Semiotics & Theory

Critics of American exceptionalism usually view it as a destructive force eroding the radical energies of social movements and aesthetic practices. In A Desire Called America, Christian P. Haines confronts a troubling paradox: Some of the most...

Sophistry, since Plato and Aristotle, has been philosophy's negative alter ego, its bad other. Yet sophistry's emphasis on words and performativity over the fetishization of truth makes it an essential part of our world's cultural, political, and...

The arrival of the Anthropocene brings the suggestion that we are only now beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, only now confronting fears and anxieties of ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. While...

Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all borders, boundaries, margins, and limits are being-often violently-challenged, erased, or reinforced,...

In this book, Emmanuel Alloa offers a handrail for venturing into the complexities of the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61). Through a comprehensive analysis of the three main phases of Merleau-Ponty's thinking and a thorough...

The Future Life of Trauma elaborates a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event by situating a groundbreaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourse. Proceeding from the formation of psychical life as presented in the...

Over the past decade, Jeffrey J. Williams has been one of the most perceptive observers of contemporary literary and cultural studies. He has also been a shrewd analyst of the state of American higher education. How to Be an Intellectual brings together...

Challenging the widely-held assumption that Slavoj Zizek's work is far more germane to film and cultural studies than to literary studies, this volume demonstrates the importance of Zizek to literary criticism and theory. The contributors show how...

Thinking Literature across Continents finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller-two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives-debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do...

In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah, a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism, offers the first critical consideration of world literature's cosmopolitan vocation. Addressing the failure of recent theories of world literature to inquire about the meaning of...

In Bioinsecurities Neel Ahuja argues that U.S. imperial expansion has been shaped by the attempts of health and military officials to control the interactions of humans, animals, viruses, and bacteria at the borders of U.S. influence, a phenomenon called...

In The Theorist's Mother one of our subtlest literary theorists turns his attention to traces of the maternal in the lives and works of canonical male critical theorists. Noting how the mother is made to disappear both as the object of theory and as its...

This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should-indeed must-reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age describes the "modern age"...

Literary Theories is the first reader and introductory guide in one volume. Divided into 12 sections covering structuralism, feminism, marxism, reader-response theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, post-structuralism, postmodernism, new historicism,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814256046Author John PierFormat PaperbackPage Count 252Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University Press

What is it that makes language powerful? This book uses the psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism and libidinal investment to explain how rhetoric compels us and how it can effect change. The works of Joseph Conrad, James Baldwin, Michael Foucault,...

What is it that makes language powerful? This book uses the psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism and libidinal investment to explain how rhetoric compels us and how it can effect change. The works of Joseph Conrad, James Baldwin, Michael Foucault,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814215524Author Barbara BuchenauFormat HardbackPage Count 253Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University Press

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814215074Author Erin JamesFormat HardbackPage Count 234Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University PressWeight(grams)...

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...

Can These Bones Live? views translation as a mode of literary invigoration-indeed, as a process at the core of all important cultural transactions-rather than a mere utilitarian means of converting the terms of one language into another. Brodzki...

In The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork, artists, curators, and scholars from many countries and fields offer new ways of understanding the history and contemporary importance of the idea of the total artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk. The term "...

Dame Muriel Spark-the highly acclaimed Scottish writer-published over twenty novels and more than a dozen short-story collections from the late 1950s until her death in 2006. Two of her novels, The Public Image and Loitering with Intent, were...

With Possible Worlds of Fiction and History, Lubomir Dole el reexamines the claim-made first by Roland Barthes and then popularized by Hayden White-that "there is no fundamental distinction between fiction and history." Dole el rejects this assertion...

This major study offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in British culture, and on the development of many major...

Theories of Memory provides a comprehensive introduction to the rapidly expanding field of memory studies. It is a resource through which students of literature will be able both to broaden their knowledge of contemporary theoretical perspectives and to...

Aesthetic experience was problematic for Enlightenment authors. Arguing against the commonly held view that aesthetics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was defined by the professionalization of criticism and the disinterested...

Over the past four decades, Geoffrey Hartman's voice has been one of the most important and profound in contemporary literary theory. Most noted for his scholarship on Wordsworth and Romanticism, Hartman developed throughout his work an original...

One of the first French intellectuals to take a systematic interest in questions of language and meaning, Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) substantially influenced such thinkers as Deleuze, Foucault, Barthes, Levinas, and Derrida. Until recently, Blanchot's...

Why did France spawn the radical poststructuralist rejection of the humanist concept of 'man' as a rational, knowing subject? In this innovative cultural history, Carolyn J. Dean sheds light on the origins of poststructuralist thought, paying particular...

"If the dying body makes us flinch and look away, struggling not to see what we have seen, the lost body disappears from cultural view, buried along with the sensory traces of its corporeal presence."-from the Introduction American popular culture...

"A lucid, well-organized survey of the almost infinite variety of production spaces of western theatre.... Carlson's survey must be admired for its wealth of carefully researched and elegantly articulated information concerning the relation of urban...

With around 645 million people expected to be displaced Ð by wars and other catastrophes Ð by 2050, Virilio begins The Futurism of the Instant by looking at the future of human settlement and migration through the evolution of the city. What he finds is...

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,...

Michelle Zerba engages current debates about the relationship between literature and theory by analyzing responses of theorists in the Western tradition to tragic conflict. Isolating the centrality of conflict in twentieth-century definitions of tragedy,...

Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites-supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums-that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the...

Breaking off the ordinary flow of experience, the passions create a state of exception. In their suddenness and intensity, they map a personal world, fix and qualify our attention, and impel our actions. Outraged anger drives us to write laws that will...

Some of the most innovative writers of contemporary literature are writing in diaspora in their second or third language. Here Azade Seyhan describes the domain of transnational poetics they inhabit. She begins by examining the works of selected...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780268206758Author William KuskinFormat HardbackPage Count 296Imprint University of Notre Dame PressPublisher University of Notre Dame PressWeight(grams)...

Leadership, innovation, diversity, inclusiveness, sharing, accountability-such is the resounding administrative refrain we keep hearing in the contemporary Western university. What kinds of benefits does this refrain generate? For whom? What discursive...