Cultures and Texts: Internet, Intertext and Interculture

This book was initially planned as a record of a series of lectures to my first classes of Bulgarian Philology, English Philology and Applied Linguistics, and Public Relations undergraduate and graduate students at the South West University of Bulgaria where, back in the early 1990s, we were to lay the foundations of an academic tradition in a fast changing world. It was meant as a record of the fast restructuring of our minds and attitudes in time of economic and sociopolitical transition and cultural transcendence, seen from a changing Bulgarian perspective where the world came upon our horizon English-speaking.

The outcome in terms of experience and experiment over 20 years now is vast. Now I feel the urgent need to share this outcome and start with this book. It has the nearest task of fulfilling the promise to my earlier students, some of whom are my colleagues now, while summarizing our effort and making it useful for the upcoming courses with a generation that was set as a target and now is a source of further insight for frontier studies, while pragmatic enough to search for a tangible academic product...

Content
Preface
The Bulgarian Perspective

• What is the book about and who is it meant for?
• Academic courses starting on the grounds of the ideas this book shares:

List of ilustrations
Intoduction

• When the world suddenly expanded
• Overview of interdisciplinary background

Internet
Chapter One: Outlines of E-Culture

• The Talkative Web
• The experience of the www and the fact os its expansion
• A Systematic Integrated Approach to the Net (SIAN)
• Definitions of terms by far or an overview of the names given to our objects of interest in the early 2000s
• The Human Individual as a Network of Social relation
• Fears ans Hermeneutics: Science vs Magic
• E-Culture
• E-kind
• Antinomies and Controversies in the Warring Webs
• Integrity of the Self

Chapter Two: Sterotypes and Metaphors

• Our subject of debate here is Metaphor
• The need of stereotype - the loss of a stereotype
• Or When there were the Winds of change
• The Metaphors of Internet
• A metaphor is never innocent
• Mentality and metaphor
• The Metaphors of E-Existence in Cyberspace
• In the World Wide Web the conduit metaphor branches into more existential types
• Metaphorical structures and cross-metaphorical correspondence
• The conceptual grounds of the existential metaphors of cyberspace

Chapter Three
The English Speaking Web
Intertext
Chapter Four: Nodes of Transcendence

• Legends Approached from a General Cuktural Perspective
• Travel Legends and E-space
• Legendary Space and Travel
• Legends in E-culture
• Bulgarian Legends of Transborder Nature
• Building Sets of Srchetypes
• Popular culture: a play of fantasy in the shadowy fold of Balkan history
• We Shall Tell Them By Their Names
• Two-dimensional Context
• One-dimensional Journalism
• History - A Tale of Vampires

Chapter Five: E-folklore In Tale and Game

• The transformations of practical philosophy in the world of computer games and the game adaptions of children's literature
• Opposition to PC Games
• Cultural Outlines of the PC Games
• PC games and virtual reality
• Imagination as the freedom of expressing truth
• E-folklore: rituals and heroes
• Text codes and symbols
• Genres
• Basic game genres include:
• Evaluation
• Types of Adaptation
• Adaptation of hero
• Adaptations of realia-symbols
• Adaptations of stories
• Adaptations of practices
• Adaptation of text
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Reconstructing the World in text

Chapter Six: The Lives of a text

• The words of an author
• Pictures and words
• The other text

Interculture
Chapter Seven: Understanding cultures

• Introduction to E-pragmatics
• Understanding cultures: E-kind writes a letter home
• Through the Looking Glass: Virtual reality and virtual culture

Chapter Eight: Bridging Cultures

• Social Networking: a field for Crosscultural Talk and Intercultural Rhetoric
• The outlines of a contemporary intercultural rhetoric
• Multilevel inercultural communication - "crosscultural talk"
• An analytical rhetoric matrix
• Cultural matrix data character
• The topics of modern cross cultural compatibility
• Conclusion

Chapter Nine: Weaving the world anew

• Net-spaces and Net-cultures in the Mind Era
• What Next?
• Specifying Our Problem
• Further specifications
• What has been done in the field of Neuroscience
• Ethics v/s Statistics
• Discussion And Results
• Perspective in operating the extended mind

Conclusion
Bibliography