Rhizomes: Connecting Languages, Cultures and Literatures

Product Description This volume, Rhizomes, is a challenging path into a very multidisciplinary set of papers. Papers range across cultural studies and film, to applied linguistics to sociolinguistics; and as gathered in this one volume the result of postgraduate student research of a very high order they force readers to think critically of disciplines, their assumed boundaries and most importantly, the usefulness of assuming the enduring value of such boundaries. This is not to say that anything goes, but the diversity of areas under scrutiny means that sharper rethinking of ones own comfort zones is necessarily one key outcome when confronted with a volume like this. This is one advantage of the selected papers besides the obvious one of having at your finger tips a simple way of delving into a challenging diversity. This is a wonderful collection of papers, which demonstrates the power and vitality of contemporary literary and cultural research. The scope of the papers, the diversity of the subject matter, and the willingness of their authors to work across disciplinary boundaries work together to create an exemplary collection of research for the twentyfirst century multidisciplinary, multigeneric, and multimodal, like 21st century texts and media. Greg Hainges opening paper sets the stage for the diverse and engaging papers that follow. With his own examples of rhizomatics drawn from music, Greg immediately has the reader acknowledging the multidisciplinary and multimodality of contemporary texts and so the need for research that can address the richness and complexity of these texts. In Part 1, we have two papers that address the issue of the limitations of conventional research methodology in their own fields (language acquisition, film studies) and propose alternative and more productive methodologies. The exciting thing about this section is that these are fields normally considered very different and without much to say to one another and yet the combination works to create a dialogue that extends across these and many other fields of research. Most importantly, both challenge the dichotomising of research and analytical methods that has worked to impoverish their fields and the research on which it is based. Part 2 presents papers on a range of marginalised social positionings and experiences and in the process demonstrates both the power of research to uncover what has been ignored or elided in contemporary histories (how many westerners know of the long history of Chinese women in film? Or of an Aboriginal Taiwanese literature?) as well as the power of new perspectives, new ways of thinking the research subject, to open up areas of study such as dating manuals and country music, both conventionally dismissed as inherently trivial and/or sexist. In Part 3, the papers all play brilliantly with the notion of connectivity, demonstrating for readers the inextricability of texts and meaning systems (verbal, visual and other) with the cultural contexts in which they operate and so the diverse ways they may be deployed. These papers banish forever any reliance on a formalist reading or methodology for the analysis of text and meaning! And, again, the range of subjectmatter is breathtaking and argues the need for crossdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research practice. Part 4 takes the reader into the realm of transformations, challenging the ways in which textual and systemic changes articulate profound cultural changes in the societies that produce them. So we learn about grammatical interventions in the Chinese language as feminine and neuter pronouns are added to the genderfree Chinese language and consider the major cultural change that both caused this change and is subsequently produced by it. We consider the ways in which cinema has evolved as an artform, under the influence About the Author Nathalie Ramire holds qualifications in Englis