Discretization of Processes

In Lu Xun and World Literature, Xiaolu Ma, Carlos Rojas, and other contributors examine various aspects of Lu Xun, who is known as the father of modern Chinese literature. Essays in this book focus on Lu Xun’s works in relation to the notions of world literature and processes of literary worlding. The contributors offer detailed analyses of Lu Xun’s own literary oeuvre and of foreign works that engage with his writings. This volume also focuses on many facets of the publication and dissemination of Lu Xun’s works’, from printing and binding to the discussions and debates that followed their release in China and abroad. This book not only makes an important contribution to the field of Lu Xun studies, but also proposes a reexamination of the category of world literature.

Prof. William S-Y. Wang, an eminent linguist, has made significant contributions to the field regarding lexical diffusion, experimental phonetic studies, language simulation and modeling, and aging and language. To celebrate his 90th birthday, colleagues and friends worldwide have contributed over 30 articles to a two-volume Festschrift. The English volume includes topics such as Chinese language evolution, the relationship between language and music, and the brain processes involved in language production. This Festschrift is written by and for experienced language researchers and is also suitable for students of Chinese linguistics and those interested in Chinese culture, history, and neurology.

Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific explores the making and consumption of conflict-related heritage throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Contributing to a growing literature on ‘difficult heritage’, this collection advances our understanding of how places of pain, shame, oppression, and trauma have been appropriated and refashioned as ‘heritage’ in a number of societies in contemporary East and Southeast Asia and Oceania. The authors analyse how the repackaging of difficult pasts as heritage can serve either to reinforce borders, transcend them, or even achieve both simultaneously, depending on the political agendas that inform the heritage-making process. They also examine the ways in which these processes respond to colonialism, decolonization, and nationalism. The volume shows how efforts to preserve various sites of ‘difficult heritage’ can involve the construction of new borders in the mind between what is commemorated and what is often deliberately obscured or forgotten. Tak

Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities explores the encounter between two processes that are unfolding in diverse patterns across Asia—the rapid urbanization of Asia across big cities, smaller towns, and the newest urban concentrations; and the contentious debates and novel schemes by which nature is figured and emplaced in cities and their conurbations. Contemporary Asian cities displace nature by causing its death and withering, but also embrace it through acts of renewal and the pursuit of sustainability. Contributors to this volume gather case studies from across Asia to address projects of urban greening and reimagining nature in urban life. The book illustrates how the intersection of urban growth and urban nature is a place rich with fresh ideas about urban planning, governance, and social life. This book illuminates a continuing process of discovery and regeneration through which urban natures may well be moving from taken-for-granted infrastructures to more consciously exper

The book provides guidelines and practical creative exercises which equip creative-major students in early semesters as well as creative practitioners with fundamental knowledge on creation methods. Combination of functionality, simplicity and aesthetics in modern design is considered a fundamental design principle in the Bauhaus School in Germany,and, inspired by the School, the creative handcrafting exercises and the concepts introduced in this book are primarily coherent with this principle. The book draws a direction between two and three dimensional material-based design and modern digital creation process. The first part of the book introduces various creative handcrafting exerciseson proportion, geometry and modularity, among other fundamental design principles. The creative exercises will sensitise students on aesthetical and structural issues, and thus serve as an essential building block for application of the design principles to computer-based creative processes, which ar

Transforming History examines the profound transformation of historical thought and practice of writing history from the late Qing through the mid-twentieth century. The authors devote extensive analysis to the common set of intellectual and political forces that shaped the study of history, from the ideas of evolution, positivism, nationalism, historicism, and Marxism, to political processes such as revolution, imperialism, and modernization. Also discussed are the impact and problems associated with the nation-state as the subject of history, the linear model of historical time, and the spatial system of nation-states. The result is a convincing study that illustrates how history has transformed into a modern academic discipline in China.

Multiple Modernities approaches the concept of modernity through two historical phases of Norawy. The first study focuses on the interplay between Lutheran state officials and popular movements in the nineteenth century as an essential aspect of the growth of social democracy. The second examination of modernization centers on twentieth-century Norway after World War II. The book is balanced between theoretical remarks on conceptual issues, an assessment of modernization processes, and a study of basic epistemic and structural challenges that confront us in our time. Scandinavian countries are often noted as cases of successful modernization processes. However, these references to a “Scandinavian model” tend to focus on the mid-twentieth century after World War II. In Skirbekk’s view, the uniqueness of modernization processes in Scandinavia, for instance in Norway, is better conceived historically, not least by focusing on the nineteenth century with a continuation into the twentieth c

The period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907-960) has long been treated as an anomaly in the history of China, an age of great disunity between the empires of the Tang and the Song dynasties. Breaking with previous scholarship on China's middle period, this edited volume presents individual studies that focus on the art, culture, and politics of the interregnum, challenging underlying assumptions about the unitary nature of dynastic culture and its value as a category of historical analysis. It understands these decades as a time of important transition in which the incipient cultural shifts of the mature Tang dynasty turned into the foundations of Song society. Consequently it highlights the complex narrative processes that gave birth to Song culture.

A number of research groups around the world have begun to study how the brain acquires and processes language, but we still know comparatively little about it. Many such groups work on very specific, often narrow, problems. This approach is certainly necessary, but a broad perspective can be helpful, if not essential, too. This volume consists of an important collection of papers presented at the Seminar on Language, Evolution, and the Brain (SLEB), hosted by the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Kyoto, Japan, bringing together distinguished researchers with background in cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics, robotics, physics, etc. Major topics discussed here include: Creoles and pidgins, and their implications regarding language evolution. Quantitative analysis and modeling of various aspects of language evolution, including the evolution of lexical items and color terms, the emergence of linguistics categories, and the dynamics of language competition. The ev

Evolution of language has evolved at multiple levels—from changes in the cognitive processes by which language is acquired in the individual, to language change by diffusion of acquired linguistic features across populations of individuals, to the emergence of linguistic features over phylogenetic time scales. Evolution of language at each of these levels interacts with that at each other level. This volume is a collection of essays by noted researchers from diverse fields that deals with a broad spectrum of issues in the study of language evolution. The principle topics addressed here include: the genetic and cognitive bases for the phylogenetic emergence of language; several distinct accounts of the underlying cognitive processes by which children learn to acquire language; a critique of the methods employed by historical linguists in the last century; the modeling of language evolution using mathematical and computational techniques; discussions on the complexity of language.