"Edith Wharton's finest achievement." -- Elizabeth Hardwick The Custom of the Country may well be have been the lynchpin that made Edith Wharton's career become the phenomenon that comes so easily to memory across so many decades. Oh, it's of a cloth with all her work -- there's no mistaking that a page of her writing came from her and not someone else -- but on a certain level, this novel is a mean book, and the meanness is warranted.

Product Description: Parallel Realities Kola and Peaches palace lifestyle in Colombia comes crashing down when the Federales kick in Eduardo's front door. Forced to flee South America with her niece and return to New York, Kola feels lost without her twin sister...read more

Product Description: Relevance Theory provides an original theoretical framework to capture the complex nature and intricacies of the processes underlying ostensive communication. The model has been in constant development for the last 30 years, and this study attempts to contribute to it by challenging free enrichment as an important explicature-generation procedure...read more

Product Description: Objects are essential for how, together, people create and experience social life and relate to the physical environment around them. Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity presents studies which use video recordings of real-life settings to explore how objects feature in social interaction and activity...read more

Product Description: Doing more than one thing at the same time – a phenomenon that is often called ‘multitasking’ – is characteristic to many situations in everyday and professional life. Although we all experience it, its real time features remain understudied...read more

Product Description: How do people use language, gestures and the materialenvironment around themfor interacting in mobile situations? Interaction and Mobility brings together international scholars who use video-recordings from real-life everyday settings to study how people interact in diverse mobile situations as part of activities such as walking, driving, flying, dancing and gaming...read more

Product Description: In response to the need for reliable results from natural language processing, this book presents an original way of decomposing a language(s) in a microscopic manner by means of intra/inter‑language norms and divergences, going progressively from languages as systems to the linguistic, mathematical and computational models, which being based on a constructive approach are inherently traceable...read more

Product Description: In the early twentieth century, Ferdinand de Saussure envisioned "a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life". About a century later, a science has emerged that is very much in the spirit of that envisioned by de Saussure...read more

Product Description: The development of digital media presents a unique opportunity to reconsider what communication is, and what individuals, groups, and societies might hope to accomplish through new as well as old media. At a time when digital media still provoke both utopian and dystopian views of their likely consequences, Klaus Bruhn Jensen places these ‘new’ media in a comparative perspective together with ‘old’ mass media and face-to-face communication, restating the two classic questions of media studies: what do media do to people, and what do people do with media? Media Convergence makes a distinction between three general types of media: the human body enabling communication in the flesh; the technically reproduced means of mass communication; and the digital technologies facilitating interaction one-to-one, one-to-many, as well as many-to-many...read more

Product Description: Be like Bill Teach Yourself The Clinton Factor shows you how to cultivate a charismatic persona in your working life using the 42nd president as your model. The book concentrates on three areas of communicating in which President Clinton excels: story, status, and focus.

This is one of the most demanding courses for Communication users, and THEORIES OF COMMUNICATION is considered the seminal text in the field. Littlejohn presents theories in a clear and accessible writing style while maintaining the high level of scholarship and analysis.

Product Description: Featuring a resource guide to the Top 100 Blogs, this title is a timely exploration of the influence of online journals and commentary that, according to Bill Gates, are the biggest thing since the 1995 Internet craze.

Focuses criticism upon the writings of Kenneth Burke."This is a powerful book. . . . We owe a debt of gratitude to James Chesebro. He and a few others have seen to it that Kenneth Burke's unique thought got a full and fair hearing from a new generation of scholars. This is because Chesebro has done what many others have failed to do. He has treated Burke's work not as a closed system but as a kind of resource that must be shaped anew for every challenge or question."This volume is the result of an open call for papers. Forty-three were submitted and considered by a selection committee that included Bernard Brock, James Klumpp, Dale Bertelson and Timothy Thompson. . . . Chesebro organized the volume into four movements [that] represent the ways in which Burke's system might continue to act as a fructifying influence in contemporary thought."—Burke Book Reviews, Kenneth Burke Society Newsletter

Product Description: Intentions in Communication brings together major theorists from artificial intelligence and computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology whose work develops the foundations for an account of the role of intentions in a comprehensive theory of communication...read more

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Product Description: An innovative text that approaches complex concepts with relative ease and simplicity, this new work by internationally-known Graziella Tonfoni takes the reader on an architectural excursion that is the metaphorical representation of the components of the expression of knowledge...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Demonstrates how to avoid verbal confrontation with nondefensive communication techniques that promote clear, compassionate, and respectful communication without need for power struggles (view table of contents)

Product Description: The language/action perspective was introduced into the field of information systems in the early 1980s, and provided a new basic paradigm for Information Systems Design. This workshop examined the foundations of the language/action perspective, and sought some convergence on the formal and logical underpinnings of communication models...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Computers, Commmunication, and Mental Models is a far-ranging, focused treatment of the cognitive and behavioural issues in computer-mediated communication, knowledge representation and computer-supported co- operative work. It is also an argued development of the theoretical bases for treating computerized tools as intermediaries in the communication of mental maps between tool builders and users...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Conville has assembled a collection of essays that share a consideration of structure as it manifests itself in human communication. Personal stories, accounts of events, narratives, diaries, and unstructured interviews are ever more widely appreciated today as valid data for understanding human cognition and human interaction...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Personal privacy is one of the preoccupations of the 1990s but, according to the author, society is in danger of ignoring one of the most fundamental implications of the privacy debate - those of individual autonomy, collective agency and bureaucratic control...read more