Reviews for Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2005: Selected papers from 'Going Romance', Utrecht, 8-10 December 2005

The average rating for Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2005: Selected papers from 'Going Romance', Utrecht, 8-10 December 2005 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-12 00:00:00 Seyed Ehsaei Wendell Berry's essay, 'Standing by Words' was written in 1979 and concerns the disintegration of language which Berry claims has been happening now for more than one hundred and fifty years. During that period he believes there has been 'a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning'. He makes an eloquent argument for the upholding of standards. He says, "In order for a statement to be complete and comprehensible three conditions are required: 1. It must designate its object precisely. 2. Its speaker must stand by it: must believe it; be accountable for it, be willing to act on it. 3. This relation of speaker, word, and object must be conventional; the community must know what it is." This is what Berry calls the 'accountability' of language. What would he make of twitter speak, I wonder?

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-19 00:00:00 Susan Purnell One of the most noteworthy aspects of Wendell Berry's writing'his novels, poetry, and essays'is the vision of community life that nurtures and binds together its individuals, land, and animals. This vision is everywhere present in this collection of essays, even though they are first and foremost literary, exploring topics such as the nature of poetic inspiration, the cultural work of poetry, and the writers that Berry finds most meaningful and inspiring (Shakespeare, Dante, Whitman, Dryden [yes, that's right!], among others) and those he finds most limiting and troubling (Shelley comes under particular and sustained attack). Throughout the essays, Berry makes a call for what he deems the "disciplined imagination," an imagination that rather than turning inward to focus entirely on the isolated mind (what Berry finds in much Romantic and modern writing) instead attempts to balance interior with exterior, grounding itself thoroughly in place and being concerned with relation, dependence, propriety, proportion, and balance (you can see why he doesn't like Shelley). Structuring Berry's vision of harmony and wholeness are a set of fundamental analogies that appear not only in these essays but also in his entire work'such as that between marriage and farming, cultural change and biology, and imagination and the natural world. For me, the highlight of this brilliant book was his discussion of Shakespeare's As You Like It, including his citation of lines in which the Duke comments on his exiled life in the forest, lines that in some ways point to Berry's own vision: "And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything." What these lines leave out about Berry is that throughout his career he has never stood "exempt from public haunt," but instead has sought to create an art and a way of life that stand against the political and industrial terrors that now reign.