Sitting prominently at the hearth of our homes, television serves as a voice of our modern time. Given our media-saturated society and television's prominent voice and place in the home, it is likely we learn about our society and selves through these stories. These narratives are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that shape and reflect the world and our role in it. Television and the Self: Knowledge, Identity, and Media Representation brings together a diverse group of scholars to investigate the role television plays in shaping our understanding of self and family. This edited collection's rich and diverse research demonstrates how television plays an important role in negotiating self, and goes far beyond the treacly "very special" episodes found in family sit-coms in the 1980s. Instead, the authors show how television reflects our reality and helps us to sort out what it means to be a twenty-first-century man or woman.

"Second Changes" begins a narrative describing the events surrounding the resettlement of German refugees throughout the cosmos following World War II. Their patrons unwittingly unlease the evil of Naziism, while at the same time establishing a new Germania founded on the principles of peace and harmony.

The chapters in this volume address a variety of issues surrounding quotation, such as whether it is a pragmatic or semantic phenomenon, what varieties of quotation exist, and what speech acts are involved in quoting. Quotation poses problems for many prevailing theories of language. One fundamental principle is that for a language to be learnable, speakers must be able to derive the truth-conditions of sentences from the meanings of their parts. Another popular view is that indexical expressions like "I" display a certain fixity -- that they always refer to the speaker using them. Both of these tenets appear to be violated by quotation. This volume is suitable for scholars in philosophy of language, semantics, and pragmatics, and for graduate students in philosophy and linguistics. The book will also be useful for researchers in other fields that study quotation, including psychology and computer science.

Mentoring Away the Glass Ceiling in Academia: A Cultured Critique is different in that it calls attention to the role mentoring has played on the "glass ceiling" phenomenon in higher education. Narratives by and about the experiences of women of diverse backgrounds in the United States and beyond the borders of this nation shed needed light on the ways in which mentoring influences identity formation and internal coping mechanisms in environments often characterized by marginalization. Through these narratives, these women serve as "quasi mentors" and create spaces for other women to survive and thrive within the educational arena. This text honors and extends previous work on the experiences of women academics from diverse backgrounds. Through this book, there is a call for new ways of understanding the vital role that narratives play in speaking truth to the power of mentoring. The insights present an expose of the extent to which politics, policies, and equity agendas for mentoring have supported or failed women.

This study examines France's determination to remain aloof and unaffected as the world economy threatens the French way of doing business. Describing the difficulty in initiating change in French organizations, the author tells of the obstacles he encountered in attempting to modernize the working practices of a Paris firm. His observations are based upon customs and habits peculiar to the French, yet they apply equally to all foreign cultures. Management methods, attitudes to the outside world, and the historic roots of the French mentality are viewed and explained anecdotally, based on the author's experience of living and working in France, and are accompanied by humorous illustrations.

Paul Ricoeur's first book, Freedom and Nature, introduces many themes that resurface in various ways throughout his later work, but its significance has been mostly overlooked in the field of Ricoeur studies. Gathering together an international group of scholars, The Companion to Freedom and Nature is the first book-length study to focus exclusively on Freedom and Nature. It helps readers to understand this complex work by providing careful textual analysis of specific arguments in the book and by situating them in relation to Ricoeur's early influences, including Merleau-Ponty, Nabert, and Ravaisson. But most importantly, this book demonstrates that Freedom and Nature remains a compelling and vital resource for readers today, precisely because it resonates with recent developments in the areas of embodied cognition, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of the will. Freedom and Nature is fundamentally a book about embodiment, and it situates the human body at the crossroads of activity and passivity, motivation and causation, the voluntary and the involuntary. This conception of the body informs Ricoeur's unique treatment of topics such as effort, habit, and attention that are of much interest to scholars today. Together the chapters of this book provide a renewed appreciation of this important and innovative work.