Language, Ideology, and the Human—New Interventions

Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions redefines the critical picture of language as a system of signs and ideological tropes inextricably linked to human existence. Offering reflections on the status, discursive possibilities, and political, ideological and practical uses of oral or written word in both contemporary society and the work of previous thinkers, this book traverses South African courts, British clinics, language schools in East Timor, prison cells, cinemas, literary criticism textbooks and philosophical treatises in order to forge a new, diversified perspective on language, ideology, and what it means to be human. This truly international and interdisciplinary collection explores the implications that language, always materialising in the form of a historically and ideologically identifiable discourse, as well as the concept of ideology itself, have for the construction, definition and ways of speaking about 'the human'. Thematically arranged and drawing together the latest research from experts around the world, Language, Ideology, and the Human offers a view of language, ideology and the human subject that eschews simplifications and binary definitions. With contributions from across the social sciences and humanities, this book will appeal to scholars from a range of disciplines, including sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, law, linguistics, literary studies, philosophy and political science.

Sanja Bahun is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, UK. She is the author of Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning, and co-editor of The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism; Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate; From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women's Aesthetic Production; and Myth and Violence in the Contemporary Female Text: New Cassandras. DuA!an RadunoviA? is Lecturer in Russian at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, UK, and author of The Early Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin.