Some Thoughts on the Role of the Critical Intellectual in Contemporary Germany

The paper starts by relating the notion of the "critical intellectual" to the notion of "agent of social change" on the one hand, and to other potential types of agents of change on the other: women in revolt, artists, exiles and queer agencies. Proceeding to a brief characterisation of the socio-cultural and political context "Germany", we shall explore some meanings of attributes such as post-modern and consumer for contemporary German society and culture, arguing that these are cultural and economic terms, which denote current forms of expression for what continues to be a capitalist economy and a bourgeois democracy. One recurrent question will be what the contours might be of the figure of the "critical intellectual" under present day conditions. This is followed by a brief sketch of the meanings of "kritische(r) Intellektuelle(r)" in a historical ("geistesgeschichtlicher") perspective, mainly from the enlightenment onwards. We shall move on to a methodologically very different, but complementary, perspective, which is the consideration of current usage of the term with the help of large-scale electronic corpora of spoken language and an on-line search on the web. As we shall see, an important share and quality of the relevant meanings of a term lies in current usage, which may or may not be directly related to what we know from the history of ideas and/ or etymology. I shall then use examples from my own professional field of work for an exploration of what the role of a critical intellectual in a German context might be, discussing the field of natural language technologies. These examples will illustrate the fact that such a role has to involve participation in, rather than exclusively detached contemplation of, the sphere of production. They will also show that the role of the critical intellectual is, indeed, a locus of contestation in several respects. We finally broaden our perspective into a wider set of questions relating to the role of the critical intellectual, in German (and other) contexts. One of these questions will revolve around the notions of "values" and "ethics": Do we assume that the role of the critical intellectual is inherently connected to some systems of values, either in the sense of the enlightenment, and/or Marxism, and/or some other Weltanschauungs-system, or else do we believe that the position of a critical intellectual could be defined within some entirely market-driven ideology? Is there something like "truth", "progress" or "justice", other than what is successful on the market? Another one of these questions will focus on whether we can identify some force that motivates change in societies, and cultures, and what the role of the critical intellectual might be vis-à-vis such a force. One of our arguments here will be that among such forces may well be "contradictions", that this category of "contradiction" is in no way exhausted by the category of "difference" as currently debated. It will be argued, finally, that whereas the figure of the "critical intellectual", as we have tried to sketch it here, may be situated in a German context, its essential characteristics defy any attempts at claiming it for any one particular culture

Further Evidence Of An Incompatibility Allele System In The Complex‐Heterozygotes Of Oenothera

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141510/1/ajb210579.pd

Methodological cross-fertilization: Empirical methodologies in (computational) linguistics and translation studies

Recent years have seen attempts at improving empirical methodologies in con- trastive linguistics and in translation studies through interdisciplinary collaboration with multi-layer corpus architectures in computational linguistics. At the same time, explanatory background for empirical results is increasingly sought in more sophisticated models of language contact in typologically based contrastive linguistics on the one hand, and in language processing in situations of multilinguality, including translation, on the other. Three attempts are discussed to narrow the significant gap between the high level of abstraction of such models, and data provided through shallow analysis and annotation of electronic corpora. The first of these operationalizes the high level terms “explicitness/explicitation” in terms of lexicogrammatical data available in a contrastive corpus, treating them as dependent variables and attempting to explain their variation in terms of the independent variables controlled for in the corpus architecture. The second attempt starts from the same corpus architecture, yet includes annotations about textual cohesion in its operationalizations and develops increasingly fine-grained hypotheses to limit search space and variation between independent and dependent variables so as to get closer to causal explanations rather than explanations in terms of co-variation. The third attempt intersects corpus data of the type outlined before with data from processing studies, aiming at an integration and mutual explanation of product and process data. Our focus here is on methodological issues involved in integrating data of such different types and granularity in an overall empirical research architecture

A Contribution To The Population Biology Of Oenothera Grandiflora L’Her.

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142264/1/ajb211985.pd

Allozyme, Si Gene, Cytological, And Morphological Polymorphisms In A Population Of Oenothera Biennis

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137516/1/evo00989.pd

Phylogenetic Studies In Oenothera: Further Analysis Of Plants From The Southeastern United States

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141025/1/ajb210440.pd

Schulbezogene Motivierungspraktiken von Eltern

Das vorliegende Open-Access-Buch untersucht die sprachlichen Motivierungspraktiken von Eltern und zeigt Handlungsoptionen auf, wie diese verbessert werden könnten. Eltern üben mit ihren Einstellungen, Aspirationen und Leistungserwartungen einen großen Einfluss auf die schulbezogenen Wertorientierungen und leistungsbezogenen Selbstbilder ihrer Kinder aus. Aber wie gehen Eltern konkret vor, wenn sie ihre Kinder in häuslichen Gesprächen für Schule und Unterricht zu motivieren suchen – namentlich, wenn die Grundschulempfehlung nicht ihren Aspirationen zu entsprechen droht

Macro- and Micro-level Approaches to Translated Texts -Methodological Contradictions or Mutually Enriching Perspectives?

The journal Target recently hosted a methodological debate on “essentialist vs. nonessentialist approaches to translation” (cf. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies. 12:1-13:2), in the course of which several basic methodological orientations in translation studies and related areas were discussed. I shall set out by reminding us that the debate between “essentialism” and “non-essentialism” can be understood as yet another instantiation of a wider debate between “macro-level/top down” and “micro-level/bottom up” methodologies in many disciplines concerned with socio-cultural and socio-semiotic phenomena. I wish to argue that the continuing existence of these different methodological orientations is partly due to the fact that the socio-cultural and socio-semiotic phenomena in question are themselves structured into layers of abstraction, instantiation and specification, related in complex ways by both top-down and bottom-up processes. There is thus nothing wrong or intrinsically worrying about the existence of different methodological orientations, provided that research communities working on these different layers still have enough of a shared concept of discourse, and are thus able to transmit their discourses across layers. I shall argue that a cornerstone of this shared concept of discourse has to be a general concern with how (translated and otherwise interlingual) texts work, this concern being logically and methodologically prior to a concern with the further questions why and with what effects texts function. The question of what translation is can be very differently answered from different perspectives, but here as well, the question of how should be at the centre of a shared concern in studies of translation. I shall then go on to identify what I believe to be helpful, and what I believe to be less helpful contributions to methodological debates between macro- and microlevel approaches to translated texts. I shall generally warn against the extremes of top-down abstract discourses which are not checked against any empirical data on the one hand, and against excessive bottom-up empiricism which disregards the fact that after all we are concerned with a meaningful object (text) on the other. I shall thus argue that at its very heart, the (translated and otherwise interlingual) text is a linguistic, or otherwise multimodallysemiotic, object, and that our methodologies have to maintain contact with their linguistic, and more broadly semiotic, base. Recent work by Juliane House will be discussed as an example of a positive integration of macro- and micro-level approaches