Semiotics & Theory

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Billions of them are scanned each day and they impact everything from how we shop to how we...

In Inter-imperiality Laura Doyle theorizes the co-emergence of empires, institutions, language regimes, stratified economies, and literary cultures over the longue duree. Weaving together feminist, decolonial, and dialectical theory, she shows how...

The scientific discovery that chaotic systems embody deep structures of order is one of such wide-ranging implications that it has attracted attention across a spectrum of disciplines, including the humanities. In this volume, fourteen theorists explore...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Desert nomads tested their vision by distinguishing a pair of stars. But we have since created more disquieting ways to test the strength of...

Although boredom appears to be a perennial feature of the human condition, it is linked to ways of experiencing time and thinking about human existence that are recognizably modern. By tracing the emergence and evolution of the modern discourse on...

A Companion to Tragedy is an essential resource for anyone interested in exploring the role of tragedy in Western history and culture. Tells the story of the historical development of tragedy from classical Greece to modernity Features 28 essays by...

This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying question: Are you writing about physical pain or...

The contributors to Territories and Trajectories propose a model of cultural production and transmission based on the global diffusion, circulation, and exchange of people, things, and ideas across time and space. This model eschews a static,...

'About the AuthorCatherine Porter is Professor of French at State University of New York College at Cortland.Book InformationISBN 9780801480867Author Gerard GenetteFormat PaperbackPage Count 168Imprint Cornell University PressPublisher Cornell University...

This book provides a wide ranging guide to current directions in literary criticism. This new and revised edition provides 14 chapters introducing new modes of 'hybrid' criticism which have emerged in the 21st century. The chapters provide thought...

A THE Book of the Week Did you know that Aristotle thought the best tragedies were those that ended happily? Or that the first mention of the motor car in literature may have been in 1791 in Boswell's Life of Johnson? Or that it was not unknown in the...

What if political rhetoric is unavoidable, an irreducible part of politics itself? In contrast to the familiar denunciations of political horse-trading, grandstanding, and corporate manipulation from those lamenting the crisis in liberal democracy, this...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When you are born, the first thing you do is scream. Be it a response to fear, anger, sadness, or happiness, the scream is a declaration of...

For the past twenty years there has been a virtual consensus in philosophy that there is a special link between fiction and the imagination. In particular, fiction has been defined in terms of the imagination: what it is for something to be fictional is...

Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader is the first book to collect together the most important contributions to the theory of the postmodern novel over the last forty years and to guide readers through the complex questions and wide-ranging...

On 10 September 2008, amid much fanfare, the Great Collider run by CERN in Geneva was turned on. The Collider was supposed to fire protons around a seventeen-mile loop of tunnels, causing them to crash into one another at close to the speed of light...

'About the AuthorAlbert J. Wehrle taught Russian at Goucher College and the Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a traqnslator in Washington, D.C.ReviewsWith this critical study... the most exhaustive Marxist analysis and refutation of Russian...

" . . . fifteen texts which are essential reading for anyone interested in semiotics . . . This collection will surely become a standard text for those who teach semiotics, aesthetics or philosophy of language." -International Philosophical QuarterlyThis...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. We are born into blankets. They keep us alive and they cover us in death. We pull and tug on blankets to see us through the night or an illness...

The Literary Theory Toolkit offers readers a rich compendium of key terms, concepts, and arguments necessary for the study of literature in a critical-theoretical context. Includes varied examples drawn from readily available literary texts spanning all...

Originally published in 1998. In his earlier books such as Tropics of Discourse and The Content of the Form, Hayden White focused on the conventions of historical writing and on the ordering of historical consciousness. In Figural Realism, White collects...

Umberto Eco published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, in 1980, when he was nearly fifty. In these "confessions," the author, now in his late seventies, looks back on his long career as a theorist and his more recent work as a novelist, and...

The second volume of The Ethics of Narrative completes the project of bringing together nearly all of Hayden White's uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, including articles, essays, and previously unpublished lectures. As in the...

Legendary publisher and writer John Calder said of Barbara Wright that she was "the most brilliant, conscientious and original translator of 20th century French literature." Wright introduced to an English-speaking readership and audience some of the...

"Against Theory," the title essay in this volume, challenges the notion that literary theory has any real work to do, or any results to show. This challenge-issued by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in Critical Inquiry (8:4)-strikes some critics as...

After the Human provides a comprehensive overview of how a range of philosophical, ethical, and political ideas under the framework of posthumanism have transformed humanities scholarship today. Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary scholars and...

Death is a subject of increasing interest in virtually all academic disciplines, yet there is surprisingly little theoretical work on the representation of death in literary contexts. Death and Representation offers a unique collection of international...

Critical Theory and Animal Liberation is the first collection to approach our relationship with other animals from the critical or "left" tradition in political and social thought. Breaking with past treatments that have framed the problem as one of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780374521363Author Roland BarthesFormat PaperbackPage Count 220Imprint Hill & WangPublisher Hill & Wang

Working from the Bible to contemporary art, Shibboleth surveys the linguistic performances behind the politics of border crossings and the policing of identities. In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members...

With an emphasis on readers and reading, Jonathan Culler considered deconstruction in terms of the questions raised by psychoanalytic, feminist, and reader-response criticism. On Deconstruction is both an authoritative synthesis of Derrida's thought and...

Paul Ricoeur's Freud and Philosophy was a major reinterpretation of psychoanalysis and its philosophical significance, but Ricoeur also wrote many important articles on similar themes. This volume makes available some of his key writings on Freud and...

Is, as Hamlet once complained, time out joint? Have the ways we understand the past and the future-and their relationship to the present-been reordered? The past, it seems, has returned with a vengeance: as aggressive nostalgia, as traumatic memory, or...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In an election year, political signs can be impossible to avoid. They're in front yards, on bumper stickers, and in some places you might never...

First published in 1979 but never available in English until now, Ego Sum challenges, through a careful and unprecedented reading of Descartes's writings, the picture of Descartes as the father of modern philosophy: the thinker who founded the edifice of...

Robin Lakoff gets to the heart of one of the most fascinating and pressing issues in American society today: who holds power and how they use it, keep it, or lose it. In a brilliant and vastly entertaining discussion of news events that have occupied an...

"Isn't it ... particularly difficult to 'speak' of your work?" Frederic-Yves Jeannet asks Helene Cixous in this fascinating book of interviews. "[I]t's only in writing, on paper, ... that I reach the most unknown, the strangest, the most advanced part of...

First published in 1985, the essays in this edited collection offer a representative sample of the descriptive and systematic approach to the study of literary translation. The book is a reflection of the theoretical thinking and practical research...

This book examines key points of J. R. R. Tolkien's life and writing career in relation to his views on humanism and feminism, particularly his sympathy for and toleration of those who are different, deemed unimportant, or marginalized-namely, the Other...

Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or...