English plays a pivotal role as a language of discourse in Africa. Recently, the relentless pressure to embrace the much-heralded African Renaissance has prompted many African countries to promote indigenous languages and elevate their status to that of official languages, alongside English which enjoys first place due to its development and popularity across Africa. Through the theoretical lenses of hegemonic theory and Afrikology, this article explores the use of English as a dominant language in Africa. It is posited in this article that language is the embodiment of culture and that over reliance on foreign languages often leads to unintentional consequences, which include serving as a hegemonic devise to promote foreign cultures at the expense of African culture. The article is informed, in part, by the author?s personal experience while living in a native Englishspeaking country (United Kingdom); his experience while teaching English in a non-English speaking country (Japan) and his experience in his native multilingual country (South Africa). The article concludes that while the merits of using English as a main language of discourse in Africa are clear, the need to challenge such a situation is even more compelling, and proposes that at least one African language should equally be endorsed.
Elliott, E. (2014). Australia plays 'catch-up' with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders. The International Journal Of Alcohol And Drug Research, 3(1), 121-125. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7895/ijadr.v3i1.177Australians are amongst the highest consumers of alcohol worldwide, and "risky" drinking is increasing in young women. Contrary to the advice in national guidelines, drinking in pregnancy is common. Many women don't understand the potential for harm to the unborn child and 20% have a "tolerant" attitude to drinking during pregnancy. As attitude, rather than knowledge, predicts risk of drinking in a future pregnancy, this presents a challenge for public health campaigns. Alcohol is teratogenic, crosses the placenta, and contributes to a range of physical, developmental, learning and behavioural problems, including fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). As nearly half of all pregnancies in Australia are unplanned, inadvertent exposure to alcohol is common. Good-quality prevalence data on FASD are lacking in Australia, although alcohol use at "risky" levels is well documented in some disadvantaged communities. In the last decade, clinicians, researchers, governments and non-governmental organizations have shown renewed interest in addressing alcohol use in pregnancy and FASD. This has included a parliamentary inquiry into FASD, provision of targeted funding for FASD, and development of educational materials for health professionals and the general public. Key challenges for the future are to prevent FASD and to offer timely diagnosis and help to children and families living with FASD. The implementation of evidence-based interventions known to decrease access to, and excessive use of, alcohol in our society will aid in the prevention of FASD. The development of national diagnostic tools for screening and diagnosis, and the training of health professionals in the management of FASD, are urgently needed.
How did English become the global force it is today? This unit explores the state and status of English in the world. It looks at the diversity of English around the globe, at how social and political factors influence people's attitudes towards the language, and at the relationship between one's linguistic heritage and sense of identity.
Walter Bagehot's anatomy of The English Constitution is a classic of English political writing. In this new Cambridge Texts edition it appears for the first time in its original (1867) book version, with Bagehot's original conclusion, and the substantial introduction written for the second edition of 1872. Paul Smith's introduction places Bagehot's views in the context of contemporary events and prevalent views of the working of the constitution, indicating their relation to his developing ideas on the anthropological and sociological springs of authority. He assesses the accuracy of Bagehot's account of parliamentary government in operation, and the strength of Bagehot's analysis of the difficulties faced by British liberalism in coming to terms with the approach of democracy. All the usual student-friendly features of the Cambridge Texts series are present, including a select bibliography and brief biographies of key figures, and annotation which explains some of Bagehot's more arcane contemporary allusions
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This book examines the interplay of history, textuality, dramaturgy, and politics in the school dramas of Daniel Casper von Lohenstein (1635–1683). The plays are based on well-known episodes from classical Roman history and were staged in Breslau by students at two all-male humanistic gymnasia. Organized exclusively around stories of such female protagonists as Agrippina, Cleopatra, Epicharis, and Sophonisbe, these productions required that the young actors dress as women to play roles that routinely involved scenes of political intrigue, incest, seduction, torture, and threatened infanticide. In print these plays were accompanied by massive annotational apparatuses that delineate the contours of the learned universe of eastern central Europe in exacting detail. Newman's study sheds light on the ideological complexity of gender, politics, and learned culture in the early modern period as it emerges from these intriguing and often bizarre plays.
English conservatism, unlike liberalism or socialism, can be interpreted as the ideology of dominant social & political groups seeking to maintain their power. This involves affirmation of class rule, of the ruling classes as guardians of the national interest, & of the deficient political judgment of other classes. Conservatism's grounding in the world of material interests & group tensions has led to its shifting concern from defense of feudal values to defenses of market or technocratic values. Socialism's avowed intent to unmask illusions clearly differentiates it from conservatism; similarly, liberalism in its origins focused on individual interests rather than on the community to which conservatism was devoted. Liberal success, however, led to a rapprochement with conservatism. Conservatism is likely, if the British economy continues to stagnate, to move increasingly toward stressing instrumental values. W. H. Stoddard.
The given article is dedicated to consideration of military euphemisms used by the English language print media to describe various conflict-ridden actions in the course of military developments across the globe. Significance of the given research is stipulated by the vivid interest to the matters of euphemy penetrated into all areas of activity, especially in mass media language style. The aim of this paper is to examine the concept and the essence of euphemy and to reveal various military-political euphemisms widely used in press. Methods used to study the subject of the given paper were as follows: theoretical literature study within the given theme, a descriptive method, followed by the method of sampling euphemisms from Anglophone print media. The main result of the present study appears to be the finding, that euphemization presents a significant process of enormous importance in communication. The usage of euphemistical examples in the contemporary English-speaking press, namely, the New York Times, the Sun, the Telegraph, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post served as the main data for the given research.
The focus of this study is to discuss the mythical motifs in Mark Ravenhill's plays; Shopping and Fucking, Faust is Dead and Some Explicit Polaroids, in relation to their positioning in the postmodern culture with the liberal capitalist systems. The concepts of relationships as a site of economic exchange, the quality of choice in market economies, free will, subject, knowledge and power are investigated through the theories of prominent postmodernist philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault and Francois Lyotard. Moreover, the provocative nature of the plays as a part of being representative of in-yer-face theatre is further explained in its historical and socio-cultural context. Such investigation not only brings political issues to the forefront, emphasizing the cultural change and its impact on individual lives but also the change in theatrical concepts of their milieu. Shopping and Fucking investigates the autonomy of the individual, the idea of sacrifice and suffering as a way to come to self-realization, the body as a place of control in authenticating the self and sexual relationships as a site of transaction. Faust is Dead explores the issues such as alienation, the loss of faith in the progress of man, the authenticity of experience, desire and the reconcilability of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. In the last play, Some Explicit Polaroids examines the hedonism and the capitalist values that the younger generations adopt, contrasted with the values of older generations, the positivist decay experienced by twenty-somethings which is also a part of capitalism, the masculinity crisis, violence and abuse on the body and the transition from disciplined to controlled societies.Also, shopping myth which was found to be encompassing all the plays was inverted by the playwright through transforming the act of shopping from being personal and limited to the objects to be public and including humans and their emotions. ; Bu çalışma Mark Ravenhill'in Shopping and Fucking, Faust is Dead ve Some Explicit Polaroids oyunlarindaki mitsel motiflerin liberal kapitalist sistemde, postmodern kültür içerisinde konumlandirildiğindaki ilişkisi üzerinde durmaktadir. İlişkilerin ekonomik faaliyet alanının bir parcasi olmasi, piyasa ekonomisi içerisinde seçimin niteligi, özgür irade, özne, bilgi ve iktidar kavramlari, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault ve François Lyotard gibi önde gelen postmodernist filozoflar ve teorileri aracılığıyla incelenmistir. Dahası, bu oyunlarin Suratina ("in-yer-face") Tiyatroyu temsil etmesinden kaynaklanan kıskırtıcı doğası tarihi ve sosyo-kültürel bağlamı içerisinde detaylı açıklanmıştır. Bu incelemeler sadece kültürel değişim ve bu değişimlerin kişilerin yaşamları üzerindeki etkilerini vurgulayarak sadece politik sorunlari degil, ayni zamanda donemin teatral değişimlerini de ön plana taşımıştır. Shopping and Fucking oyununda bireyin otonomisi, kendini gerçekleştirmede fedakarlik ve acı kavramları, varoluşun kanıtlanmasında bedenin bir kontrol alanı olarak yeri ve cinsel iliskiler ekonomik faaliyet alanı içerisinde incelenmistir. Faust is Dead oyununda yabancılaşma, insanin ilerlemesine olan inancın yitirilmesi, tecrubenin gerçekligi, arzu ile fenomen ve numen dünyalar arasındaki uzlaşabilirlik araştırılmıştır. Son oyun olan Some Explicit Polaroids' de ise genç nesillerin benimsedigi hedonist ve kapitalist değerler, daha önceki nesillerin değerleriyle kıyaslanmış, yirmilerindeki bir grup insanın tecrübe ettiği, kapitalizmin de bir parcasi olan pozitivist çürüme, erkeklik krizi, bedene yapılan şiddet ve taciz ile disiplin toplumlarından kontrol toplumlarına geçiş incelenmistir. Ayrıca bütün oyunları içine alan alışveriş mitinin yazar tarafindan değiştirilerek kişisel ve nesnelerle sınırlı olan alışveriş eyleminin, insanları ve duygularını da içine alan bir eyleme dönüştürdüğü anlasilmistir.
We are concerned here with the influence that the political and economic conditions in England had on the English Reformation. Although, the actions in the break with the Roman Church covered a period of only a few years, the causes for those actions lie in the previous growth of England, politically and economically, An action, as far reaching, as the repudiation of the papacy, certainly did not come about over night. Its causes lie much deeper than merely a breach of canon law.
