Semiotics & Theory

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...

In Animate Literacies Nathan Snaza proposes a new theory of literature and literacy in which he outlines how literacy is both constitutive of the social and used as a means to define the human. Weaving new materialism with feminist, queer, and decolonial...

This book is about memory-about how the past persists into the present, and about how this persistence has been understood over the past two centuries. Since the French Revolution, memory has been the source of an intense disquiet. Fundamental cultural...

Constellation is the first extended exploration of the relationship between Walter Benjamin, the Weimar-era revolutionary cultural critic, and the radical philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The affinity between these noncontemporaneous thinkers serves as a...

Imagining Surveillance presents the first full-length study of the depiction and assessment of surveillance in literature and film. Focusing on the utopian genre (which includes positive and negative worlds), this book offers an in- depth account of the...

A transformative literary history of black environmental writing.Winner, William Sanders Scarborough Prize by the Modern Language AssociationAt the intersection of social and environmental history there has emerged a rich body of Black literary response...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Hope, as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, is the thing with feathers. Erik Anderson, on the other hand, regards our obsession with birds as too...

Baroque New Worlds traces the changing nature of Baroque representation in Europe and the Americas across four centuries, from its seventeenth-century origins as a Catholic and monarchical aesthetic and ideology to its contemporary function as a...

By championing the recovery of "lost" women writers and insisting on reevaluating the past, women's studies and feminist theory have effected dramatic changes in the ways English literary history is written and taught. In Writing Women's Literary...

This text involves students in understanding and using the "tools" of critical social and literary theory from the first day of class. It is an ideal first introduction before students encounter more difficult readings from critical and postmodern...

This Element provides an accessible introduction to ecosemiotics and demonstrates its pertinence for the study of today's unstable culture-nature relations. Ecosemiotics can be defined as the study of sign processes responsible for ecological phenomena...

Paul Ricoeur's contribution to the theory of interpretation, or hermeneutics, is considerable: he ranks among the masters of this discipline alongside Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer. In addition to major works like The Conflict of...

Almost immediately after jazz became popular nationally in the United States in the early 20th century, American writers responded to what this exciting art form signified for listeners. This book takes an expansive view of the relationship between this...

The "ancient quarrel" between philosophy and literature seems to have been resolved once and for all with the recognition that philosophy and the arts may be allies instead of enemies. Critical Excess examines in detail the work of five thinkers who have...

In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a...

Narratology in Practice opens up the well-known theory of narrative to various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Written as a companion to Mieke Bal's international classic Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, in which...

This interpretation of Aristotle's "Poetics" seeks to demonstrate that it is a coherent statement of a challenging theory of poetic art and that it hints towards a theory of mimetic art in general. Assessing this theory against the background of earlier...

How did an ordinary, if intelligent, boy who wrote unremarkable poems become-with no help, and in record time-the author of one of the most significant and beloved poems of the twentieth century?T. S. Eliot's juvenilia show little inclination to question...

An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to belong in the world. "Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a "kosmo-polites," or...

The aim of this Element is to provide a novel framework for gaining a critical grasp on the present situation concerning animals. It offers reflections on resisting the established order as well as suggestions on what forms alternative, pro-animal ways...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. While we all use remote controls, we understand little about their history or their impact on our daily lives. Caetlin Benson-Allot looks back...

The contributors to Siting Postcoloniality reevaluate the notion of the postcolonial by focusing on the Sinosphere-the region of East and Southeast Asia that has been significantly shaped by relations with China throughout history. Pointing out that the...

Nineteenth-century English nature was a place of experimentation, exoticism, and transgression, as site and emblem of the global exchanges of the British Empire. Popular attitudes toward the transplantation of exotic species-botanical and human-to...

In Money, Language, and Thought, Marc Shell explores the interactions between linguistic and economic production as they inform discourse from Chretien de Troyes to Heidegger. Close readings of works such as the medieval grail legends, The Merchant of...

It is one of the ironies of contemporary literary study that as it has moved toward greater interdisciplinarity it has grown sceptical of the aesthetic. This anthology works to reassert the continuing relevance of the aesthetic and to reintegrate it into...

The only form of monumental artistic expression practiced from antiquity to the Enlightenment, allegory evolved to its fullest complexity in Dante's Commedia and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Drawing on a wide range of literary, visual, and critical works in...

In The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of "queer liberalism"-the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States, economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and...

In Dying Modern, one of our foremost literary critics inspires new ways to read, write, and talk about poetry. Diana Fuss does so by identifying three distinct but largely unrecognized voices within the well-studied genre of the elegy: the dying voice,...

Terry Eagleton's work has had a powerful influence in debates about the politics of literature and culture. This book reflects the breadth of his interests. It offers a view of his career to date, raising a number of central issues in literature, culture...

Part biography, part cultural history, part literary study, Ruben Gallo's book explores the presence of Latin America in Proust's life and work. The novelist lived in an era shaped by French colonial expansion into the Americas: just before his birth,...

"It's the first book which revisits Greek and Latin theories of signs from the point of view of a profound classical scholarship and a paramount knowledge of contemporary semiotics debates." -Umberto EcoAvailable in English for the first time is...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780156011594Author Professor of Semiotics Umberto EcoFormat PaperbackPage Count 480Imprint Wadsworth Publishing Co IncPublisher Cengage Learning,...