Full Description
This book examines the powerful role of writing in society. The invention of writing, independently at various places and times in history, always stood at the cradle of powerful civilizations. It is impossible to imagine modern life without writing. As individuals and social groups we hold high expectations of its potential for societal and personal development. Globally, huge resources have been and are being invested in promoting literacy worldwide. So what could possibly be tyrannical about writing?
The title is inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure's argument against writing as an object of linguistic research and what he called la tyrannie de la lettre. His critique denounced writing as an imperfect, distorted image of speech that obscures our view of language and its structure. The chapters of the book, written by experts in language and literacy studies, go beyond this and explore tyrannical aspects of writing in society through history and around the world: from Medieval Novgorod, the European Renaissance and 19th-century France and Germany over colonial Sudan to postcolonial Sri Lanka and Senegal and present-day Hong Kong and Central China to the Netherlands and Spain. The metaphor of 'tyranny of writing' serves as a heuristic for exploring ideologies of language and literacy in culture and society and tensions and contradictions between the written and the spoken word.
Contents
Preface
1. The tyranny of writing in language and society, Constanze Weth (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg) and Kasper Juffermans (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg)
2. Revisiting the 'tyranny of writing', Florian Coulmas (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
3. How to write a birch-bark letter: Vernacular orthography in medieval Novgorod, Daniel Buncic (University of Cologne, Germany)
4. The end of the standard language: The rise and fall of a European language culture, Joop van der Horst (University of Leuven, Belgium)
5. The tyranny of Orthography: Multilingualism and Frenchification at primary schools in late 19th-century France, Manuela Böhm (University of Kassel, Germany)
6. Ideologies of language and literacy in the German educational reform movement at the end of the long 19th century, Ulrich Mehlem (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany)
7. When God is a linguist: Missionary orthographies as a site of social differentiation and the technology of location, Ashraf Abdelhay (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar), Busi Makoni (Pennsylvania State University, USA) and Sinfree Makoni (Pennsylvania State University, USA and University of South Africa, South Africa)
8. Standard English, cricket, nationalism and tyrannies of writing in Sri Lanka, Harshana Rambukwella (Open University of Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka)
9. Escaping the tyranny of writing: West African regimes of writing as a model for multilingual literacy, Friederike Lupke (SOAS, University of London, UK)
10. Writing Chinese: A challenge for Cantonese-L1 and South Asian Hongkongers, David C. S. Li (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
11. Fangyan and the linguistic landscapes of authenticity: Normativity and innovativity of writing in Globalizing China, Xuan Wang (Tilburg University, Netherlands)
12. Dialect authenticity upside down: Brabantish writing practices of a black comedian on Twitter, Jos Swanenberg (Tilburg University, Netherlands)
13. Salty politics and linguistics in the Balearic Islands: Tracing a nonstandard iconization in metalinguistic Facebook communities, Lucas Duane (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg and Open University of Catalonia, Spain)
Contributors
Index
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