In his book Jewish Bible Translations: Personalities, Passions, Politics, Progress (Jewish Publication Society, 2020), Leonard Greenspoon is the first to examine thoroughly Jewish Bible translations from the third century BCE to our day. It is an overdue corrective of an important story that has been regularly omitted or downgraded in other histories of Bible translation.Examining a wide range of translations over twenty-four centuries, Greenspoon delves into the historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious contexts of versions in eleven languages: Arabic, Aramaic, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish. He profiles many Jewish translators, among them Buber, Hirsch, Kaplan, Leeser, Luzzatto, Mendelssohn, Orlinsky, and Saadiah Gaon, framing their aspirations within the Jewish and larger milieus in which they worked.Greenspoon differentiates their principles, styles, and techniques—for example, their choice to emphasize either literal reflections of the Hebrew or distinctive elements of the vernacular language—and their underlying rationales. As he highlights distinctive features of Jewish Bible translations, he offers new insights regarding their shared characteristics and their limits. Additionally, Greenspoon shows how profoundly Jewish translators and interpreters influenced the style and diction of the King James Bible.Accessible and authoritative for all from beginners to scholars, Jewish Bible Translations enables readers to make their own informed evaluations of individual translations and to holistically assess Bible translation within Judaism.Leonard Greenspoon is Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization and a professor of theology and of classical and Near Eastern studies at Creighton University.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

We are now living in the richest age of public memory. From museums and memorials to the vast digital infrastructure of the internet, access to the past is only a click away. Even so, the methods and technologies created by scientists, espionage agencies, and information management coders and programmers have drastically delimited the ways that communities across the globe remember and forget our wealth of retrievable knowledge.In Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age (University of Alabama Press, 2020), Nathan R. Johnson charts turning points where concepts of memory became durable in new computational technologies and modern memory infrastructures took hold. He works through both familiar and esoteric memory technologies—from the card catalog to the book cart to Zatocoding and keyword indexing—as he delineates histories of librarianship and information science and provides a working vocabulary for understanding rhetoric’s role in contemporary memory practices.This volume draws upon the twin concepts of memory infrastructure and mnemonic technê to illuminate the seemingly opaque wall of mundane algorithmic techniques that determine what is worth remembering and what should be forgotten. Each chapter highlights a conflict in the development of twentieth-century librarianship and its rapidly evolving competitor, the discipline of information science. As these two disciplines progressed, they contributed practical techniques and technologies for making sense of explosive scientific advancement in the wake of World War II. Taming postwar science became part and parcel of practices and information technologies that undergird uncountable modern communication systems, including search engines, algorithms, and databases for nearly every national clearinghouse of the twenty-first century.Nathan R. Johnson is assistant professor of Rhetoric at the University of South Florida. His work has appeared in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Poroi, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture.Connect with your host, Lee Pierce (they & she) on social and Gmail @rhetoriclee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

The traditional Indian method of learning Sanskrit is through oral transmission, by first memorizing texts and then learning their meaning. The Western academic approach methodically teaches the alphabet, declensions, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary building. Zoë Slatoff-Ponté's Yogavataranam integrates the traditional and academic approaches for a full and practical experience of Sanskrit study. Yogavataranam: The Translation of Yoga (North Point Press, 2015) approaches language systematically and at the same time allows students to read important and relevant texts as soon as possible, while emphasizing proper pronunciation through its audio accompaniment. This new approach joins theory and practice to invoke an active experience of the philosophy, the practice, and the culture that together inform the multiplicity of meanings contained within the single and powerful word "yoga." By the way, you can study Sanskrit with Zoë.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In her new book Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips (Ohio State Press, 2021) Susan Kirtley examines female-created comics that were nationally syndicated starting in the late 1970s-2010. Kirtley uncovers the understudied and developing history of these strips, defining and exploring the ramifications of this expression of women’s roles at a time of great change in history and in comic art. This impressive, engaging, and timely study illustrates how these comics express the complexities of women’s experiences, especially as such experiences were shaped by shifting and often competing notions of womanhood and feminism. Including the comics of Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy), Nicole Hollander (Sylvia), Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek), Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From), Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), and Jan Eliot (Stone Soup), Typical Girls is an important history of the representation of womanhood and women’s rights in popular comic strips. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Why is the term "openly gay" so widely used but "openly straight" is not? What are the unspoken assumptions behind terms like "male nurse," "working mom," and "white trash"? Offering a revealing and provocative look at the word choices we make every day without even realizing it, Taken for Granted exposes the subtly encoded ways we talk about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, social status, and more.In Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable (Princeton UP, 2018), Eviatar Zerubavel describes how the words we use―such as when we mark "the best female basketball player" but leave her male counterpart unmarked―provide telling clues about the things many of us take for granted. By marking "women's history" or "Black History Month," we are also reinforcing the apparent normality of the history of white men. When we mark something as being special or somehow noticeable, that which goes unmarked―such as maleness, whiteness, straightness, and able-bodiedness―is assumed to be ordinary by default. Zerubavel shows how this tacit normalizing of certain identities, practices, and ideas helps to maintain their cultural dominance―including the power to dictate what others take for granted.A little book about a very big idea, Taken for Granted draws our attention to what we implicitly assume to be normal―and in the process unsettles the very notion of normality.Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

At the intersection of epistemology and philosophy of language is a puzzle. First, it seems we don’t need less evidence for a claim that we know something if the practical importance of the knowledge claim shifts. Second, it seems we shouldn’t assert that we know something if we don’t. Third, it seems that if the practical importance of a knowledge claim shifts, we should back up our claim with more evidence. So is knowledge really insensitive to shifts in practical stakes? Or should the knowledge norm of assertion be abandoned? In Shifty Speech and Independent Thought (Oxford University Press, 2021), Mona Simion critically considers various types of responses to the Shiftiness Dilemma before defending her own solution. On her view, assertions obey both epistemic and non-epistemic norms, and what is permissible to assert shifts depending on all-things-considered judgments that rely on a contextually determined mix of these norms. Simion, who is lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow, generalizes her approach to other types of epistemically relevant speech acts, and argues that only moral assertion requires special treatment, due to differences in audience understanding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Political Theorist Robert Bartlett spoke with the New Books in Political Science podcast about two of his recent publications, which take on translating the work of two distinct classical thinkers, Aristotle and Aristophanes. In discussing these thinkers, we talked about two of Aristophanes’ earliest extant plays, The Acharnians and The Knights. We also discussed Aristotle’s text, The Art of Rhetoric. All three of these works focus on the interaction of the words spoken by a public individual, and how those words are also received and considered by an audience, especially the citizens of the state. This conversation took us to ancient Athens and some of the earliest western thinking about the interrelationship between political rhetoric and emotions, and how these connections can be both useful and dangerous, especially for democracies.Bartlett explains that Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is an important component of Aristotle’s thinking about politics, and one of his later works. The Art of Rhetoric explores the idea and art of persuasion, and Aristotle provides a defense of rhetoric for the polis. Bartlett also examines the way that Aristotle’s Rhetoric, while attacked by Thomas Hobbes in his writing, as he does with so many of Aristotle’s works, actually provides the basis for Hobbes’ understanding of the passions, and thus the basis for Hobbes’ own political theory. In an effort to examine the way that rhetoric and persuasion work, especially within politics, Aristotle delineates a clear account of the passions in Book II of The Rhetoric, and this, combined with the three modes of persuasion (ethos, pathos, logos), are key to considering how rhetoric can be used, for good or ill. It is inevitable that political rhetoric will come forward in societies, however large or small, simple or complex. Thus, Aristotle’s work explains not only how to best make use of rhetoric, it also explains the ways in which rhetoric can be misused, abused, and how it can threaten the society when used corruptly, especially by demagogues. Bartlett’s translation of Aristotle’s text guides the reader with clarity and accessibility, and his interpretative essay explores these important dimensions of understanding how rhetoric works, how it accesses our emotions, and how it can be used corruptly. This is particularly important to consider in our current political climates, in the United States and elsewhere, as we have seen the rise of demagogues and the inflaming of passions within the political sphere. Against Demagogues: What Aristophanes Can Teach Us about the Perils of Populism and the Fate of Democracy (University of California Press, 2020) examines many of the same themes as Aristotle explores in The Rhetoric, but in Aristophanes’ work, Bartlett notes, the use of comedy and narrative skewer the demagogue and his abuse of rhetoric. Once again Bartlett has translated the ancient Greek work, in this case, the two plays, The Acharnians and The Knights, and has provided an interpretative essay of each play. Against Demagogues also provides the contemporary reader with considerations of Aristophanes’ relevance, especially in his attack on demagogues. As Bartlett notes, the term “demagogue” itself only become negative in its valence when Aristophanes uses it this way in The Knights.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Listen to this interview of Iain McGee, a PhD student in the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of Bristol (UK), where he also teaches Applied Linguistics. We talk about his book Understanding the Paragraph and Paragraphing (Equinox, 2018), the paragraph as a break in the text, about the paragraph as a unit of the text, and about the ¶.Iain McGee : "Often writing instruction in classroom environments is readerless in terms of the actual text and in terms of who will engage with it. Many writers in classrooms know that the only reader will be the teacher. But when it comes to writing for purposeful reasons, then we will be thinking of the reader, and the reader will have certain (as Michael Hoey puts it) textual colligation expectations, that means that the reader will be expecting paragraphs to flow in a certain way, will be expecting certain ways of organizing that text. And so, for the writer in that environment, the writer needs to be aware of those discourse-specific ways in which we communicate. One of the points I make in the book is that, Alexander Bain and his work in particular never really considered the reader and as such, made rather prescriptive, one-size-fits-all comments on what good paragraphing is. But in reality, the genre very much determines how we will go about writing our paragraphs, for example, how many sentences we might have, or the kinds of links between the paragraphs, for example, those links will be very different between reading an article in a newspaper and reading a journal article. And so, that sensitivity to genre is one of the focal points of my research, and I want to draw attention to the fact that we need to understand genres better so that we can make comments about the paragraph which are more intelligent, more specific, and more relevant to the actual readers of real genres and to the writers engaged with those genres."Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

James Fredal is Associate Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University. The recipient of multiple awards for his work in rhetorical theory and history, Fredal is the author in 2006 of Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Artistry from Solon to Demosthenes and now The Enthymeme: Syllogism, Reasoning and Narrative in Ancient Greek Rhetoric (Penn State UP, 2020).Central to rhetorical theory, the enthymeme is most often defined as a truncated syllogism. Suppressing a premise that the audience already knows, this rhetorical device relies on the audience to fill in the missing information, thereby making the argument more persuasive. James Fredal argues that this view of the enthymeme is wrong. Presenting a new exegesis of Aristotle and classic texts of Attic oratory, Fredal shows that the standard reading of Aristotle's enthymeme is inaccurate--and that Aristotle himself distorts what enthymemes are and how they work.From close analysis of the Rhetoric, Topics, and Analytics, Fredal finds that Aristotle's enthymeme is, in fact, not syllogistic and is different from the enthymeme as it was used by Attic orators such as Lysias and Isaeus. Fredal argues that the enthymeme, as it was originally understood and used, is a technique of storytelling, primarily forensic storytelling, aimed at eliciting from the audience an inference about a narrative. According to Fredal, narrative rather than formal logic is the seedbed of the enthymeme and of rhetoric more broadly.The Enthymeme reassesses a fundamental doctrine of rhetorical instruction, clarifies the viewpoints of the tradition, and presents a new form of rhetoric for further study and use. This groundbreaking book will be welcomed by scholars and students of classical rhetoric, the history of rhetoric, and rhetorical theory as well as communications studies, classical studies, and classical philosophy.Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Catriona McKinnon is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on climate ethics and environmental justice. Much of her recent work aims at addressing denialism about climate change.The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language