdetermined, passion is therefore not the -other- of reason but a deeply social energy that fuels political, cultural and everyday practices. The Politics of Passion combines theoretical...

This study examines the use of English in Switzerland from a multilingual perspective based on a corpus of 400 interviews collected in the German speaking Canton of Zurich. It presents a framework for explaining the linguistic interaction that arises as a result of the use of a -globalizing- language in a multilingual context. It has given the relationships that obtain between the various Swiss national languages a hierarchical character. The proposed Swiss framework indicates viewed through a macro-sociolinguistic lens that the present linguistic situation in Switzerland seems to reflect a...