Covariant Physics

This book is an introduction to the modern methods of the general theory of relativity, tensor calculus, space time geometry, the classical theory of fields, and a variety of theoretical physics oriented topics rarely discussed at the level of the intended reader (mid-college physics major). It does so from the point of view of the so-called principle of covariance; a symmetry that underlies most of physics, including such familiar branches as Newtonian mechanics and electricity and magnetism. The book is written from a minimalist perspective, providing the reader with only the most basic of notions; just enough to be able to read, and hopefully comprehend, modern research papers on these subjects. In addition, it provides a (hopefully short) preparation for the student to be able to conduct research in a variety of topics in theoretical physics; with particular emphasis on physics in curved spacetime backgrounds. The hope is that students with a minimal mathematical background in calculus and only some introductory courses in physics may be able to study this book and benefit from it.

Half-Envying

This chapter assesses the degree to which Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene not only responds to reading “characterologically” but solicits it, as an offering to and claim upon the reader whose interest Spenser was most anxious to secure. The Faerie Queene is not a tightly plotted prose narrative, and its intended reader was no figment of Spenser's imagination. On the contrary, she was a living ruler on whose favor the poet's livelihood depended and to whom, on at least one occasion, he read parts of his uncompleted poem aloud. These well-known facts are related in nonobvious ways: Queen Elizabeth's engrossment in The Faerie Queene is the poem's motivating and sustaining fiction, as well as the scene of an imagined catastrophe it must labor to forestall. In claiming Elizabeth as inspiration and ideal reader, Spenser's poem participates in a collective fiction of the queen's willing self-subjection to her chastely devoted male subjects, a fiction whose seditious and erotic subtexts were at perpetual risk of contaminating the official narrative.

When the audience changes

Much is expected to change when a work of fiction is translated from one language and culture to another, but the intended reader is not. This paper deals with the issue of the change of the intended reader from adult to child/adolescent in translations of fiction from English into Slovene. The intended reader is most likely to change in translations of comics/cartoons, fantasy, and realistic fiction with child or animal protagonists. The reasons for the change can be both textual and extra-textual: on the one hand, books are categorized as children’s books by libraries, award boards and marketers, as well as by the publisher’s choice of translator, while, on the other hand, individual translation decisions on the microlevel can help move a book from one category to another.

SELF-HELP TITLE: PRAGMATICS, SYNTACTICS, SEMANTICS

The article focuses on titles of the texts belonging to the motivational success genre. The texts of the genre under investigation are manuals on achieving success which aim to teach readers to help themselves live successfully and prosperously in the rapidly changing world. The research aims at exploring the pragmatic, syntactic and semantic features of self-help titles. The study was based on 70 titles, selected by the method of continuous sampling on Amazon.com. It has been found that the title complex (a two-tier structure consisting of the main title and the subtitle) is typical for self-help texts. The two elements of such a complex differ in their pragmatics. The functions of self-help titles have been highlighted and described. The key elements (mostly nouns and adjectives that verbalize genre concepts SUCCESS and MONEY) in the titles in question inform about the content of the texts without touching their details. In addition, such elements attract the intended reader – the representative of the modern American society of consumers for whom the highest steps in the hierarchy of values are occupied by material goods. It has been proven that self-help titles intrigue and excite the addressee's imagination, and, by outlining the subject matter, act as a kind of advertising of their texts. Moreover, imperative titles encourage the addressee to take action. In the course of the research, three structural-syntactic models of self-help titles have been identified. The major function of self-help titles – to capture the prospective reader’s interest – is facilitated by the dominant syntactic model of the nominal title, the expressiveness and the semantics of the titles.

Edukacja seksualna a przekłady książek dla dzieci i młodzieży – ideologie, specyfika, kontrowersje

Sex Education and Translations of Books for Children and Young People – Ideologies, Characteristics, Controversies This article discusses sex education books for children and young people published in Poland in 1945–2018. After defining the ideological profile of 111 examined publications as conservative, moderately conservative, neutral, moderately liberal or liberal, the authors compare the whole set of books translated from other languages with the whole set of books by Polish authors, taking into account the date of publication and the age of the intended reader. The analysis shows that translations differ from texts written originally in Polish, because they promote other values. Polish books, especially those published before 1989, are usually neutral or moderately conservative, while translations mostly propagate moderately liberal or liberal ideologies. There is also a close correlation between those ideological categories and the age of the reader: books for the youngest audience are ideologically charged to the smallest degree, and the ideological content increases with the age of the reader. This seems to be related to the growing percentage of translations in the older age groups. Translations, which usually reflect the liberal ideology, fill a gap in Polish culture by complementing or replacing the conservative sexeducation available at school and by encouraging Polish authors to write sex education books expressing similar views.

Kristuskarakteristik og eksempelfortælling

During its history of interpretation and reception, the temptation story in Matthew 4:1–11 and Luke 4:1–13 has been interpreted with emphasis on either its Christological or its paraenetical dimension. The article investigates how contemporary Danish children’s bibles retell the story with accent on the paraenetic elements. The children’s bibles reframe the story according to the genre of the morality tale. With literary devices such as focalization, metalepsis, shared interest and reader involvement strategies, the children’s bibles portray Jesus as a positive moral example for readers to emulate. This implies a view of the intended reader as a competent child who is capable of understanding and identifying with the text and overcome the devil’s temptations.

Cultural Norms in Translating Children’s Literature

The reader of a translated text is particularly important when the translation is intended for a young audience. The translation must take into account the cultural knowledge of the intended reader. This research looks at the relationships between the translator, the author, and the intended and accidental readers of the source text. It discusses the issue of the low status of children’s books, and translated children’s literature in the literary polysystem. It focuses on the resulted disagreement among translators on the appropriate translational procedure to be followed when translating works with culture specific references (foreignization vs. domestication). It is an attempt to draw the attention to the cultural norms which govern the translation of children’s literature from English into Arabic. The research also examines ‘adaptation’ as the most common translational procedure used in translating children’s works with culture specific items and references. Examples are taken from two works of children’s literature: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Tom Sawyer. The examples reveal incidents of adaptation by means of deletion, replacement and addition.

The Construction and Transcultural Dissemination of Negative Images of Jews in a French Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Psalter Made for a Danish Reader

Marina Vidas: The Construction and Transcultural Dissemination of Negative Images of Jews in a French Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Psalter Made for a Danish Reader The article is concerned with a thirteenth-century de luxe Psalter (London, British Library, MS Additional 17868) produced in France after 1253. It provides an overview of the relevant literature on the London Psalter, a full description of the textual and pictorial components of the manuscript, including a detailed analysis of the Calendar and Litany, as well as reasons for identifying the intended reader as Danish (rather than French, as has been presumed in earlier scholarly literature). A lengthy and detailed analysis is undertaken of the mostly negative manner in which Jews are represented in the Prefatory Cycle miniatures and Psalter section of the manuscript. It is argued that the image of the Jew in the Prefatory Cycle is shaped by pictorial tradition and the then-current negative perception of Jewish usury while in the Psalter section the depictions of Jews were constructed in response to adjacent texts and to nearby images. It is suggested that the interplay between words and images provided a mnemonic tool for the reader but also reinforced widely-held stereotypes of Jews, for example about Jewish enmity toward Christ. Also presented and discussed is French iconography, including pejorative images of Jews and Judaism, which was assimilated and appropriated in Medieval Danish churches. It is concluded that the images would have shaped the reader’s experience of the text and perception of members of the Jewish faith, centuries before the establishment of Jewish communities in this part of Europe.

Decoding Byzantine ekphraseis on works of art. Constantine Manasses’s description of earth and its audience

The study deals with ekphraseis on works of art and poses the question as to how far these texts can be a reliable source for the study or even the reconstruction of the artefacts they describe. Based on reception theory and readerresponse criticism, in the paper is proposed that as every text, byzantine ekphraseis on artworks presuppose an audience or readership, i. e. the one the author had in mind and on the basis of which he encoded his message. In order to decode this message and by extension to extract any information about the described works of art we must aim to discover their “intended reader”, and identify his or her “horizon of expectations. This proposal is tested in the study of a well known piece of this kind, Manasses’s description of a mosaic floor with a depiction of Earth. The author’s dialogue with the earlier tradition of ekphraseis, his readership’s “horizon of expectations” combined with historical facts, allow us to suppose that Manasses is describing a composition with Xenia scenes and an asarotos motif (unswept floor) created in the early byzantine period and preserved in the Great Palace of Constantinople up to the twelfth century.

The Good Little Book by K. Maclear

Maclear, Kyo. The Good Little Book. Illustrated by Marion Arbona. Tundra Books, 2015.In this work, Maclear uses allegorical techniques to expand on compelling themes. Her protagonist is unnamed; he is “the boy,” every boy who loves to read. The Good Little Book is every book that captivates a reader. Its author is unnamed. Its characters are not delineated. Only a captioned illustration, one of Arbona’s many colorful offerings, provides clues to the book’s plot and impact:“It carried him to the deep sea and steered him towards a faraway land. It dazzled him and stumped him and made him laugh and gasp. He read it through. Then he turned back to the beginning and read it again.”[pp.11-12]Humour is a feature of the work; Maclear likes to play with words--literary words. The Good Little Book resides with others, one of which has won the “Called a Cat” medal. We are informed, however, that “The good little book…had no shiny medals…it didn’t even own a proper jacket.” [p.3]The protagonist’s compulsion to read and reread his good little book introduces the first theme: books transport us to imagined worlds. When the book is lost, then rediscovered, a secondary theme emerges: books are to be shared.Text and illustration lead the reader to surmise that “the boy” is school-aged, a child physically mature enough to walk his dog while riding a skateboard. He is, of course, an avid and independent reader. Tormented by the loss of his book, he is old enough to hunt for it on his own, to scour crowded and heavily trafficked streets, to search the public library. Initially, he appears to have an age appropriate appreciation of the book’s capacity to occupy his mind, to move his thoughts.“The book the boy thought couldn’t do anything did many things.” [p.11] “It did become a loyal companion, there to see him to sleep and distract him when he had to “think things over.””[p.13].To this point, the boy’s relationship with the book seems in keeping with the primary theme: book as intellectual transport. Suddenly, his thought processes revert to those of a much younger child.“The boy worried. How would such a good and quiet book survive? What would it do if it found itself at the edge of the unknown? Or among frightful enemies?...the book did not have skills that would help it in the dangerous wild….”[pp.19-20 ]The story becomes even more anthropomorphic when the book is discovered by various creatures:“A squirrel thought it might be a thriller. A sparrow thought it might be a romance. A raccoon thought it might be a sandwich.” [p.29 ]These developments raise a question: “Who is the intended reader?” A child who has completed grade three would generally have both the ability and the maturity to read the book and to appreciate its messages. This reader might, initially, identify with the protagonist’s dilemma. But would this same youngster identify with thinking that becomes, in the lexicon of child psychologists, animistic? One can readily imagine a nine-year-old reader’s sudden dismissal of the work as, “…a little kid’s book.” One can also imagine that a preschooler would listen with rapt attention to the anthropomorphic sections, but zone out during the development of the book’s themes. Finally, it may be that only librarians, booksellers, and children’s literature specialists would appreciate the humour. In sum, maintaining a clear vision of the intended reader or listener is a requisite in any kind of storytelling; The Good Little Book falls short in this regard.Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Leslie AitkenLeslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship involved selection of children’s literature for school, public, special, and university collections. She is a former Curriculum Librarian at the University of Alberta.