scholarly journals Literary Musings and Critical Mediations: Interview with Rev. Fr Professor Amechi N. Akwanya

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 26-31
Author(s):  
Andrew Bula

Reverend Father Professor Amechi Nicholas Akwanya is one of the towering scholars of literature in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world. For decades, and still counting, Fr. Prof. Akwanya has worked arduously, professing literature by way of teaching, researching, and writing in the Department of English and Literary Studies of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. To his credit, therefore, this genius of a literature scholar has singularly authored over 70 articles, six critically engaging books, a novel, and three volumes of poetry. His PhD thesis, Structuring and Meaning in the Nigerian Novel, which he completed in 1989, is a staggering 734-page document. Professor Akwanya has also taught many literature courses, namely: European Continental Literature, Studies in Drama, Modern Literary Theory, African Poetry, History of Theatre: Aeschylus to Shakespeare, European Theatre since Ibsen, English Literature Survey: the Beginnings, Semantics, History of the English Language, History of Criticism, Modern Discourse Analysis, Greek and Roman Literatures, Linguistics and the Teaching of Literature, Major Strands in Literary Criticism, Issues in Comparative Literature, Discourse Theory, English Poetry, English Drama, Modern British Literature, Comparative Studies in Poetry, Comparative Studies in Drama, Studies in African Drama, and Philosophy of Literature. A Fellow of Nigerian Academy of Letters, Akwanya’s open access works have been read over 109,478 times around the world. In this wide-ranging interview, he speaks to Andrew Bula, a young lecturer from Baze University, Abuja, shedding light on a variety of issues around which his life revolves.

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohd Nazri Latiff Azmi ◽  
Lidwina Teo Pik Ching ◽  
Norbahyah Binti Jamaludin ◽  
Muhammad Nur Haziq Bin Ramli ◽  
Muhammad Habibbullah Bin Razali ◽  
...  

English and Malay languages are categorized as popular languages in the world.  However, both languages underwent different history and composition. This study investigates the languages in terms of history, phonology, loanwords, grammar, morphology and semantics. The purposes of studying the comparisons and contrasts of both languages are not only to analyze the uniqueness of the languages but also to identify the process of understanding the languages especially the view of second language learners. It is found that two languages come from different background; somehow they share similar characteristics such as the vowels sounds, loanwords and semantics. However, the learners face difficulty in learning both languages especially in pronunciations and spelling.Keywords: English language, Malay language, history of language


1966 ◽  
Vol 05 (03) ◽  
pp. 142-146
Author(s):  
A. Kent ◽  
P. J. Vinken

A joint center has been established by the University of Pittsburgh and the Excerpta Medica Foundation. The basic objective of the Center is to seek ways in which the health sciences community may achieve increasingly convenient and economical access to scientific findings. The research center will make use of facilities and resources of both participating institutions. Cooperating from the University of Pittsburgh will be the School of Medicine, the Computation and Data Processing Center, and the Knowledge Availability Systems (KAS) Center. The KAS Center is an interdisciplinary organization engaging in research, operations, and teaching in the information sciences.Excerpta Medica Foundation, which is the largest international medical abstracting service in the world, with offices in Amsterdam, New York, London, Milan, Tokyo and Buenos Aires, will draw on its permanent medical staff of 54 specialists in charge of the 35 abstracting journals and other reference works prepared and published by the Foundation, the 700 eminent clinicians and researchers represented on its International Editorial Boards, and the 6,000 physicians who participate in its abstracting programs throughout the world. Excerpta Medica will also make available to the Center its long experience in the field, as well as its extensive resources of medical information accumulated during the Foundation’s twenty years of existence. These consist of over 1,300,000 English-language _abstract of the world’s biomedical literature, indexes to its abstracting journals, and the microfilm library in which complete original texts of all the 3,000 primary biomedical journals, monitored by Excerpta Medica in Amsterdam are stored since 1960.The objectives of the program of the combined Center include: (1) establishing a firm base of user relevance data; (2) developing improved vocabulary control mechanisms; (3) developing means of determining confidence limits of vocabulary control mechanisms in terms of user relevance data; 4. developing and field testing of new or improved media for providing medical literature to users; 5. developing methods for determining the relationship between learning and relevance in medical information storage and retrieval systems’; and (6) exploring automatic methods for retrospective searching of the specialized indexes of Excerpta Medica.The priority projects to be undertaken by the Center are (1) the investigation of the information needs of medical scientists, and (2) the development of a highly detailed Master List of Biomedical Indexing Terms. Excerpta Medica has already been at work on the latter project for several years.


Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.


1971 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Taylor

Editorial note. March 17th, 1971 was the fiftieth anniversary of the opening by Marie Stopes of her birth control clinic in Holloway, London, the first of its kind in the UK and possibly in the world. In recognition of this notable event, the Board of the Marie Stopes Memorial Foundation, in conjunction with the University of York, has established a Marie Stopes Memorial Lecture to be given annually for a term of years. The first of the series was delivered on 12th March in the Department of Sociology, University of York, by Mr Laurie Taylor of that department. In introducing the speaker, Dr G. C. L. Bertram, the Chairman, emphasized the great contribution made by Marie Stopes to human welfare and gave a brief history of the clinic, which was soon moved to Whitfield Street. On Marie Stopes' death in 1958 the Memorial Foundation was set up to manage the clinic, still in Whitfield Street, and as a working monument to a great women.Mr Taylor's script is printed below as delivered and it will be seen that the lecture was a notable one. Not only that, but it was delivered with the verve of a Shakespearean actor and the members of the large and appreciative audience will not readily forget the occasion.


2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 17-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Radmila Sajkovic

In this text the author reviews the life and work of Zagorka Micic, famous Serbian woman-philosopher, in honour of the 100th anniversary of her birth. She was one of the first students of Edmund Husserl, and her Ph. D. thesis was among the earliest ones in phaenomenology, which was waking in that time. Her cooperation with Husserl has continued for a decade. After the World War II Zagorka Micic worked as a professor of logic and history of philosophy at the University of Skoplje (now FYRM). Stressing her individual qualities, the paper is full of personal memories and reminiscences of mutual encounters.


The article attempts to comprehend the essence and possibility of forming discourse competence among foreign and Russian students with simultaneous immersion in patriotic discourse. It is highlighted that the addition of the humanitarian series of “History of Civilizations” and “Features of Russian Civilization” to the educational process at the university creates the necessary pedagogical conditions for organizing a special linguo-ethno-cultural environment that forms active social interaction of authors within the framework of the medical and patriotic linguistic scenario. The authors of the article conducted a semantic and historical analysis of interpretations of the concept of “patriotism” that were studied from the point of view of traditional and liberal culture. The article presents the results of a socio-pedagogical study of students' perceptions of this concept. The article describes various theoretical and methodological approaches to the definition of the concepts of “discourse” and “discursive picture of the world” as well as psycholinguistic features of the method of semantic differential. Special attention in the article is paid to the typologies of discourse presented in the scientific literature. The authors of the article present the principle of genre and the principle of thematic correlation as the basis for distinguishing between types of discourse and highlight differences in language and discursive pictures of the world. The tasks of educators is to form not only purely medical discursive competence, but also to immerse the listener in “correctly” interpreted picture, saturated with verbal patterns that allow to create statements of patriotic content.


Author(s):  
Halyna Syvachenko

A theory of cultural transfer was the branch of comparative literary criticism, although this theory declared its sharp opposition against the mentioned tradition of study. The comparative studies in humanities are based on the ideas of specificity of every culture, even when one deals with the influence of one culture on another. Instead of this approach, the theory of cultural transfer promotes not only a simultaneous study of several cultural and national spaces but also a research on disseminations and transformations that appear at any rapprochement between cultures both in an influential culture and in a perceiving one. Consequently, it is not the binary opposition that must be taken into account in cultural transfer but two cultures, one of which is necessarily comprehended as a culture-recipient, although the whole scheme is much more complicated. Any transition from one cultural space into another easily may cause some transformation. Other ‘new element’ in the theory of cultural transfer is positioning the study of a cultural space periphery, i. e. connections with alien cultural space that every culture necessarily supports, in a center. This approach demonstrates that any phenomenon, no matter how specifically national it may be, actually is a complicated alloy of different cultures and influences. The objects of cultural transfer include the history of translation. Another priority direction is a comparative study of the national forms of comparativism related to the history of intellectual and spiritual relations between different countries and nations. During the transfer from one cultural situation into another any object gets into another context and acquires a new meaning. As focus of attention of a theory and studies of translation was shifting to the context of creation, operation and perception of translations, the research on the translated texts increasingly crossed the boundaries of the related disciplines that enabled learning this context – sociology, comparative studies, economics, history, cultural studies. The scholars aim to indicate the ways of manipulating the readers via translation, to explicate interests and values brought with every translation, to show how it forms the culture-receiver and values of society. The most attention is paid to the issues of ideology, economy and politics, the problems of ethnic responsibility of the translator. The object of cultural translation studies is the text in the system of literary and extra-literary meanings within the initial and receiving cultures. Cultural theory of translation raises the question of cultural prestige of the selected texts and determines the basis of this selection, the principles of forming and changing their status. One may focus also on the role of the commentator as an intermediary between the translator of the text and the readers to whom the translator wants to make his way through.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaas Berkel ◽  
Guus Termeer

The University of Groningen has been an international university since its foundation in 1614. The first professors formed a rich international community, and many students came from outside the Netherlands, especially from areas now belonging to Germany. Internationalization, a popular slogan nowadays, is therefore nothing new, but its meaning has changed over time. How did the University of Groningen grow from a provincial institution established for religious reasons into a top-100 university with 36,000 students, of whom 25% come from abroad and almost half of the academic staff is of foreign descent? What is the identity of this four-century-old university that is still strongly anchored in the northern part of the Netherlands but that also has a mind that is open to the world? The history of the university, as told by Klaas van Berkel and Guus Termeer, ends with a short paragraph on the impact of the corona crisis.


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