Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood. Unselfing explores the nature of disruptive self-experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writing. The book focuses on the tension between rival conceptions of unselfing as either a form of productive self-transcendence or a form of alienating self-loss. Michaela Hulstyn explores the shapes and meanings of unselfing through the framework of the global French literary world, encompassing texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium alongside writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. Together these diverse texts prompt a re-evaluation of the consequences of the loss or the transcendence of the self. Through a series of close readings, Hulstyn offers a new account of the ethical questions raised by altered states and shows how philosophies of empathy can be tested against and often challenged by literary works. Drawing on cognitive science and phenomenology, Unselfing provides a new methodology for approaching texts that give shape to the fringes of conscious experience.

The idea that there once existed a language which perfectly and unambiguously expressed the essence of all possible things and concepts has occupied the minds of philosophers, theologians, mystics and others for at least two millennia. This is an investigation into the history of that idea and of its profound influence on European thought, culture and history. From the early Dark Ages to the Renaissance it was widely believed that the language spoken in the Garden of Eden was just such a language, and that all current languages were its decadent descendants from the catastrophe of the Fall and at Babel. The recovery of that language would, for theologians, express the nature of divinity, for cabbalists allow access to hidden knowledge and power, and for philosophers reveal the nature of truth. Versions of these ideas remained current in the Enlightenment, and have recently received fresh impetus in attempts to create a natural language for artificial intelligence. The story that Umberto Eco tells ranges widely from the writings of Augustine, Dante, Descartes and Rousseau, arcane treatises on cabbalism and magic, to the history of the study of language and its origins. He demonstrates the initimate relation between language and identity and describes, for example, how and why the Irish, English, Germans and Swedes - one of whom presented God talking in Swedish to Adam, who replied in Danish, while the serpent tempted Eve in French - have variously claimed their language as closest to the original. He also shows how the late eighteenth-century discovery of a proto-language (Indo-European) for the Aryan peoples was perverted to support notions of racial superiority. To this subtle exposition of a history of extraordinary complexity, Umberto Eco links the associated history of the manner in which the sounds of language and concepts have been written and symbolized. Lucidly and wittily written, the book is, in sum, a tour de force of scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European History. The paperback edition of this book is not available through Blackwell outside of North America.

This book (vol. 2) presents the proceedings of the IUPESM World Congress on Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics, a triennially organized joint meeting of medical physicists, biomedical engineers and adjoining health care professionals. Besides the purely scientific and technological topics, the 2018 Congress will also focus on other aspects of professional involvement in health care, such as education and training, accreditation and certification, health technology assessment and patient safety. The IUPESM meeting is an important forum for medical physicists and biomedical engineers in medicine and healthcare learn and share knowledge, and discuss the latest research outcomes and technological advancements as well as new ideas in both medical physics and biomedical engineering field.

This book presents theoretical and methodical cultural concerns in teaching literatures from non-American cultures along with issues of cross-cultural communication, cultural competency and translation. Covering topics such as the 1001 Nights, Maqamat, Arabic poetry, women’s writing, classical poetics, issues of gender, race, and class, North African concerns, language acquisition through literature, Arab-spring writing, women’s correspondence, issues connected with the so called nahdah (revival) movement in the 19th century and many others, the book provides perspectives and topics that serve in both the planning of new courses and accommodation to already existing programs.

At the Mariani Foundation meeting held in Milan, October 1995, highly qualified specialists were invited to assist in understanding of the basic principles of cerebral development and brain function, with specific attention to those structures and mechanisms involved in the phenomenon of falls. Epiliptologists illustrate the different semiologic modalities and clinical conditions in which the fall is an essential symptom. A main part of the book is dedicated to the medical and surgical treatment of syndromes where falls appear in the foreground. This volume has the mission of improving life conditions of children who suffer from drop seizures, by limiting the risks to which they are subjected, and to try and compensate for the psychological and social limitations affecting them.

Performing the Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives of Settler Memory and Identity in Literature and On-Screen sheds new light on the memory community of the pieds-noir from the Algerian War (1954-1962) as it continues to resonate in France, where the subject was initially repressed in the collective psyche. Aoife Connolly draws on theories of performativity to explore autobiographical and fictional narratives by the settlers in over thirty canonical and non-canonical works of literature and film produced from the colony’s imminent demise up to the present day. Connolly focuses on renewed attachment to the family in exile to facilitate a comprehensive analysis of settler masculinity, femininity, childhood, and adolescence and to uncover neglected representations, including homosexual and Jewish voices. Connolly argues that findings on the construction of a post-independence identity and collective memory have broader implications for communities affected by colonization and migration. Scholars of literature, film, Francophone studies, and film studies will find this book particularly useful.

The front covers of books written by Algerian women serve as the primary source of investigation in Front Cover Iconography and Algerian Women Writers. These covers have implications that extend beyond selling the book. What we see on one side of the page—or in this case, the cover, (recto) controls what we read on the reverse—in this case, the text itself (verso). Using theories of the paratext, including those of Gérard Genette and Jonathan Gray, this book determines how four dominant iconographies used on the covers of Algerian women’s writing – Orientalist art, the veil, the desert, and the author portrait – work with and against the texts they represent. These images have an impact on the initial reception of the book, but beyond that, book covers determine how both the informed and uninformed reader categorize and interpret francophone Algerian women’s writing in France and beyond. As the covers help to sell the works, they also produce messages, represented via their iconographies that embed themselves into the texts. A sometimes explicit, and at the very least, implicit dialog between the visual paratextual representation and the written textual one is created: a dialog that extends beyond the life of the physical book to a sort of canonical paradigm for reading these authors’ works. Thus, even if the cover image appears ephemeral, it never truly disappears. Its powerful control over critical reception and, ultimately, interpretation of francophone Algerian women’s writing remains.