This week on Madison’s Notes, we sit down with philosopher and author Charles Taylor to discuss his latest work, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Belknap Press, 2024) . Taylor dives into the profound role of poetry in reconnecting us to a sense of wonder and meaning in a world often characterized by disillusionment. Drawing on his vast expertise in philosophy, Taylor explores how poetry serves as a bridge between the mundane and the transcendent, offering a counterpoint to the rational, scientific worldview that dominates modern life. This conversation offers a deep dive into the power of language, imagination, and the poetic tradition in addressing the spiritual and existential challenges of our time. Join us for a reflective exploration of how poetry can restore enchantment in an age of disenchantment.Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

How does analyzing video games as hypertexts expand the landscape of research for video game rhetoricians and games studies scholars? This is the first book to focus on how hypertext rhetoric impacts the five canons of rhetoric, and to apply that hypertext rhetoric to the study of video games. It also explores how ludonarrative agency is seized by players seeking to express themselves in ways that game makers did not necessarily intend when making the games that players around the world enjoy.Hey! Listen!: Hypertext Rhetoric and The Legend of Zelda (McFarland, 2024) takes inspiration from The Legend of Zelda, a series which players all over the world have spent decades deconstructing through online playthroughs, speedruns, and glitch hunts. Through these playthroughs, players demonstrate their ability to craft their own agency, independent of the objectives built by the makers of these games, creating new rhetorical situations worthy of analysis and consideration.Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design at the IU International University for Applied Science, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Alexandra Grey about Dr. Grey’s book entitled Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study (De Gruyter, 2021).China has had constitutional minority language rights for decades, but what do they mean today? Answering with nuance and empirical detail, this book examines the rights through a sociolinguistic study of Zhuang, the language of China’s largest minority group. The analysis traces language policy from the Constitution to local government practices, investigating how Zhuang language rights are experienced as opening or restricting socioeconomic opportunity. The study finds that language rights do not challenge ascendant marketised and mobility-focused language ideologies which ascribe low value to Zhuang. However, people still value a Zhuang identity validated by government policy and practice.Rooted in a Bourdieusian approach to language, power and legal discourse, this is the first major publication to integrate contemporary debates in linguistics about mobility, capitalism and globalization into a study of China’s language policy.This book came out in May 2021 after almost a decade of Alex’s doctoral and postdoctoral work. Her doctoral dissertation was recognised as the best dissertation on the sociology of language, internationally, through the 2018 Joshua A. Fishman Award.For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Laura Smith-Khan about language and accents in children’s media, from Octonauts to Disney to Bluey, and they investigate what a choice as seemingly banal as a character’s accent has to do with whiteness, standard language ideology, and securing a nation’s borders. They then reflect on Laura’s most recently published paper (with co-authors Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr. Hanna Torsh) and how accents and language are used to shape discourses around migration and belonging.For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Hannah White, a Postdoc researcher at Macquarie University in the Department of Linguistics. She completed her doctoral research in 2023 with a thesis entitled “Creaky Voice in Australian English”.Brynn speaks to Dr. White about this research along with a 2023 paper that she co-authored entitled “Convergence of Creaky Voice Use in Australian English.” This paper and the entirety of Hannah’s thesis examines the use of creaky voice, or vocal fry, in speech.For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Popular discourse around British Muslims has often been dominated by a focus on Muslim women and their sartorial choices, particularly the hijab and niqab. British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End: The Changing Landscape of Dress and Language (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Fatima Rajina takes a different angle and focuses on Muslim men, examining how factors like the global war on terror influenced and changed their sartorial choices and use of language. The book denaturalises the ubiquitous and deeply problematic security lens through which knowledge of Muslims has been produced in the past two decades.British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End offers an alternative reading of these communities and how their political subjectivities emerge. Drawing on historical events, field research and existing academic work, the book aims to address the multiple ways British Bangladeshi Muslim men and women create their relationship with dress and language. This is the first book to empirically examine how dress and language shape the identities of British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End, using in-depth analysis useful for anyone interested in the study of British Muslims broadly. While the book focuses on a specific Muslim community, the emerging themes demonstrate the interconnectedness of Muslims locally and globally and how they manifest their identities through dress and language.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

How can school communications become more accessible to multilingual families? In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Dr Agnes Bodis talks to Professor Margaret Kettle about the Multilingual Glossary of School-based Terms. This is list of school-related terms selected and translated to help multilingual families connect with schools. The research-based glossary was developed jointly with the Queensland Department of Education, Education Queensland school personnel, Multicultural Australia, and community group members and families.For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanisation of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harboured profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyse these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Dr. Hannah Pollin-Galay explores Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions.Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) investigates Khurbn Yiddish through the lenses of cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation. Analysing fragments of language consciousness left behind from the camps and ghettos alongside the postwar journeys of three intellectuals—Nachman Blumental, Israel Kaplan and Elye Spivak—Dr. Pollin-Galay seeks to understand why people chose Yiddish lexicography as a means of witnessing the Holocaust. She then turns to the Khurbn Yiddish words themselves, focusing on terms related to theft, the German-Yiddish encounter and the erotic female body. Here, the author unearths new perspectives on how Jews experienced daily life under Nazi occupation, while raising questions about language and victimhood. Lastly, the book explores how writers turned ghetto and camp slang into art—highlighting the poetry and fiction of K. Tzetnik (Yehiel Di-Nur) and Chava Rosenfarb. Ultimately, Occupied Words speaks to broader debates about cultural genocide, asking how we might rethink the concept of genocide through the framework of language.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

How do street-level bureaucrats in Austria’s public service deal with linguistic diversity? In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Dr Clara Holzinger (University of Vienna) about her PhD research investigating how employment officers deal with the day-to-day communication challenges arising when clients have low levels of German language proficiency.For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi (Columbia UP, 2024), Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with written text artifacts and a new approach to theorizing and writing Hindi literary history. He responds to recent developments in quantitative and qualitative approaches to book history - including tools developed within the digital humanities - by applying new as well as traditional techniques of paleography, codicology, and bibliography to handwritten copies of romances, epics, songbooks, treatises, and scriptures. To make the book more accessible and enjoyable for cross-disciplinary readers, Williams bookends (so to speak) each chapter with the story of a specific artifact - an ascetic's notebook, a Mughal general's storybook, a pandit's textbook, or a guru's copy of a sacred scripture - in order to pose and then apply the questions about writing, textuality, and performance that the chapter addresses. By combining distant and close reading that is mindful of the materiality of these manuscripts, Tyler reveals literary, intellectual, and religious practices that we would otherwise be unable to see. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language