A comparative history of the practices, technologies, institutions, and people that created distinct literary traditions around the world, from ancient to modern times Literature is such a familiar and widespread form of imaginative expression today that its existence can seem inevitable. But in fact very few languages ever developed the full-fledged literary cultures we take for granted. Challenging basic assumptions about literatures by uncovering both the distinct and common factors that led to their improbable invention, How Literatures Begin is a global, comparative history of literary origins that spans the ancient and modern world and stretches from Asia and Europe to Africa and the Americas. The book brings together a group of leading literary historians to examine the practices, technologies, institutions, and individuals that created seventeen literary traditions: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, English, Romance languages, German, Russian, Latin American, African, African American, and world literature. In these accessible accounts, which are framed by general and section introductions and a conclusion by the editors, literatures emerge as complex weaves of phenomena, unique and deeply rooted in particular times and places but also displaying surprising similarities. Again and again, new literatures arise out of old, come into being through interactions across national and linguistic borders, take inspiration from translation and cultural cross-fertilization, and provide new ways for groups to imagine themselves in relation to their moment in history. Renewing our sense of wonder for the unlikely and strange thing we call literature, How Literatures Begin offers fresh opportunities for comparison between the individual traditions that make up the rich mosaic of the world's literatures. The book is organized in four sections, with seventeen literatures covered by individual contributors: Part I: East and South Asia: Chinese (Martin Kern), Japanese (Wiebke Denecke), Korean (Ksenia Chizhova), and Indian (Sheldon Pollock); Part II: The Mediterranean: Greek (Deborah Steiner), Latin (Joseph Farrell), Hebrew (Jacqueline Vayntrub), Syriac (Alberto Rigolio), and Arabic (Gregor Schoeler); Part III: European Vernaculars: English (Ingrid Nelson), Romance languages (Simon Gaunt), German (Joel Lande), and Russian (Michael Wachtel); Part IV: Modern Geographies: Latin American (Rolena Adorno), African (Simon Gikandi), African American (Douglas Jones), and world literature (Jane O. Newman).

Semiotic Margins analyses the meaning making potential of not only language, but modalities like laughter, music, colour, and architectural spaces. By examining resources often positioned on the side-line of mainstream semiotic accounts, this study raises the question of what counts as part of language and communication and why. Beginning with the more established nonverbal resources of communication, four major themes of modalities of meaning are covered. The investigation of music and space looks at how semiotic systems in classical music interact. Using children's books, the relationship between images and verbal meaning is then explored, presenting implications for student literacy as well as a methodology for supporting children excluded from mainstream literary practices. Finally new approaches to transcribing representations in screen-based technologies are presented through an examination of television advertisements. Semiotic Margins will appeal to linguists and semioticians wishing to pursue research in systemic functional linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis.

The subject of this book is the thought of the American pragmatist and founder of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce. The book collects the papers presented to the International Conference Semiotics and Philosophy in C.S. Peirce (Milan, April 2005), together with some additional new contributions by well-known Peirce scholars, bearing witness to the vigour of Peircean scholarship in Italy and also hosting some of the most significant international voices on this topic. The book is introduced by the two editors and is divided into three sections, corresponding to the three main areas of the most interesting contemporary reflection on Peirce. Namely, Semiotics and the Logic of Inquiry (part I); Abduction and Philosophy of Mathematics (part II); Peirce and the Western Tradition. (part III). The analysis is carried out from a semiotic perspective, in which semiotics should not be understood as a specific doctrine but rather as the philosophical core of Peirce's system. As we read in the introduction: "it is semiotics and philosophy or, rather, semiotics as philosophy and philosophy as semiotics, which emerge from a reading of these papers".

How do we learn, use, and understand the meaning of words representing sensations? How is the connection between words and sensations structured? How can outward signs of sensations be manifested? What does it mean "to understand someone"? Is semantics affected by inner states? What does one mean when one uses an expression to describe a sensation? How should such success in communication be defined?Grammar, Expressiveness, and Inter-subjective Meanings: Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology deals with these questions, examining the peculiar uses of language-games representing sensations (such as "thinking", "seeing such-and-such", and "I'm in pain") and exploring outer references to inner states.Externalising something internal gives expression to the psychological experience. As such, an expression should be understood as a sophisticated form of exteriorising experiences. This book clarifies the use of sense-expressions and the praxis of "bringing to expression" as an inter-subjective meaning process. The central focus of the book entails both the outwardness of language and the inwardness of experience, as was intensively remarked by Wittgenstein's last writings (namely his lectures from 1946-47, exclusively and remarkably concerning the philosophy of psychology), which were recently published and which, despite their importance and originality, are still little known.