Author: Alan Lupack File Type: pdf The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend is both a critical history of the Arthurian tradition and a reference guide to Arthurian works, names, and symbols. It offers a comprehensive survey of the legends in all of their manifestations, from their origins in medieval literature to their adaptation in modern literature, arts, film, and popular culture. Not only does it analyse familiar Arthurian characters and themes, it also demonstrates the tremendous continuity of the legends by examining the ways that they have been reinterpreted over the years. For instance, the motif of the abduction of Guinevere can be traced from Chretien de Troyess Lancelot or the Knight of the Cart and the vulgate cycle of French romances in the 13th century, to Malorys retelling of the story in the Morte dArthur, through various modern adaptations like those in T. H. Whites The Once and Future King and the contemporary film First Knight. This indispensable reference guide contains seven essays that trace the development of the Arthurian legend, encyclopedic entries, bibliographies, and a comprehensive index. The essays explore the chronicle and romance traditions, the influence of Malory, the Grail legend, the figures of Gawain and Merlin, and the story of Tristan and Isolt. The entries, which highlight key Arthurian characters, symbols, and places, offer quick and easy references. The extensive chapter-by-chapter bibliographies, which are subdivided by topic, augment the general bibliography of Arthurian resources. Comprehensive in its analysis and hypertextual in its approach, The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend is an essential reference book for Arthurian scholars, medievalists, and for those interested in cultural studies of myth and legend.

Author: Yahya R. Kamalipour File Type: pdf Focusing on the Iranian presidential elections of 2009 and ensuing demonstrations in major cities across Iran and world, Media, Power, and Politics in the Digital Age provides a balanced discussion of the role and impact of modern communication technologies, particularly the novel utilization of small digital media vis-a-vis the elections and global media coverage. Written in a non-technical, easy to read, and accessible manner, the volume will appeal to scholars, students, policy makers and print professionals alike. To provide a global overview of media coverage and diverse perspectives on the controversial 2009 presidential election, this book consists of 24 original essays, covering issues from global media coverage to new media-social networking, from the ideological-political dimensions to the cultural facets of the elections. Organized in a cohesive manner, the writing styles and presentation remain varied and richly informative.

Author: Gerry Stahl File Type: pdf Innovative uses of global and local networks of linked computers make new ways of collaborative working, learning, and acting possible. In Group Cognition Gerry Stahl explores the technological and social reconfigurations that are needed to achieve computer-supported collaborative knowledge building--group cognition that transcends the limits of individual cognition. Computers can provide active media for social group cognition where ideas grow through the interactions within groups of people software functionality can manage group discourse that results in shared understandings, new meanings, and collaborative learning. Stahl offers software design prototypes, analyzes empirical instances of collaboration, and elaborates a theory of collaboration that takes the group, rather than the individual, as the unit of analysis.Stahls design studies concentrate on mechanisms to support group formation, multiple interpretive perspectives, and the negotiation of group knowledge in applications as varied as collaborative curriculum development by teachers, writing summaries by students, and designing space voyages by NASA engineers. His empirical analysis shows how, in small-group collaborations, the group constructs intersubjective knowledge that emerges from and appears in the discourse itself. This discovery of group meaning becomes the springboard for Stahls outline of a social theory of collaborative knowing. Stahl also discusses such related issues as the distinction between meaning making at the group level and interpretation at the individual level, appropriate research methodology, philosophical directions for group cognition theory, and suggestions for further empirical work.ReviewIn this bold and brilliant book, Stahl integrates three distinct fields of knowledge computational design, communication studies, and the learning sciences. Such an interdisciplinary effort is both timely and necessary to foster innovations for human learning. This book shows how small-group cognition can be the underlying building block for individual and collective knowledge building.--Sten Ludvigsen, Professor and Director of InterMedia, University of OsloGerry Stahls new work targets a vitally important issue facing a twenty-first-century knowledge-based economy How can group cognition be fostered as a new unit of analysis for research and design of computer systems crafted for building collaborative knowledge? There are many golden nuggets in this volume that will help advance the collective intelligence available on the planet for finding and tackling hard problems, from educational systems to informal workplace learning. Roy Pea , Stanford University Gerry Stahls new work targets a vitally important issue facing a 21st-century knowledge-based economy How can group cognition be fostered as a new unit of analysis for research and design of computer systems crafted for building collaborative knowledge? There are many golden nuggets in this volume that will help advance the collective intelligence available on the planet for finding and tackling hard problems, from educational systems to informal workplace learning.--Roy Pea, Stanford UniversityAbout the AuthorGerry Stahl is Associate Professor in the College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University. He is founding coeditor of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning.

Author: Shane Butler File Type: pdf Ancient and medieval literary texts often call attention to their existence as physical objects. Shane Butler helps us to understand why. Arguing that writing has always been as much a material struggle as an intellectual one, The Matter of the Page offers timely lessons for the digital age about how creativity works and why literature moves us. Butler begins with some considerations about the materiality of the literary text, both as a process (the draft) and a product (the book), and he traces the curious history of the page from scroll to manuscript codex to printed book and beyond. He then offers a series of unforgettable portraits of authors at work Thucydides struggling to describe his own diseased body Vergil ready to burn an epic poem he could not finish Lucretius wrestling with words even as he fights the madness that will drive him to suicide Cicero mesmerized by the thought of erasing his entire career Seneca plumbing the depths of the soul in the wax of his tablets and Dhuoda, who sees the book she writes as a door, a tunnel, a womb. Butler reveals how the work of writing transformed each of these authors into his or her own first reader, and he explains what this metamorphosis teaches us about how we too should read. All Greek and Latin quotations are translated into English and technical matters are carefully explained for general readers, with scholarly details in the notes.ReviewThe Matter of the Page investigates the authors relationship with what he or she has written... The books six case studies are essays ranging flexibly across the distinctions involved in this approach to writing and reading, offering close critical discussions of selected texts.--Times Literary SupplementA learned, moving essay in humane literary and cultural criticism. Brilliantly written, The Matter of the Page takes our own sense of reading and writing and relates it to the work of past writers and readers, showing in fascinatingly different ways how authors as diverse as Thucydides, Vergil, and Dhuoda transcended both their own mortality and the limits of material culture.James Tatum, Dartmouth CollegeInnovative both stylistically and methodologically, Butlers outstanding book has the feel of a dual elegyfor the author, whom it seeks to resuscitate as more than an abstract theoretical concept, and for the vanishing (or at least de-materializing) page in an ever accelerating digital universe.James I. Porter, University of California, IrvineCharacterized by profound originality of imagination and an assured command of the spectrum of classical scholarship, the authors dissection of select texts of Thucydides, Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, and the female Carolingan aristocrat Dhuoda constitutes a virtuosic display of insight and analytical acuity. . . . Summing Up Highly recommended.J. S. Louzonis, ChoiceA smart, insightful, and ultimately persuasive book about the nature of the page from antiquity into the Middle Ages. . . . Butler has made a bold attempt to break down the blood-brain barrier between ideas and texts, signifiers and signifieds, and to suggest that the very space onin which the text plays out informs the text that is played out there.Sarah Spence, Renaissance QuarterlyA great little book to grapple with, not only for its streamlined main thesis or its knotty close readings, but also for Butlers ambitious and experimental methodology that engages with how Classical texts (and by extension, Classical scholarship) are read, written and reproduced in our digitalized age. . . . I cannot recommend The Matter of the Page highly enough.Richard Fletcher, DigressusIn a discursive style that combines a strong lyrical voice with sound classical learning, [The Matter of the Page] resembles the critical manner of Italo Calvino in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, or Umberto Ecos critical prose. . . . A pleasure to read, especially for its intriguing and novel ideas, for its brave attempt to rediscover the concept of the author as reader through a poststructuralist lens, and for offering variant paths to reinterpreting the work and creative drive of canonical writers.Laura Jansen, The Classical ReviewAbout the AuthorShane Butler is professor of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of The Hand of Cicero and the editor and translator of the Latin correspondence of Renaissance humanist Angelo Poliziano.