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Abstract. The Talmudic Sages displayed a remarkable understanding of economic laws and practices. A knowledge of this understanding would be useful for the development of western economic thought. Especially is this true of the insight these Jewish scholars won into the nature of value, one of the most controversial economic concepts today. The Talmud—a compilation of studies, disputations and interpretations from Palestinian and Babylonian academies from the 3rd century B.C.E. to the 5th century C.E.—contains a complex system of value concepts in which economic aspects are part of a larger set of ethical and legal doctrines. This includes "ideal" and "market value," the value of human life and its link to man's productive capacity, the derivation of present value from calculations of expected income flow from the person's labor, the nucleus of the concept of "human capital," of "free labor" as against "slave labor," subjective and objective value with the latter made subjective and the former objective, psychic value and marginal utility. The most intriguing doctrine is that of a "valueless value"; the Talmudic sages attempted the quantification of a negative value couched in positive and psycho‐economic terms, an idea which, it is held, has no parallel in western economic thought. This idea, it is argued, has significance for modern welfare economics; it is a distinct category in which the valueless subject is given a positive numerical value (1) (2).

Das Feuilleton, entstanden um 1800 in der Pariser Presse, überdauert - als Ressort, als journalistisch-literarische Gattung und als Schreib- und Denkweise - die Medienbrüche des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts. Seit jeher Ort des Ästhetischen im publizistisch-ökonomischen Pressewesen, entfaltet es seine komplexe Poetik bis heute im Spannungsfeld von journalistischer Sachgebundenheit und literarischer Verwandlungsfreiheit, von (kultur-)politischer Debatte und flüchtigem Sprachspiel, von sachlicher Kritik und subjektiver Gestimmtheit.Die literaturwissenschaftlichen, medienhistorischen und mediensoziologischen Beiträge des Bandes folgen dem feuilletonistischen Schreiben auf seinem Weg von der Zeitung zum Blog und fragen nach der medialen und kulturellen Funktion des Feuilletons als diskursiver Raum und Ort der kulturellen Selbstverständigung.

In The Road from Damascus (2008), Syrian-British writer Robin Yassin-Kassab's debut novel, the protagonist describes "the opposing camps of [his] childhood," as narratives of "Qabbani versus Qur'an" (56). While Sami's father idolises the pan-Arabist poet Nizar Qabbani and supports the Syrian regime despite its repressive policies, Sami's mother, disillusioned with nationalist ideology, turns instead to faith, offering her son a "different mythology" based on "the adventures of God's messengers" (53). Tracing Sami's negotiations of these seemingly opposed inherited narratives, Yassin-Kassab's novel examines the lingering impact of pan-Arabism and the alternatives offered by Islamic frameworks. While critics have previously approached this novel as part of a growing corpus of British Muslim fiction, in this essay, I focus more closely on the novel's interrogation of Arab nationalism. As I will show, Yassin-Kassab's novel unfolds as a series of ideological disillusionments that chart the protagonist's confrontation with the failure of nationalist politics. Inviting the reader to follow the protagonist's successive conversions and de-conversion from various forms of nationalism, Yassin-Kassab's representation of the polarisation between " Qabbani versus Qur'an" poses the question of how one might find alternatives beyond such restrictive dichotomies, dramatizing the inadequacies of political vision in the Arab world today.

Shakespeare's 154 sonnets have become the interest of several generations of Russian translators. Overall, after their first appearance in the middle of the nineteenth century, at least thirty-five Russian translations of the complete sonnet collection have been produced so far, though mostly during the last three decades. The overall objective of the present thesis is to examine the evolution of Russian translations of Shakespeare's sonnets over the years. The thesis is novel in that it offers an analysis of specific linguistic, literary and cultural challenges the numerous Russian translators have dealt with while translating the sonnets, as well as the strategies adopted in an effort to resolve them. In order to achieve the study objectives, several individual sonnets and a number of their Russian translations have been selected as a sample representing challenging areas that have been more closely investigated in four articles. The method of cross comparison has been applied throughout the study. Both the introductory part and the articles address certain problematic translation issues, such as the sonnets' formal structure, the pronouns of address, grammatical gender, bawdy language, sexual puns, culture-specific items, and metaphors. The results provide evidence for seeing translation as a multi-layered and ever-changing process, which, apart from the pure linguistic tasks, combines historical, political and ideological aspects. The findings of the study suggest that translation competence, namely deep understanding of the context and its fundamental cultural and social features, motivates the translator's interpretation of the contradictions and uncertainties of Shakespeare's poems. Those include the sonnets genre, relation to Shakespeare's biography, the order of the poems in the first 1609 Quarto. The analysis also identifies the ways in which the target language's social and historical context have had an impact on the choices made by the translators. On the whole, the study's results do not contradict Mikhail Gasparov's model describing the pendulum-like movement from "free" to "literal" approaches through the history of Russian literary translation.