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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Invention Of The Native Speaker, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio
The Invention Of The Native Speaker, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio
Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications
This paper argues that employing the designations “native speaker” and “native language” unreflectively is to engage in a gesture of othering that operates on an axis of empowerment and disempowerment. Bonfiglio examines the ideological legacy of the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of “mother tongue” and “native speaker” by historicizing their linguistic development. He traces the construction of ethnolinguistic nationalism, a composite of national language, identity, geography, and race, which informed the philology of the early modern era and culminated most divisively in the race-conscious discourses of the 19th century. Bonfiglio makes the case that scholarship should scrutinize the tendency to …
Philanthropy As A Virtue In Late Antiquity And The Middle Ages, G. Scott Davis
Philanthropy As A Virtue In Late Antiquity And The Middle Ages, G. Scott Davis
Religious Studies Faculty Publications
"Philanthropy," "charity," and related concepts were well known to late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Rulers, wealthy individuals and, early on, the Christian church founded hospitals, distributed food, and established forms of relief for the needy of various sorts throughout the period. The problem comes in interpreting these activities, their motives, and their goals. Is the philanthropia of a pre-Christian philosopher of a piece with the agape, or Christian love, of a fourth-century bishop? When the Roman emperor provides bread and circuses, what does he intend and why does he do it? Does the twelfth-century nobleman intend the same? As …