5 Cultures / Languages English eBooks #

Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age
Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon
Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West
Translation in Undergraduate Degree Programmes
Chinese Magical Medicine

Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age
2001 | pages: 317 | ISBN: 0801866073 | PDF | 13,5 mb
From sexist jokes about women drivers to such empowering icons as Amelia Earhart and Rosie the Riveter, representations of the relationship between women and modern technology in popular culture have been both demeaning and celebratory. Depictions of women as timid and fearful creatures baffled by machinery have alternated with images of them as being fully capable of technological mastery and control — and of lending sex appeal to machines as products.In Women and the Machine, historian Julie Wosk maps the contradictory ways in which women's interactions with — and understanding of — machinery has been defined in Western popular culture since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Drawing on both visual and literary sources, Wosk illuminates popular gender stereotypes that have burdened women throughout modern history while underscoring their advances in what was long considered the domain of men. Illustrated with more than 150 images, Women and the Machine reveals women rejoicing in their new liberties and technical skill even as they confront society's ambivalence about these developments, along with male fantasies and fears.

Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon
ISBN: 0826449492, 0826413439 | 2001 | PDF | 368 pages | 16 MB
Over the sixty years of his existence, Batman has encountered an impressive array of cultural icons and has gradually become one himself. This fascinating book examines what Batman means and has meant to the various audiences, groups and communities who have tried to control and interpret him over the decades. Brooker reveals the struggles over Batman's meaning by shining a light on the cultural issues of the day that impacted on the development of the character. They include: patriotic propaganda of the Second World War; the accusation that Batman was corrupting the youth of America by appearing to promote a homosexual lifestyle to the fans of his comics; Batman becoming a camp, pop culture icon through the ABC TV series of the sixties; fans' interpretation of Batman in response to the comics and the Warner Bros. franchise of films.

Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West
English | ISBN: 0521160626, 0521768292 | 2012 | PDF | 400 pages | 3.6 MB
Western and East Asian people hold fundamentally different beliefs about learning that influence how they approach child rearing and education. Reviewing decades of research, Dr. Jin Li presents an important conceptual distinction between the Western mind model and the East Asian virtue model of learning. The former aims to cultivate the mind to understand the world, whereas the latter prioritizes the self to be perfected morally and socially. Tracing the cultural origins of the two large intellectual traditions, Li details how each model manifests itself in the psychology of the learning process, learning affect, regard of one's learning peers, expression of what one knows, and parents' guiding efforts. Despite today's accelerated cultural exchange, these learning models do not diminish but endure.

Translation in Undergraduate Degree Programmes
Published: 2004-12-23 | ISBN: 9027216657, 158811600X | PDF | 208 pages | 2 MB
This book brings together an international team of leading translation teachers and researchers to address concerns that are central in translation pedagogy. The authors address the location and weighting in translation curricula of learning and training, theory and practice, and the relationships between the profession, its practitioners, its professors and scholars. They explore the concepts of translator competence, skills and capacities and two papers report empirical studies designed to explore effects of the use of translation in language teaching. These are complemented by papers on student achievement and attitudes to translation in programmes that are not primarily designed with prospective translators in mind, and by papers that discuss language teaching within dedicated translation programmes. The introduction and the closing paper consider some causes and consequences of the odd relationships that speakers of English have to other languages, to translation and ultimately, perhaps, to their "own" language.

Chinese Magical Medicine
English | March 25, 2002 | ISBN: 0804739404 | 432 pages | PDF | 66,1 MB
This book argues that the most profound and far-reaching effects of Buddhism on Chinese culture occurred at the level of practice, specifically in religious rituals designed to cure people of disease, demonic possession, and bad luck. This practice would leave its most lasting imprint on the liturgical tradition of Taoism. In focusing on religious practice, it provides a corrective to traditional studies of Chinese religion, which overemphasize metaphysics and spirituality.A basic concern with healing characterizes the entire gamut of religious expression in East Asia. By concentrating on the medieval development of Chinese therapeutic ritual, the author discovers the germinal core of many still-current rituals across the social and doctrinal frontiers of Buddhism and Taoism, as well as outside the Buddhist or Taoist fold.