Unspeakable names

Genital Mutilation — The Unspeakable Atrocity

39 MOST recent estimates indicate that 48,000,000 African women, ranging in age from a few days to beyond puberty, are currently victims of ritual genital mutilation. Though it is spoken of in Africa as “circumcision” it is actually quite distinct from the removal of the foreskin of a boy. Annie de Villeneuve gives an eye-witness account of what actually happens to girls : “Among the Somalis th...

Speakable and Unspeakable, Past and Future

A volume in honour of a visionary thinker such as John Archibald Wheeler is a rare license to exercise in the kind of speculation and exploration for which Wheeler is famous, but which most of the rest of us usually feel we had better keep to ourselves. We have all – even those of us who never had the fortune to work directly with him – been inspired and motivated by Wheeler's creativity and op...

fictional names

fictional names have been one of the most important and serious topics in the contemporary philosophy of language and metaphysics.several questions such as “do fictional names refer to any objects?” “are fictional characters existent objects?” have resulted in a considerable literature of philosophy. in this essay, we will follow two objectives. first we will describe and elaborate the ideas ...

geographical names

a place-name or a toponym is a word used to indicate, denote or identify a geographic locality. place-names are formed in the course of history of a region and are affected by various linguistic, social, political and cultural events. toponymy is the taxonomic study of place-names, based on etymological, historical and geographical information. this paper first defines toponym and topnymy and i...

Writing the unspeakable: Fanny Burney's mastectomy and the fictive body.