[Xmca-l] Re: new book of possible interest to Vygotskian people

[mike cole]

It sure looks interesting, but you neglected to tell us the price, Peter.
mike

On Sat, Feb 10, 2018 at 11:31 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:

>
> Vygotsky’s Notebooks: A Selection
> Еkaterina Zavershneva, Rene van der Veer, Editors
> Springer, 2018
>
> Contents
> 1 A Tragicomedy of Strivings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . 1
> 2 Jewry and World History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . 11
> 3 The Book of Fragments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . 21
> 4 The Jewish Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
> 5 Genres of Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
> 6 The Trip to London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . 57
> 7 From the Zakharino Hospital. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . 71
> 8 Toward Cultural–Historical Theory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . 107
> 9 The Instrumental Method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . 115
> 10 Concepts and the Systemic Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . 129
> 11 The Anomalous Development of the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . 155
> 12 From the EDI Clinic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
> 13 Spinoza and the Problem of Higher Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . 209
> 14 Observing Asya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
> 15 The Study of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . 243
> 16 From Sign to Meaning and Sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . 251
> 17 The Problem of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . 271
> 18 The Semic Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
> 19 The Result of Many Years of Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . 311
> 20 Disintegration and Schizophrenia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . 319
> 21 Thinking and Speech. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . 353
> 22 Psychology as a Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . 367
> 23 Dubious Moves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383
> 24 The Conference of October 27–29, 1933 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . 391
> 25 The Semantic Field: Sparring with Lewin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . 403
> 26 Neuropsychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
> 27 Difficult Children. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437
> 28 The Playing Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459
> 29 The Rest is Silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483
> Author Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503
> Subject Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> Preface
> It is ironic that Lev Vygotsky, who claimed for many years that mental
> development
> is about the internalization of external signs and that external signs
> must be
> replaced by inner ones during the course of such development, made notes
> throughout his life. It seems he was always making notes on whatever was
> at hand
> (e.g., cards, maps, pieces of paper, forms) and whatever he was doing
> (e.g., visiting
> museums, attending lectures, reading books, examining patients).
> Subsequently,
> these notes formed the basis of lectures, articles, and books. This book
> contains a
> selection of these notes found in Vygotsky’s personal archive. They were
> meticulously
> studied and deciphered by the first editor and, in cases of doubt, by both
> editors. The second editor provided a first translation of the text, and
> together the
> editors tried to solve the remaining linguistic and conceptual problems.
> Elsewhere one of us has argued that the fact that Vygotsky became popular
> long after his death causes problems for the modern reader (Van der Veer
> 2014,
> p. 4). We know so little of the psychology of the early 20th century that
> it is easy
> to attribute ideas to Vygotsky that were common at the time or fail to see
> the
> novelty of the ideas he advanced. In the words of Boring (1950, p. ix):
> “Without
> such knowledge he [the reader] sees the present in distorted perspective,
> he
> mistakes old facts and old views for new, and he remains unable to
> evaluate the
> significance of new movements and methods.” This is why the editors have
> supplied introductions and what may seem an excessive number of notes to
> the
> text. It is their hope that these will allow the reader to at least
> partially reconstruct
> the historical context of Vygotsky’s ideas. In writing these introductions
> and notes,
> they relied on the usual encyclopedias (notably, Wikipedia), read scores
> of articles
> and books by Vygotsky and his contemporaries, and were especially pleased
> with
> the existence of digitalized older books. The editors were also morally
> supported
> by colleagues and friends (e.g., Tatyana Akhutina, Igor Arievitch, Irina
> Kazakova,
> Peter Keiler, Alexandre Métraux, Maksim Osipov, Yakov Sinichkin, Natal’ya
> Stoyukhina, Anton Yasnitsky) and felt free to bother them with silly or
> difficult
> questions. In rare cases, they believed they knew something themselves.
> The result
> of this effort is what Vygotsky regarded as typical for the modern Western
> person:
> borrowed knowledge, e.g., knowledge that is transmitted from expert to
> novice.
> Few readers have been in the Sahara; yet most of them believe it is a hot
> and
> sandy place in the daytime.
> Even with the introductions and the footnotes, this volume requires some
> hard
> work by the reader, and the editors do not claim that they fully
> understand each and
> every part of the text. After all, a large part of this text was written
> for private use,
> and arguments were not spelled out. Moreover, sometimes is not even clear
> whether
> Vygotsky gives his own point of view or summarizes the view of a colleague.
> Hopefully, discussions of this volume in the scientific press and on the
> Internet will
> help to solve the remaining problems of comprehension.
> The publication of private notebooks always involves some modifications,
> and
> we wish to explain the procedure we followed. First, the text was
> deciphered and
> typed. This in itself is no easy task because Vygotsky’s handwriting was
> not always
> clear, and he frequently used abbreviations of his own invention (e.g.,
> “m.r.” for
> “mental retardation” or “hndwrtng” for “handwriting”). One might say that
> his
> notebooks have several of the properties that Vygotsky himself ascribed to
> inner
> speech: abbreviations, references to things that are only clear to someone
> who has
> the same knowledge (e.g., “See my talk”), etc. In typing the text of the
> notebooks,
> we lost the typical typographical features of a manuscript, that is, the
> underlining,
> the crossing out, the arrows, the writing upside down or backwards, the
> added
> remarks in the margins, and so on. Rendering these features in the book
> would have
> made it very unpleasant to read, but in the comments we have indicated what
> readers cannot see for themselves. In addition, we have corrected the
> mistakes in
> foreign words, expressions, citations, and names. Although Vygotsky read
> several
> languages, his active use of them left much to be desired. Words
> underlined by
> Vygotsky, book and journal titles, poetry lines, and foreign words are
> rendered in
> italics. In the rare cases that Vygotsky himself used English words or
> expressions,
> these are given in bold script. Punctuation has been mostly left
> intact—unless this
> made the understanding difficult—and we added quotation marks when Vygotsky
> was citing a poet or writer verbatim. Vygotsky was in the habit of
> repeatedly
> writing up the outlines of the same talk or chapter and had a stock of pet
> expressions
> and ideas to which he came back time and again, as the reader will see in
> the
> present edition. For this reason, in rare cases, we left out part of the
> text when it
> became excessively repetitive. These suppressed passages have been
> indicated with
> angle brackets and ellipses. Insertions and comments by the editors are
> given in
> square brackets (i.e., [ ]) and/or small script. Words that were difficult
> or impossible
> to decipher are given in angle brackets (i.e., < >) with either our best
> guess or the
> word “illegible.”
> Finally, this book was edited by two authors who have never met each other
> and
> communicated solely through email. There is no doubt that this caused some
> disadvantages—
> e.g., written speech needs to be much more elaborate than oral speech
> —and it is better not to speculate about the possible advantages. However,
> we
> sincerely believe that the present result once more shows the truth of
> Feuerbach’s
> dictum, that what is impossible for one person is possible for two.
> Moscow, Russia Еkaterina Zavershneva
> Leiden, The Netherlands René van der Veer
> References
> Boring, E. G. (1950). A history of experimental psychology. Englewood
> Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
> Van der Veer, R. (2014). Lev Vygotsky. London: Bloomsbury.
>