Fictional languages are central to numerous creative works. This book examines such languages in a wide range of literature, films, and television shows. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on particular works. Many of these works are widely taught, such as All's Well That Ends Well, Gulliver's Travels, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Utopia, while others are popular books, films, and television series, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cat's Cradle, The Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars. Thus the encyclopedia helps students understand texts central to the curriculum and popular culture. Each entry discusses the role of imaginary languages in a particular work. Entries range from antiquity to the present and close with suggestions for further reading. The encyclopedia ends with a selected bibliography and includes various helpful finding aids. Some of the most popular creative works are appealing because of the artificial worlds their authors create. In many of these works, fictional languages are essential to the setting and plot, and often help the author comment on social issues. This encyclopedia examines fictional and fantastic languages in a broad range of literature, films, and television shows. Each entry discusses the features of the invented language central to the work and relates it to the film, literary text, or television program. Entries provide suggestions for further reading, and the Encyclopedia closes with a selected bibliography. Because many of the works discussed are central to the curriculum, the Encyclopedia will help students understand these texts and the importance of language. At the same time, the volume's coverage of popular books, films, and television series invites students to explore more critically those works that are most likely to interest them.

Who has the right to speak? How is this right acquired? What happens when this right is denied or inhibited? These are the questions examined by Michel de Certeau in this foundational exploration of political expression and participation.

In The Capture off Speech, de Certeau moves beyond formal or legal definitions of rights. He argues that to "communicate" in a contemporary political system means not only having the abstract possibility of utterance, but possessing the conditions that allow being heard. De Certeau emphasizes that all too often free speech is upheld in the abstract while social institutions work in such a way as to deny access to effective communication.

The book's title essay was written in response to the revolutionary events of May 1968. Almost thirty years later, these essays remain a central resource for exploring de Certeau's political thought.

Tim Conley’s Useless Joyce provocatively analyses Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and takes the reader on a journey exploring the perennial question of the usefulness of literature and art. Conley argues that the works of James Joyce, often thought difficult and far from practical, are in fact polymorphous meditations on this question. Examinations of traditional textual functions such as quoting, editing, translating, and annotating texts are set against the ways in which texts may be assigned unexpected but thoroughly practical purposes. Conley’s accessible and witty engagement with the material views the rise of explication and commentary on Joyce’s work as an industry not unlike the rise of self-help publishing. We can therefore read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as various kinds of guides and uncover new or forgotten “uses” for them. Useless Joyce invites new discussions about the assumptions at work behind our definitions of literature, interpretation, and use.

James Joyce has written that 'the man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are the portals of discovery.' In "Joyces Mistakes," Tim Conley explores the question of what constitutes an 'error' in a work of art. Using the works of James Joyce, particularly "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake," as central exploratory fields, Conley argues that an 'aesthetic of error' permeates Joyce's literary productions; readers and criticism of Joyce's texts are inevitably affected by a slippery dialectic between the possibility of mistake and the potential for irony.

Outlining modernism's struggle with textual authority and completion, Conley locates Joyce among his literary contemporaries, including Herman Melville, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and Marcel Proust. He finds that Joyce's reconfigurations of authorial presence and his error-generating methods problematize all attempts to edit, anthologize, and even quote or cite his texts. Yet Conley goes well beyond cataloguing the instances where error is at issue in Joyce's canon; he offers a comprehensive, engaging look at theories of error. He extends his analysis of Joyce to examine the radical reshaping of cognition by 'the textual condition' (McGann), and suggests that the act of reading's propensity for diversity of error makes 'misreadings' valuable critical experiments and the basis of literary theory.

"Joyces Mistakes" is an absorbing and sophisticated work, a portal of discovery in its own right.

In 1929, ten years before James Joyce completed "Finnegans Wake", Sylvia Beach published a strange book with a stranger title: "Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress". Worried by the confusion and attacks that constituted the general reception of his "Work in Progress" (the working title for "Finnegans Wake"), Joyce orchestrated this collection of twelve essays and two 'letters of protest' from such writers as Samuel Beckett, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, and William Carlos Williams. "Our Exagmination" represents an altogether unusual hybrid of criticism and advertisement, and since its first appearance has remained a touchstone as well as a point of contention for Joyce scholars. Eighty years later, Joyce's "Disciples Disciplined" reads the "Exagmination" as an integral part of the larger composition history and interpretive context of "Finnegans Wake" itself. This new collection of essays by fourteen outstanding Joycean scholars offers one essay in response to each of the original "Exagmination" contributions. From philosophically informed exegeses and new conceptions of international modernism to considerations of dance, film, and the flourishing field of genetic studies, these essays together exemplify an interdisciplinary criticism that is also a lively and ongoing conversation with that criticism's history.

This is a How-To book that shows by example how to write good fiction. It is a compilation of writing that the author put together for the purpose of publication.