https://arab.news/nzvqa
Authors: Melissa Leach & James Fairhead
Are language and culture uniquely human, justifying an exceptionalism that sets people apart from the rest of nature?
New discoveries in the biological sciences have challenged this assumption, finding syntax, symbolism and social learning beyond the human, and identifying culture as a second inheritance system across the phyla from whales to insects and plants.
Biologists are constrained, however, by the mechanistic ways communication is understood.
In his 1668 preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton rejected the use of rhyme, portraying himself as a revolutionary freeing English verse from “the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.”
Despite his claim to be a pioneer, Milton was not initiating a new line of thought—English poets had been debating about rhyme and its connections to liberty, freedom, and constraint since Queen Elizabeth’s reign.
“The Fetters of Rhyme” traces this dynamic history of rhyme from the 1590s through the 1670s.
In “Stem,” Stella Wong intersperses lyric poems on a variety of subjects with dramatic monologues that imagine the perspectives of specific female composers, musicians, and visual artists, including Johanna Beyer, Mira Calix, Clara Rockmore, Maryanne Amacher, and Delia Derbyshire.
Whether writing about family, intimate relationships, language, or women’s experience, Wong creates a world alive with observation and provocation, capturing the essence and the problems of life with others.
Languages and cultures are becoming increasingly homogenous, with the resulting loss of a rich linguistic tapestry reflecting unique perspectives and ways of life.
‘Rare Tongues” tells the stories of the world’s rare and vanishing languages, revealing how each is a living testament to human resilience, adaptability, and the perennial quest for identity.
Taking readers on a captivating journey of discovery, Lorna Gibb explores the histories of languages under threat or already extinct as well as those in resurgence, shedding light on their origins, development, and distinctive voices.
Author: Anne Trumbore
From AI tutors who ensure individualized instruction but cannot do math to free online courses from elite universities that were supposed to democratize higher education, claims that technological innovations will transform education often fall short.
Yet, as Anne Trumbore shows in “The Teacher in the Machine,” the promises of today’s cutting-edge technologies aren’t new. Scholars at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s were encouraged by the US government to experiment with computers and AI in education.
Author: Andrew Kahn and Mark Lipovetsky
The Russian cultural tradition treats poetry as the supreme artistic form, with Alexander Pushkin as its national hero. Modern Russian lyric poets, often on the right side of history but the wrong side of their country’s politics, have engaged intensely with subjectivity, aesthetic movements, ideology (usually subversive), and literature itself.
“All the World on a Page” gathers 34 poems, written between 1907 and 2022, presenting each poem in the original Russian and an English translation, accompanied by an essay that places the poem in its cultural, historical, and biographical contexts.
The poems, both canonical and lesser-known works, extend across a range of moods and scenes: Velimir Khlebnikov’s Futurist revolutionary prophecy, Anna Akhmatova’s lyric cycle about poetic inspiration, Vladimir Nabokov’s Symbolist erotic dreamworld, and Joseph Brodsky’s pastiche of a Chekhovian play set on a country estate.
