How many words do we use in a day? How many of them are actually necessary to convey the flow of our thoughts? And how many could we do without, if we were to fast, abstain from using words? This book examines the power of words. It explores the links between communication, language and identity, arguing for a certain gravity to the practice of speech, for offering only meaningful words to the people we talk to.
We are the words we hear and utter, we are the words we think, and Anna Lisa Tota invites us to use “eco-words” to change the world we live in: “This book is a proposal to myself and to you, dear Reader, an invitation to change together: while you read and while I write, bridging the temporal and spatial gap that separates us and makes it impossible for us to help each other”.
This volume will appeal to readers interested in the everyday practice of communication. It will also be useful to scholars and students of sociology, emotion, memory, body studies, philosophy, aesthetics, communication studies, psychology, and linguistics.
1. The quantum self and the power of words
2. Between conversation and reality
3. “The words not to say it”
4. Body language
5. The language of space
6. Sustainable past
Afterword
Biography
Anna Lisa Tota is Vice-Rector of the University Roma Tre in Rome, Italy and Full Professor of Sociology of Communication and Culture at the Department of Philosophy, Communication, and Performing Arts in the same university. Among her publications is the Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies (edited with Trever Hagen, Routledge, 2016).
"Anna Lisa Tota's volume, Eco-Words: The Ecology of Conversation, offers a perspective, or rather, a multisensory perception that penetrates the different layers of natural, social, and individual reality. It captures the subtle complexity of tacit correspondences, interrelations, and references of meaning. The multiplicity of perspectives and levels of analysis in this volume corresponds to an approach that reveals the permeability of distinctions and the inadequacy of rigid and unidimensional categorizations in the critical understanding of both objective and subjective reality."
Ludovica Malknecht, Università Europea di Roma, Italy. Published in journal "Trauma and Memory” rivista online.
