Download or read book Pomona The Future of English written by Basil de Sélincourt and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before discussing the future of English, one is forced, in the bustle of these scientific days, to inquire whether language itself has a future. “We are working”, wrote Mr. J. B. S. Haldane, in his brilliant little essay Daedalus, “towards a condition when any two persons on earth will be able to be completely present to one another in not more than a twenty-fourth of a second.” Is speech quick-moving enough to keep a place in such a picture? When everything else has learned the speed of lightning, will the transference of our thought be likely to lag behind and is it not a waste of time to ask if future generations will speak German, or Japanese, or Esperanto, when they may not need to speak at all? Scientific knowledge is a delightful plaything. Working with measurable quantities, it can treat the future like a ball of string to be unwound. Though life is all wonder and surprise, though the world always turns out stranger and richer than we expected, we know that the future will be linked mechanically with the present as the present is with the past. The machinery of human existence fifty years hence will be the practical application of possibilities known to-day. There is basis, then, for a certain kind of scientific prediction. The future of language is in a different case, because the mechanical element in it is subsidiary. It is conjecturable, of course, that it may one day be superseded, that men may learn to transfuse their meanings by a kind of controlled telepathy, mind meeting mind. But to do this they would need to be able to think without words, and language, as we now know it, is not for communication only: it is the very framework of our thought. It is part of our lives; and what our lives are to be we can tell only by living them. A good deal has been learned of late about the evolution of language—enough to modify very much our views as to the influences that really count, the habits which conduce to accuracy or to vitality. But there is a long way between understanding after the event and understanding before it. It is with the different languages of the world as with the different species of animals: once they have come into being, one easily sees which way they came, one cannot see in the least which way they are going. Of all whom change awaits, man seems likely to change most and most quickly. Whole nations are stirred to hope and restlessness. Never did the future beckon more enticingly than it does now. Science lays a finger upon the springs of life and dreams of a race to be made perfect, not by the murderous processes of haphazard struggle, but by the swift and decisive elaboration of a conscious design. The man of the future, we hear, may differ as much from ourselves as we do from monkeys. Inventive eugenics, new as motor-cars, is to inaugurate a still more drastic revolution and make of us, in the near future, whatever we may wish to be.
Download or read book Proceedings of the British Academy Volume 117 written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 117 of the Proceedings of the British Academy contains 13 lectures delivered at the British Academy in 2001.
Download or read book Imagined Futures written by Max Saunders and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study provides the first substantial history and analysis of the To-Day and To-Morrow series of 110 books, published by Kegan Paul Trench and Trübner (and E. P. Dutton in the USA) from 1923 to 1931, in which writers chose a topic, described its present, and predicted its future. Contributors included J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Sylvia Pankhurst, Hugh McDiarmid, James Jeans, J. D. Bernal, Winifred Holtby, André Maurois, and many others. The study combines a comprehensive account of its interest, history, and range with a discussion of its key concerns, tropes, and influence. The argument focuses on science and technology, not only as the subject of many of the volumes, but also as method—especially through the paradigm of the human sciences—applied to other disciplines; and as a source of metaphors for representing other domains. It also includes chapters on war, technology, cultural studies, and literature and the arts. This book aims to reinstate the series as a vital contribution to the writing of modernity, and to reappraise modernism's relation to the future, establishing a body of progressive writing which moves beyond the discourses of post-Darwinian degeneration and post-war disenchantment, projecting human futures rather than mythic or classical pasts. It also shows how, as a co-ordinated body of futurological writing, the series is also revealing about the nature and practices of modern futurology itself.
Download or read book Books and Notes written by Los Angeles County Public Library and published by . This book was released on 1926 with total page 1364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Utopia written by David Ayers and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopian hope and dystopian despair are characteristic features of modernism and the avant-garde. Readings of the avant-garde have frequently sought to identify utopian moments coded in its works and activities as optimistic signs of a possible future social life, or as the attempt to preserve hope against the closure of an emergent dystopian present. The fourth volume of the EAM series, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, casts light on the history, theory and actuality of the utopian and dystopian strands which run through European modernism and the avant-garde from the late 19th to the 21st century. The book’s varied and carefully selected contributions, written by experts from around 20 countries, seek to answer such questions as: · how have modernism and the avant-garde responded to historical circumstance in mapping the form of possible futures for humanity? · how have avant-garde and modernist works presented ideals of living as alternatives to the present? · how have avant-gardists acted with or against the state to remodel human life or to resist the instrumental reduction of life by administration and industrialisation?
Download or read book English in the Future written by John Hubert Jagger and published by . This book was released on 1940 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Achates written by W. Eric Harris and published by London : K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Company, Limited ; New York : E.P. Dutton & Company. This book was released on 1929 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mrs Fisher written by Robert Graves and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New Statesman written by and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 932 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Columbia written by George Godwin and published by London : K. Paul, Trench, Trubner ; New York : E.P. Dutton & Company. This book was released on 1928 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nation written by and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Daedalus written by John Burdon Sanderson Haldane and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Journal of Education written by and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Nation and Athen um written by and published by . This book was released on 1926 with total page 956 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Autolycus written by Ronald Grey Gordon and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Private Library written by and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
