Semiotics & Theory

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Few clothing items are as ubiquitous or casual as blue jeans. Yet, their simplicity is deceptive. Blue jeans are nothing if not an exercise in...

How did early modern scholars-as exemplified by Leibniz-search for their origins in the study of language?Who are the nations of Europe, and where did they come from? Early modern people were as curious about their origins as we are today. Lacking...

A thoroughly updated edition of the witty and engaging exploration of the history, application, and tenets of literary theory. The first edition of Ten Lessons served as a "literary" introduction to theoretical writing, a strong set of pedagogical...

In Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play, Jennifer DeVere Brody places punctuation at center stage. She illuminates the performative aspects of dots, ellipses, hyphens, quotation marks, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points by considering them in...

Exploring why there is so much fecal matter in literary works that matterCacaphonies takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. Readers and critics have too long overlooked excrement's vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century...

In recent years the left has transformed traditional approaches to literature and culture. Critical movements such as Cultural Materialism and New Historicism have succeeded to the point where they now constitute the new academic order. Scott Wilson...

In late-capitalist Western society, cross-ethnic cultural transactions are an inevitable daily routine. Yet, according to acclaimed cultural critic Rey Chow, the notion of ethnicity as it is currently used is theoretically ambivalent, confusing, indeed...

In this new book Zygmunt Bauman and Riccardo Mazzeo examine the contentious issue of the relation between literature (and the arts in general) and sociology (or, more generally, a branch of the humanities claiming scientific status). While many...

Featuring summaries of postmodernism's greatest literary, cultural, and political champions written by a diverse group of scholars, Postmodernism: The Key Figures captures the dominance of a theoretical paradigm that has done nothing less than re-define...

In these essays McCaffrey works to undo the current bifurcation between theory and practice - to show how a poetic text might be the source rather than the product of the theoretical principles against which it must be read.Book InformationISBN...

Literary Theory and Criticism: An Introduction provides an accessible overview of major figures and movements in literary theory and criticism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. It is designed for students at the undergraduate level or for...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalization and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk...

"This is the most systematic discussion of semiotics yet published." -Choice"A bravura performance." -Thomas Sebeok"Noeth's handbook is an outstanding encyclopedia that provides first-rate information on many facets of sign-related studies, research...

An interdisciplinary study of issues of language manipulation, this book explores the interpretation stage of critical discourse analysis (CDA) for students in areas such as English language, media studies and applied linguistics, as well as...

How does theatre shape the body and perceptions of it? How do bodies on stage challenge audience assumptions about material evidence and the truth? Theory for Theatre Studies: Bodies responds to these questions by examining how theatre participates in...

The term "modernism" is central to any discussion of twentieth-century literature and critical theory. Astradur Eysteinsson here maintains that the concept of modernism does not emerge directly from the literature it subsumes, but is in fact a product of...

'We must see to it that we put the best of ourselves in our letters; for there is nothing to suggest that we shall see each other again soon.' So wrote Walter Benjamin to Gretel Adorno in spring 1940 from the south of France, shortly before he took his...

At the same time that 1970s feminist psychoanalytic theorists like Jean Baker Miller and Nancy Chodorow were challenging earlier models that assumed the masculine psyche as the norm for human development and mental/emotional health, writers such as Anne...

Despite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification.In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as...

In this fresh and often playful interdisciplinary study, Lisa Zunshine presents a fluid discussion of how key concepts from cognitive science complicate our cultural interpretations of "strange" literary phenomena. From Short Circuit to I, Robot, from...

For decades, we have been told we live in the "information age"-a time when disruptive technological advancement has reshaped the categories and social uses of knowledge and when quantitative assessment is increasingly privileged. Such methodologies and...

Richard Parmentier takes up Ferdinand de Saussure's challenge to study the "life of signs in society" by using semiotic tools proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce. He studies how semiotic theory can illuminate highly complex social and cultural practices...

A captivating portrait of futurist artist Iliazd infused with the reflections of his accidental biographer on the stickiness of the genre.The poet Ilia Zdanevich, known in his professional life as Iliazd, began his career in the pre-Revolutionary...

Bringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture. Scholars have largely understood modernism as an...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But...

Haunting's consequences for the literary imagination.Reading is a weirdly phantasmic trade: animating words to revive absent voices, rehearing the past, fantasizing a future. In Romantic Shades and Shadows, Susan J. Wolfson explores spectral language,...

George Steiner's accomplishments in criticism, in theory of literature, and in the history of ideas have made him a central figure on the contemporary intellectual scene. He is as widely known for his frequent contributions to the New Yorker and TLS as...

Shoshana Felman ranks as one of the most influential literary critics of the past five decades. Her work has inspired and shaped such divergent fields as psychoanalytic criticism, deconstruction, speech-act theory and performance studies, feminist and...

Nortrop Frye differed from other theorists of myth in tracing all of the major literary genres--romance, comedy, satire, not just tragedy--to myth and ritual. This volume is the most thorough presentation of his thinking on the subject.Reviews"...this...

"This concise and lucid volume offers a satisfying survey of all the major theories, from structuralism in the 1960s to deconstruction today, that have made academic criticism both intriguing and off-putting to the outsider." -New York Times Book Review...

C.S. Peirce was the founder of pragmatism and a pioneer in the field of semiotics. His work investigated the problem of meaning, which is the core aspect of semiosis as well as a significant issue in many academic fields. Floyd Merrell demonstrates...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780156932509Author Italo CalvinoFormat PaperbackPage Count 348Imprint Mariner BooksPublisher Mariner Books

Matters of space, spatiality, geography, topography and place have mostly remained neglected in modern scholarship and teaching because in most modern and postmodern literary criticism history and temporality have been dominating discourses. But in...

In Fugitive Time, Matthew Omelsky theorizes the embodied experience of time in twentieth- and twenty-first-century black artforms from across the world. Through the lens of time, he charts the sensations and coursing thoughts that accompany desires for...

A History of the Surrealist Novel offers a rich, long, and elastic historiography of the surrealist novel, taking into consideration an abundance of texts previously left out of critical accounts. Its twenty thematically organized chapters examine...

One of the most famous literary critics of the twentieth century, Edward Said's work has been hugely influential far beyond academia. As a prominent advocate for the Palestinian cause and a noted music critic, Said redefined the role of the public...

Originally published in 1981. The meaning and objectives of literature, argues David Bleich, are created by the reader, who depends on community consensus to validate his or her judgements. Bleich proposes that the study of English be consciously...

Henri Bergson has been the subject of keen interest within French philosophy ever since being championed by Gilles Deleuze and others. Yet his influence extends well beyond European philosophy, especially within Africa and South Asia. Postcolonial...

Recent thinking has resuscitated civility as an important paradigm for engaging with a violence that must be deemed endemic to our lives. But, while it is widely acknowledged that civility works against violence, and that literature generates or...

The writings of Jean Baudrillard have dramatically altered the face of critical theory and promise to pose challenges well into the 21st century. His work on simulation, media, the status of the image, the system of objects, hyperreality, and information...