Portraits of other-than-human beings writing and reading embody the Classic Maya hieroglyphic script’s godly origins and the privileged spaces, knowledge, and ritual experiences of historical scribes who used the script.

Chapter 3 examines the problem of Homer and the making of the epics. It surveys ancient traditions about Homer, the realities of oral composition, and the long processes by which Iliads and Odysseys took shape. It considers standardization, the transition from voice to page, and the role of epic as public memory, explaining why an ‘author’ figure became necessary.

The process of researching, planning and writing a persuasive essay is a fundamental task in the study of law. A well-planned and well-executed essay shows that you have knowledge and that you can apply that knowledge persuasively in relation to an argument. This form of assessment is used less often in the law than in other humanities subjects, but the skills you obtain by becoming proficient at this sort of writing will certainly assist you in any type of endeavour which requires you to form coherent arguments. Remember that the key to the whole process is to do the preparatory work before you begin writing. An essay with a strong underlying structure is almost certainly going to be a strong essay. Where an essay has been written by a student who has not taken the time to plan, this will, unfortunately, be obvious to the marker, and will result in lower grades every time. Understand the topic, develop your one-sentence answer to the question, plan the structure, add your research – and you will write an excellent essay.

Chapter 6 delineates certain new aesthetic categories for modernism in the subcontinent, drawing on the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi and her minimalist artistic practice. In addition to her gridded drawings and black and white photography, this chapter focuses on her diaries, written sporadically throughout the 1960s to 1980s, capturing her time in Karachi, Pakistan; Rajasthan, India; and the Persian Gulf. The “diaries,” however, are composed of aphorisms, conceptual questions, and theoretical notes to self. “The world is raging a war outside and mine is an inner one.” Via the “notative,” the “asketic,” and the “micrographic,” this presentation argues for ways to “read” these texts, which were never intended to be read, and perhaps not written: as concept notes for an existential artistic practice, as an early example of desert/Gulf modernism, as a “situation” of the body and the female artist, and as generative of a new ethics of modernism based on erasure, dilution, perforation, and diminution.

This chapter focuses on learner corpora of L2 English and the analysis of learner language varieties. The first part of the chapter describes the main characteristics of learner corpus data and presents a survey of the aspects that have most often been dealt with in the literature within the frame of learner corpus research (LCR) and its three main research orientations (descriptive, predictive, and pedagogical). A number of representative studies are selected to illustrate various facets of LCR. The chapter then describes the methods that are typically used in LCR, including multimethod approaches. It identifies the recent advances in LCR as well as the challenges that it still needs to address in terms of data collection, methodology, linguistic analysis, and applications. In the second part of the chapter, the main aspects of LCR are illustrated in an empirical study that the authors conducted on the use of discourse markers (DMs) in learner spoken English. The study compares six frequent two-word DMs (and so, and then, I mean, in fact, sort of, you know) in native and learner speech, both from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The study considers individual texts in addition to entire corpora, showing that corpora may display a high degree of internal variability.

Now that the notion of the Anthropocene is more than a quarter century old, it is possible to review its career. With a special focus on the notion’s trajectory in literary studies, this chapter assesses that career in three ways. First, it makes the language-theoretical point that the Anthropocene is less a rigid denominator than a necessary misnomer: a term that cannot possibly capture the vast realities it is assumed to name, and is better thought of as a catalyst for debate. This helps explain why the recent dismissal of the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphic unit hardly affects the term’s popularity. Second, it tracks the development of the term in literary studies to show how a term that initially signaled ecological urgency began to signify theoretical complexity in the 2010s and, somewhat later, also an increasing awareness of diversity. Third, it underlines that the particular way in which literary studies conceives of the Anthropocene is affected by the specific affordances of literature, which is reflected in the association of the Anthropocene with interdisciplinarity, multiscalarity, embodied experience, the ontology of writing, and a mood of impending disaster.

This chapter traces the process by which villages became cities and city-states, which grew in some places into larger-scale states and empires, with a focus on the social institutions and cultural norms that facilitated these developments, including hereditary dynasties, hierarchical families, and notions of ethnicity. Writing and other means of recording information were invented to serve the needs of people who lived close to one another in cities and states. Oral rituals of worship, healing, and celebration in which everyone participated grew into religions, philosophies, and branches of knowledge presided over by specialists, including Judaism and Confucian thought. Social differences became formalized in systems that divided enslaved and free, or that grouped people into castes or orders, distinctions that were maintained through marriage and cultural ideologies. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity were created and then expanded in the cosmopolitan worlds of classical empires, shaping family life and social practices.

This chapter is on the production of African literature at the intersection of colonialism, colonial institutions, and the African subjects conscripted into modernity. The key argument is that, irrespective of the languages used, the emergence of creative writing on the continent was determined by systems and processes of colonization and colonial institutions including the Christian missions and schools and European ideas about modernity. In addition to providing a critical account of the overdetermining power of colonial institutions in the invention of African literature, the chapter examines the self-fashioning of Africans as writers and intellectuals and how the task of writing and the forms that it generated changed as the desire to master colonial ideas and institutions was transcended by decolonial aspirations.

What does it mean to know a language? Language is our primary tool for communication, and speaking, listening, reading, and writing are integral to our everyday lives. This chapter explores how adults use and understand language, from speech to the written word. We deconstruct the processes that are involved when speakers speak and listeners listen, and when readers read, and writers write. We delve into groundbreaking (and often controversial) studies to find out what they can tell us about speech production and comprehension. We’ll also find that a big part of language use is misuse. We look at the typical language of adults and the normal mistakes we make in our speech everyday, from mondegreens and malapropisms to spoonerisms and other slips of the tongue. We discuss what these speech and hearing errors mean, and what they reveal about the way language is organized in our minds.

Chapter 4 deals with the philosophical meaning of dialogue as a form of writing and thinking. I take as my starting point the apparent paradox of Plato’s written critique of writing in the Phaedrus and explain how Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger resolve this question. For all three of them (inspired by Friedländer on this point), dialogical writing overcomes the deficiencies inherent to writing. I argue that for all three of them, dialogical writing and dialogical thinking reflect the practical embeddedness of philosophical inquiry: for Strauss, it is the political situatedness of the philosopher that has priority; for Gadamer, it is our ethical facticity; for Krüger, it is the fundamental attunements (Stimmungen) of philosophy. The chapter also explains how these three trajectories propose three different interpretations of the meaning of Socratic and Platonic irony, which is a key feature of Plato’s dialogical compositions.