Semiotics & Theory

The importance of history has been powerfully reaffirmed in recent years by the appearance of major new authors, pathbreaking works, and fresh interpretations of historical events, trends, and methods. Responding to these developments, Roger Chartier...

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...

A Dictionary of Postmodernism presents an authoritative A-Z of the critical terms and central figures related to the origins and evolution of postmodernist theory and culture. Explores the names and ideas that have come to define the postmodern condition...

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...

What is sovereignty? Often taken for granted or seen as the ideology of European states vying for supremacy and conquest, the concept of sovereignty remains underexamined both in the history of its practices and in its aesthetic and intellectual...

Sanford Schwartz situates Modernist poetics in the intellectual ferment of the early twentieth century, which witnessed major developments in philosophy, science, and the arts. Beginning with the works of various philosophers--Bergson, James, Bradley,...

Mimesis, with its connecting concepts of imitation, simile, and similarity, has been cited since classical times in the exploration of the relationship between art and reality. In this major study Arne Melberg discusses the theory and history of mimesis...

Maurice Blanchot remains a writer whose work, though often cited, is little-known to the English-speaking reader. In The Blanchot Reader Michael Holland answers that urgent need and does so in a way that provides a coherent perspective on what by any...

In this most recent collection of his writing, Cavell provides extraordinary careful and sustained readings of Emerson's "Fate", Derrida's response to J. L. Austin in "Signature Event Context", and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations .About the...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This volume fulfills the author's career-long reflections on radical otherness in literature. J. Hillis Miller investigates otherness through ten nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors: Friedrich Schlegel, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony...

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...

Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly...

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...

It is the first sustained study to explore the relationship between touching and writing in contemporary literature. For centuries, writers have explored the intimate links between the page and the skin, between the hand and writing, and between language...

This book explores the value for literary studies of the model of communication known as relevance theory. Drawing on a wide range of examples-lyric poems by Yeats, Herrick, Heaney, Dickinson, and Mary Oliver, novels by Cervantes, Flaubert, Mark Twain,...

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...

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,...

Against Theatre shows that the most prominent writers of modern drama shared a radical rejection of the theatre as they knew it. Together with designers, composers and film makers, they plotted to destroy all existing theatres. But from their destruction...

'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...

"Robert Hatten's new book is a worthy successor to his Musical Meaning in Beethoven, which established him as a front-rank scholar . . . in questions of musical meaning. . . . [B]oth how he approaches musical works and what he says about them are timely...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This volume of more than twenty essays reflects the intersections between biography, autobiography and literature. Several pieces focus upon the contentious sub-genre of literary biography, while others examine the autobiographical threads that are...

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...

A 2019 Prose Award Finalist What is the role of literary studies in an age of Twitter threads and viral news? If the study of literature today is not just about turning to classic texts with age-old questions, neither is it a rejection of close...

What is going on in English studies? Bernard Bergonzi, a literary critic and teacher, who has also published poetry and fiction and has been involved in university administration, seeks to answer this frequently-raised question. With the advent of theory...

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,...

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...

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...

"Robert Hatten's new book is a worthy successor to his Musical Meaning in Beethoven, which established him as a front-rank scholar . . . in questions of musical meaning. . . . [B]oth how he approaches musical works and what he says about them are timely...

Now available in paperback! Until now, there was no theoretical research of character in children's fiction and very few comprehensive theoretical studies of literary characters in general. In her latest intellectual foray, the author of From Mythic to...